We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
In this article, Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat appears as just the latest in a decades- long exchange between American and Soviet models of minority uplift: on the one side, civil rights and multiculturalism; on the other, druzhba narodov (the friendship of peoples) and mnogonatsional'nost’ (multi-national- ness). Steven S. Lee argues diat, with Borat, multiculturalism seems to have emerged as the victor in this exchange, but that the film also hearkens to a not-too-distant Soviet alternative. Part 1 shows how Borat gels with recent leftist critiques of multiculturalism, spearheaded by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj żižek. Part 2 relates Borat to a largely submerged history of American minorities drawing hope from mnogonatsional'nost', as celebrated in Grigorii Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus. The final part presents Borat as choosing neither multiculturalism nor mnogonatsional'nost', but rather the continued opposition of the two, if not a “third way.” For a glimpse of what this might look like, the paper concludes with a discussion of Absurdistan (2006) by Soviet Jewish American novelist Gary Shteyngart.
I would like to thank Gregory Freidin, Amelia Glaser, Tomas Matza, Chris Stroop, and two anonymous readers for their helpful and insightful comments. Thanks, as well, to Nina Bagdasarova, Ryan Podolsky, and my students in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, during summer 2005 for the opportunity to explore many of the ideas leading to this paper. All mistakes are my own. Epigraphs taken from V. A. Tishkov, Rekviempo etnosu (Moscow, 2003), 247; and Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan (New York, 2006), 251-52.
1. Dudziak, Mary, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2000), 12, 15,26-46.Google Scholar
2. Having spent a year in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan researching Soviet Korean history and literature, I served as a consultant for the film and organized its November 2006 Stanford screening. For more on Soviet Koreans, see Gelb, Michael, “An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans,” Russian Review 54, no. 3 (July 1995): 389–412 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Koryo Saram: The Koreans of Central Asia,” at http://www.koryosaram.freenet.kz/ (last consulted 27 November 2007).
3. There are, of course, many competing understandings of “multiculturalism.“ Concerned that the term has become an “empty signifier,” Timothy Powell grounds it in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He writes that because these movements were “highly decentralized,” a single definition is impossible. He adds, however, that all of the groups involved were bound by “a shared belief in the ideology of cultural selfdetermination.“ Powell warns against any attempt “to translate the multiplicity of historically distinct cultural perspectives into philosophical abstractions,” having specifically in mind Charles Taylor's widely cited understanding of multiculturalism—the recognition of subaltern identities by the universal, vacillating between the politics of equal dignity (the right to be included in the universal) and the politics of difference (the right to maintain unique identities). Timothy Powell, “All Colors Flow into Rainbows and Nooses: The Struggle to Define Academic Multiculturalism,” Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 159, 155, 177n9; Taylor, Charles, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Gutmann, Amy, ed., Multiculturalism (Princeton, 1994), 36–39.Google Scholar
4. For this turn's theoretical basis, see Hall, Stuart, “New Ethnicities,” in Donald, James and Rattansi, Ali, eds., “Race,“Culture and Difference (London, 1992), 252-60Google Scholar. For a critique, see Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick, “Beyond ‘Identity,'” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 8–9, 30-31Google Scholar.
5. Slavoj Žiżek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,“ Nexv Left Review (September-October 1997): 37. Žiżek here draws on the Lacanian “real,” understood as that which escapes symbolic order. In this context, the symbolic order appears as that fetishized “folklorist Other,” against which the “real Other” is negatively defined. Žiżek does not posit an authentic “real Other” that precedes the “folklorist Other.“
6. Ibid., 44. Interestingly, Žiżek here seems to be in agreement with David Palumbo- Liu, who defends multiculturalism by arguing that what is commonly known as “identity politics” does not liberate but confines individuals to “social types.” “The question … is not how to get beyond identity in the classic sociological sense of ‘identity,' but how to get to identity in the first place, that is, how to move beyond type to individuals whose identity formation is arrived at in democratic interaction.” David Palumbo- Liu, “Assumed Identities,” New Literary History 31, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 773, 778. For Palumbo-Liu's call for a “critical multiculturalism,” see his introduction to The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions (Minneapolis, 1995), 1-27.
7. From this perspective, Borat has made much progress since an earlier scene, in which his mimicry of black ghetto slang and dress prompts the staff at an upscale hotel to threaten to call the police.
8. Neil Strauss, “The Man behind the Mustache,” Rolling Stone, 14 November 2006. For praise of Baron Cohen's “liberating project,” see Paul Gilroy, “Ali G and the Oscars,“ openDemocracy.net, 4 April 2002, at http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-FiIm/article_459 jsp (last consulted 27 November 2007).
