This talk is based on a collaborative digital mapping project that critically examines the interplay of erasure, power, and empire in Soviet-era ethnographic maps of the Caucasus. Using the 1959 census and ensuing maps as an example, Goff will discuss why these maps should be analyzed as argumentative sites rather than as illustrations of statistical data. How are maps representations of the concerns and subjectivities of Soviet mapmakers and how do the aesthetic qualities of maps complicate the historical narratives that we can tell?

Speaker’s Bio:

Krista Goff is an associate professor of history at the University of Miami and co-editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. She is the award-winning author of Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus and co-editor of Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands. Goff is currently working on a new manuscript about the experience of World War Two in the Caucasus and the long life of war-related deportations, forced resettlements, and prosecutions.

4 p.m.
Dwinelle 3335 UC Berkeley

https://events.berkeley.edu/armenian/event/331319-lines-of-control-the-hidden-politics-of-soviet