Anna Yu. Krylova

The format of the seminar assumes attendees will have read the work in advance, so if you are coming do rsvp to carolinatrianglelaborseminar@gmail.com to get a copy of the article. The event is in-person. You can also join the event via zoom: 
https://unc.zoom.us/j/95785635647
Abstract: Over the past forty years, the Marxist intellectual tradition has served the discipline of history as a privileged site of critical interrogations into what scholars have come to characterize as simplistic approaches to the study of history. In the US, in the 1980s and 1990s, the front row in this influential conversation, led by pioneers of poststructuralist analysis, was assigned to the most recent academic encounter with Marxism. The 1960s and 1970s British and American schools of social history were criticized for holding a set of naïve presuppositions characteristic of Marxism more generally, namely, the naïve belief in the historical protagonist whose engagement with the knowable world was, according to critics, uncomplicated with considerations of cultural mediation. By the beginning of the new century, even those who wrote to counter the emergent mainstream consensus could not help but agree that Marxism had become a “name for everything that now seemed to have been superseded.” In the counter plot I am proposing, the story does not end with the demise of Marxism. I argue that the kind of Marxist historical theory that was developed by Marxist scholars in the second half of the twentieth century has played a critical even if unacknowledged—that is, latent—role in the making of contemporary fields of social and cultural history in the U S. What proved to be particularly durable was precisely what the Marxist academic tradition allegedly lacked, that is, Marxist insights into such fundamental dilemmas of historical analysis as the problem of socio-cultural mediation and the challenges this theory posed to the concept of human agency in history.

History Department Methods Lab, March 6, 2023, 11:45 am to 1:15 pm.
The link for the discussion recording https://history.duke.edu/news/methods-lab-anna-krylova-history-and-agency
Presenters: Dr. Anna Krylova, Dr. Malachi Hacohen, Vivien Tejada, and Dr. Prasenjit Duara. The panel was chaired by Dr. Jehangir Malegam.

The AHR Forum includes:
Anna Krylova, Agency and History
Responses to Krylova's Agency and History by William Sewell, Judith Walkowitz, Geoff Eley, Angela Zimmerman, Vivien Tejada
Anna Krylova's response to the critics, "Ideology, Power, and the Phantom of Agency."

In the 1990s, feminist scholars committed to bringing gender analytics into historiographies of modern Russia and Central-Eastern Europe saw their mission as decidedly field-transforming. However, contrary to expectations, the gender analytics, as this chapter contends, did not enact a major shift in scholarship devoted to the problem of socialist modernities and their record of women’s emancipation. Rather, scholars drawing on innovative gender analysis happened to integrate it into what some scholars call “Cold War narratives” and empower their inbuilt propensities to prejudge socialism’s emancipatory promise. This chapter interrogates the peculiar behavior of the gender category in scholarship on socialist modernities by asking: how does one explain the ease with which Cold War plots have made themselves at home in gender-informed scholarship on socialism? It also follows the history of gender analysis into the emergent research that decisively ventures beyond Cold War plots. In conclusion, the chapter reflects on the future of gender in histories of socialism. It calls for turning the pioneering scholarship that examines alternative, non-binary, and, yet, heterosexual forms of organization of family, work, self into a new site—a theoretical resource—for the development of gender theory and methodology in the 21st century.

I consider this 2004 essay somewhat outdated, being the first attempt to enter the territory of Bolshevik-Soviet gender politics, culture, and identity that was predictably schematic. A more thoroughly theorized conceptualization of the Soviet gender politics, gendered identities, and what the case of Bolshevik socialist feminism and Soviet non-binary (as well as binary) conceptualizations of heterosexual subjectivity/difference has to offer to gender theory and history is developed in “Introduction” to Soviet Women in Combat (2010); “Gender Binary: The Limits of Poststructuralist Method” [mainly the introduction section and the last, fourth section] (2016); and “Socialist Feminism: Gender Agendas of Communism,” (forthcoming, 2017).

... to gradualism, and impatient insistence that people follow his lead and act here and now, though his wish was that they "act" by not acting-ne-delanie-except ... Peters-burg between theRevolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917 (New Haven, 1990). ...