Unveiling Empire: The Multiple Lives of The Silk Maiden
This article examines The Silk Maiden, a tale of heroism and cultural significance, as it modifies its messages and meanings across the twentieth century. From its Islamic underpinnings at the turn of the century, through the powerful tumult of Socialist Realism, to the national awakenings of the 1960s and 1970s, The Silk Maiden remained an iconic tale of loyalty and resistance. Despite its continued iconic status, the story also brings to light a relentlessly adaptive subaltern culture. First the tale reveals a remote world on the edge of the Russian Empire, then a culture quickly absorbed in the Soviet experiment, finally an expression of autonomy and independence. The social and political changes reflected in the story were mirrored in the medium as well, the oral epic became an opera and later a film. It is the story of modern Kazakhstan
Cinema for the “Soviet East”: National Fact and Revolutionary Fiction in Early Azerbaijani Film
Before the eyes of the vast, ignorant masses of the eastern nationalities, the fast-moving frames of cinema will reproduce the many achievements of human knowledge. For the illiterate audience, the electric beam of the magic motion-picture lamp will define new concepts and images, will make the wealth of knowledge more easily accessible to the backward mind. Bakinskii rabochii, 18 September 1923 Pictures, so the first Bolsheviks believed, speak louder than words. Visual propaganda was essential in their campaign to reach the illiterate and poorly literate masses, to engage them in a new Soviet style of life. By the end of the civil war, every leading member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party valued the political uses of film. As commissar of nationalities, Iosef Stalin recognized its potential; in his simple expression, film was “the greatest means of mass agitation.” Like cinema, the Bolsheviks appeared at the confluence of two worlds, the traditional and the modern. For them, film was the perfect medium by which to critique the old and celebrate the new. Film viewed the world as they did, with one measure of hard realism, another of soft utopianism.
Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears
Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. Th e Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved: