Responding to Russophonia: Toward a Planetary Approach

In this article, co-authored with Andy Byford and Connor Doak, Stephen Hutchings compares Russophonia with other critical models that take Russian Studies beyond the boundaries of the Russian Federation, including their own volume Transnational Russian Studies and Kevin Platt's Global Russian Cultures. You can find the article via the link - https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/178/article/990024.

Summary

This article is a response to the concept of Russophonia, which hasgained currency in contemporary Russian studies scholarship through thework of Naomi Caffee, Nina Freiss, and others, especially since Russia’sfull-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The authors of this article, basedin the field of modern languages, recognize that Russophonia provides awelcome return to a critical emphasis on language, while also offering aframework that is keenly attuned to the nexus of language, culture, andpolitics, and the power relations therein. The authors compare Russophoniawith other critical models that take Russian Studies beyond the boundariesof the Russian Federation, including their own volume Transnational Rus-sian Studies and Kevin Platt’s Global Russian Cultures. While the authorshighlight that Russophonia has been posited as a framework to decenterRussia and decolonize Russian Studies, they observe that such attemptscan paradoxically end up reinforcing the centrality of Russia in its mostnegative aspects. The authors examine how these paradoxes play out incontemporary Russophone poetry, analyzing the way certain Russophonewriters have charted their changing relationship to their own language andculture since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The authors reflecton questions of scholarly positionality, suggesting an approach inspired byquantum theory that recognizes the dynamic relationship between subjectand object of study. They offer “language commons” and the “planetary” asconcepts that might allow us to build on the tools offered by Russophonia.