This course looks at how and why states seek to control culture and how creative projects may disrupt the action of political and commercial forces. The course begins by considering totalitarian regimes and cultural policy, along with examples of art labeled "healthy" or "degenerate" in Nazi Germany and the USSR. Case studies from the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc, and post-Communist successor states illustrate how censorship, education and technology may be used to control cultural production and knowledge of the past. Seminar participants will look at the policy of Socialist Realism and consider official and unofficial art and literature to explore the potential for transforming culture into a site of resistance. Readings in theory of the archive will be used to support analysis of how nonconformist works complicate or subvert established views of the past and open new potentials for the future. The course will facilitate in-depth research of major examples of nonconformist poetry, art, fiction and archival projects from these countries and provide a basis for analysis of cultural resistance in other repressive contexts.

Readings include selections from Arendt and Lefort on totalitarian states, as well as analysis by Andrei Siniavskii, Katerina Clark, Igor Golomshtok, Boris Groys and Alexei Yurchak of official and unofficial literature and art. The course will engage theory of the archive with texts from Freud, Buchloh, Spieker and others.