A critical assessment of the Russian-language literature in the field of visual culture

Visual Studies. 2023. Vol. 38. No. 3-4. P. 711–721.

Victoria Vasileva

The paper is focused on the Russian-language literature on visual culture in the period the 1990s -  the 2010s. Growing contact between Russian and international scholars, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 coincided with the world-wide process of transformation of historical research in the advent of a society of visual culture, which meant changes in academic terminology, expansion of the subject matter of research, and an update of the resource base and analysis methods in relation to visual sources. Within Russian-speaking academia, this was the time when deep historical reflection on the imperial and national past of Russia and the USSR started. The fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and the collapse of the Soviet Union led the post-Soviet peoples to seek the answer to the fundamental question of ethnic/national identity and civilisational belonging: who are we? This resulted in the series of relevant academic papers in the field of, first of all, Russia's historiography, visual ethnography and folklore studies.

Keywords: культурные исследования, фольклористика, cultural studies, visual studies, визуальные исследования, visual turn, визуальный поворот, Folklore studies, visual semiotics, визуальная семиотика, историография российской истории, Russia's historiography

Publication based on the results of: Материя, образ, тело: визуальные среды современной культуры (2020)