BOAS lecture: Dace Dzenovska on ‘Emptiness and dreams of empire in the Latvian Russian borderlands’

Professor Dace Dzenovska will give a Boas lecture on ‘Emptiness and dreams of empire in the Latvian Russian borderlands‘ on 2 April 2025, 3:10pm in Room 457, 4th Floor, Schermerhorn Extension, Columbia University. A light reception will follow in Room 465, Schermerhorn Extension. 

In Latvia’s borderlands near Russia, there is a deindustrialized settlement that survives on scraps of socialism and capitalism. A discarded and ailing multi-ethnic working class lives on social wages paid by the Latvian state based on salaries they earned in the Soviet Union. They never privatized the apartments they live in, which have been transformed from a coveted socialist ‘living space’ into unwanted municipal housing stock assigned to surplus people. They describe themselves as “a community of pensioners, alcoholics and criminals”. They rely on Alesha, a khoziain-like figure, to protect them from outsiders who might upset their hopes that “tomorrow wouldn’t be worse than today”. They fear the disciplining nation-state and despise its elites for serving masters who produce emptiness. Sometimes, they dream of a force that could revitalize their settlement and return meaning and value to their lives. They dream, I suggest, of empire. But what do they dream about when they dream about empire? And are there others like them?