9. Brendan O'Neill, “Backstory: Borat Write Thesis. It niiiice. You Like Read?” Christian Science Monitor, 21 November 2006. On African American and Jewish American relations, see Budick, Emily Miller, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (New York, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sundquist, Eric, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, Mass., 2005);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, 2006).Google Scholar
10. Žiżek leaves us at a similar impasse. He critiques global capitalism and then calls for a renewed Leninism-Stalinism which is, to say the least, repellant. See his afterword to V. I. Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, ed. Slavoj Žiżek (New York, 2002). For a critique of Žiżek's politics, see Laclau, Ernesto, “Structure, History, and the Political,” in Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernesto, and Žiżek, Slavoj, eds., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York, 2000), 195–206.Google Scholar
11. Joshua Kucera, “Bush: Kazakhstan Is a ‘Free Nation,’ “ Eurasianet.org, 29 September 2006, at http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav092906.shtml (last consulted 27 November 2007). This scandal is alluded to in the 2005 film Syriana, in which a U.S. oil company's bribery of Kazakhstani officials leads to two token arrests. The outcome of the Giffen case, which implicates multiple oil companies as well as branches of the U.S. government, has yet to be decided. Ron Stodghill, “Oil, Cash, Corruption,” New York Times, 5 November 2006
12. Kallen, Horace, Frontiers of Hope (New York, 1929).Google Scholar For connections between his “cultural pluralism” and multiculturalism, see Hollinger, David, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995), 11–12 Google Scholar; and Levine, Lawrence, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston, 1996), 113-20Google Scholar. For recent accounts of Jewish American ties to the Soviet Union, see Slezkine, Yuri, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004), 213-16, 259-67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Estraikh, Gennady, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance xuith Communism (Syracuse, 2005), 70–101 Google Scholar; Katz, Dovid, “Introduction,” in Glaser, Amelia and Weintraub, David, eds., Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets (Madison, 2005), 4–22 Google Scholar; and Michels, Tony, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 217-50, 256.Google Scholar
13. Hughes, Langston, An American Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Moscow, 1934).Google Scholar
14. Hughes, Langston, Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York, 1956), 174-80Google Scholar. The descendants of one of these settlers include the Russian Africanist Lily Golden and Golden's daughter, Russian television personality Yelena Khanga. See their autobiographies, Lily Golden, My Longjourney Home (Chicago, 2002); and Khanga, Yelena, Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family, 1865-1992 (New York, 1992).Google Scholar
15. Kelley, Robin D. G., Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990), 100 Google Scholar. The term magic pilgrimage comes from McKay's 1937 travelogue A Long Way from Home, and figures prominently in William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York, 1999), particularly pages 63-93, as well as in Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters betiueen Black and Red, 1922-1963 (Durham, 2002), 14-24. See also Smetliurst, James, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Peterson, Dale, Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, 2000)Google Scholar; and Singh, Nikhil Pal, “Retracing the Black-Red Thread,“ American Literary History 15, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 830-40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16. Circus itself draws on the mass-spectacles of Hollywood. As Susan Buck-Morss notes, “It is clear that Aleksandrov, like most Soviet film directors in the 1930s, had Busby Berkeley in mind for this work. And yet the tableau vivant of the mass as ornament had a specifically Bolshevik precursor as well. It had been scripted into the earliest spectacle celebrations of the October Revolution.” Buck-Morss, Susan, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 154 Google Scholar. For further connections between Circus and western entertainment, see Holmgren, Beth, “ The Blue Angel and Blackface: Redeeming Entertainment in Aleksandrov's Circus,” Russian Review 66, no. 1 (January 2007): 5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17. Taylor, Robert, “The Illusion of Happiness and the Happiness of Illusion,” Slavonic and East European Review 74, no. 4 (October 1996): 617.Google Scholar
18. Soviet usages of “nation” and “nationality” cannot be seen as synonymous with American “race” and “ethnicity.” In 1913, losif Stalin left an indelible imprint on Soviet nationalities by defining four criteria to distinguish “nations” from “tribes” and “races.“ He wrote that a fully developed “nation” required a common language, territory, economic life, and “psychical disposition, manifested in a community of culture.” According to Stalin, neither a “tribe” nor a “race” could fulfill all four components—the most important being territory, which undergirded the Bolshevik guarantee of the “right of nations to self-determination. One explicit goal of this territorial emphasis was to undermine groupings based solely on culture and character—precisely the focus of American “ethnicity.” Stalin, however, did not dismiss entirely “psychical disposition.” When laying out this part of his definition, he noted that, although “national character” changed with the “conditions of life,” none theless “it exists at every given moment, it leaves its imprint on the physiognomy of the nation.“ Stalin, Joseph, “Marxism and the National Question,“ Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, ed. Fineburg, A. (New York, 1934), 5–13 Google Scholar.
