Emily Mellen  0:06  
Welcome to Global Research Bytes. I'm Emily Mellen, and I'm here with Edith Clowes, Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Edith, you're co-hosting the upcoming symposium, "Re-envisioning the Black Sea in Literature and Historiography: Backwater or oikoumenē?" Can you explain what oikoumenē means, and give us a brief overview of the symposium?

Edith Clowes  0:27  
Sure, thank you for having me. Oikoumenē is sort of an intriguing word that means sort of three things over time. Originally, it meant the known world or the inhabited world in ancient Greek, and was applied to the Black Sea region and the whole Mediterranean region as well. And then it became the root of a church word, which meant, basically, the World Council of Churches and sort of the inter-denominational character of the Christian church that became, was used really after World War Two. But now in the post Soviet world, we're finding a new meaning. That I was alerted to in the wonderful sort of blockbuster novel by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, a Russian writer, titled Medea and Her Children, in which oikoumenē means something closer to community or multicultural community. The symposium has many speakers from the region, who do literary and historical research, who have spent a lot of time thinking about what the Black Sea is more than just being the the edge of various empires, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and so forth. So we're sort of looking at history, we're looking at the literary record, and we're looking to toward the future, what can that tell us about future possibilities?

Emily Mellen  2:30  
That's so interesting. What prompted you to organize this symposium at this particular moment? How did the idea come about? And why is it important now?

Edith Clowes  2:40  
Well, it's super important now because the Black Sea and its north coast, are hotspots in the world. Everybody's attention is focused laser-like on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We are at an inflection point, when Imperial ambition is rising again, under the government of Vladimir Putin. And what's different now is that ambition has been challenged head on by national sovereign strength and determination. So the Black Sea is one of those focal points. We're in the 11th year of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, starting in 2014. And it's been conducted, this war, this invasion, very much on the Black Sea. And so we're looking beyond that, though. Two very hopeful signs, for example-- we're not doing politics and sort of economics and those sorts of things, but that's in the background of what we're studying-- it's very hopeful that Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, have all conjoined with, with Ukraine, to create avenues in the sea, by which Ukrainian grain can get out to the rest of the world. This is huge, I don't know of any precedent for that sort of cooperation. But beyond the news, it's very important to understand how residents in a region think about their place, and what they feel about the past and what aspirations they have for the future, and literature and the arts in general, song and painting and so forth, but particularly literature, fiction, can often be prescient. It can be what I call the "canary in the coal mine," in the sense that it can tell us about threats. But it can also tell us about other possibilities for the future.

Emily Mellen  5:11  
That's fascinating. How does the Black Sea connect with your own research interests?

Edith Clowes  5:17  
So, as I said, the Black Sea has often been on the edge of various empires, and it served as a buffer zone, rather than a place for people in communities who live there. And those people have been ignored very often in the research. So I started paying attention about 20 years ago, when I was writing a book called Russia on the Edge, about post-Imperial post-Soviet Russian identity. And I was investigating how Russian writers and public intellectuals think about their south, not global South, but their Russian south. It's something I've called "imagined geography." It struck me that the meaning of the Black Sea was really starting to change, as I said at the beginning of our conversation here, with the work of Lyudmila Ulitskaya, but not just her. And so, interestingly, what I wrote in Russia on the Edge, and was anticipated in fiction and film, has now been becoming reality. So, my disciplinary goal, and my whole career has been to expand the relevance of the study of literature beyond just literature, to the work that social scientists do, and sociologically-oriented humanists and, to a more limited degree, to natural scientists, and that has paid off very well. So, in other research, I've asked the same questions about imagined geography, but more recently about another crisis time in the early 20th century years of revolution and civil war. And I'm just finishing a key part of a Digital Humanities project that has much larger scope than what this will have. And writing a book called Shredding the Map.

Emily Mellen  7:24  
You have this great line in your description of this symposium, while describing the events goals, and you've sort of alluded to this already, you say you're working with, "the premise that imagining comes first in scripting and enacting a productive future." With these productive futures in mind, what are your next steps with this project?

Edith Clowes  7:42  
Well, that's a good question. We're asking all sorts of questions about the future. What kinds of future for the Black Sea region and the people who live there might be anticipated in history, historiography and fiction? Some of those visions might seem utopian and unrealizable, but others might seem much more realizable. We want to find commonalities among the six national communities that currently inhabit the Black Sea World. So, this symposium is also a workshop through which we'll study and discuss each other's papers. And we hope by the end of 2024, or shortly thereafter, to produce a special number of an open-access journal that is titled New Area Studies. We want this group of articles to counter the rather imperially-oriented English language writing about the Black Sea that's currently available.

Emily Mellen  8:50  
That's fascinating. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.