19. For overviews of Soviet nationalities policy, see Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar; Slezkine, Yuri, “The USSR as Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Revietv 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414-52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001)Google Scholar; and Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005).Google Scholar
20. As Slezkine reports, Stalin stated in July 1930 that “national differences cannot disappear in the near future, but will remain in existence for a long time, even after the victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale.” Accordingly, Slezkine writes, after Stalin triumphantly declared the Soviet Union an industrialized socialist society in 1934, “socialist content” lost salience, and “class-based quotas, polls and identity cards” disappeared. “Differences ‘in form’ remained acceptable, however, and nationality (die most venerable and certifiably hollow form of ‘form’) was allowed to develop, regroup and perhaps even acquire a little content.” See Slezkine, “The USSR as Communal Apartment,“ 437-38, 442. Emphasis in the original.
21. In February 1936, the same year of the film, Pravda named the Russian nation “first among equals.” This signaled a shift from persecution to promotion of Russian nationalism by the Soviet state. See Brandenberger, David, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and theFormation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 43 Google Scholar; and Slezkine, Jewish Century, 278.
22. Clark, Katerina, “Socialism Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in Dobrenko, Evgeny and Naiman, Eric, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism (Seattle, 2003), 9.Google Scholar
23. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 9.
24. For a recent account of Soviet antisemitism, see Slezkine, Jewish Century, 297-314.
25. It should be noted that Tishkov draws his understanding of multiculturalism from Canada, not the United States—one more indication of this term's varied meanings and applications. Focusing on Quebec, he traces what he calls (borrowing from Michel Wieviorka) “integrated multiculturalism,” through which the state addresses both social and cultural demands—not just cultural recognition, but also assistance in becoming economically competitive. He then proceeds to contrast this with the essentialist strictures of Soviet “many-national-ness.” Ultimately, his aim is integrated multiculturalism in the Russian Federation, but much of his book focuses on the post-Soviet barriers confronting such concepts—among them, the rigid political system, which he critiques. Tishkov, Rekviem po etnosu, 245-46.
26. Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loi'c, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,“ Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 41–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Interestingly, the authors draw their understanding of multiculturalism from Charles Taylor, without noting that he is from Canada, not the United States.
27. Kymlicka, Will, “American Multiculturalism in the International Arena,” Dissent 45, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 79 Google Scholar. See discussion in Hollinger, David A., “Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way,” Constellations 8, no. 2 (June 2001): 236-48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28. This fact leads Hirsch to resist linking Soviet nationalities policy and American affirmative action, as in Terry Martin's account of die USSR as “an affirmative action empire.“ Hirsch writes, “Although the term affirmative action has some descriptive power, it is also misleading—disconnecting Soviet policies and practices from their actual historical context. Soviet nationality policy was not a precursor to American race policy of the twentieth century, but rather an attempt to adapt evolutionary paradigms of the late nineteenth century to the Soviet context. It was grounded in a tradition of European thought that saw nationalism as a necessary but transient phase in the development of a more universalistic identity.” Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 103. While correctly stressing the importance of context, Hirsch too hastily separates American reforms from European thought and assumes that diese too did not seek “a more universalistic identity.” Ibid. Indeed, Nikhil Pal Singh identifies Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal as a key thinker behind postwar civil rights, the result of which was (in Singh's words) “managed consensus“—a watered-down equality that separated race from class. Singh, Nikhil Pal, “Culture/War: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,” American Quarterly 50, no. 3 (September 1998): 471–522 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29. Hughes, An American Negro, 46. See also Northrop, Douglas, Veiled Empire: Gender and Powerin Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, 2004), 85–101, 164-208, 330Google Scholar; and Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 120.
30. Klehr, Harvey, Haynes, John Earl, and Anderson, Kyrill M., The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, 1998), 218-27Google Scholar. For responses to these findings, see Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 70; and Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 273n44. On Fort-Whiteman's leadership roles as an early African American communist, see Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago, 1978), 139, 143-47. For his welcome of Hughes and twenty-one other African Americans—all invited to assist with an ill-fated Soviet film about Southern black workers—see Emory University Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers, Box 1, Folder 24, Item 4, Louise Thompson to Mother Thompson, 4 July 1932.
31. Wright, Richard, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” Atlantic Monthly 174, no. 2 (August 1944): 67.Google Scholar
32. Kymlicka, “American Multiculturalism in the International Arena,” 74. Kymlicka derives this distinction from Hollinger, Postethnic America, 84-85.
33. Nikhil Pal Singh, “Cold War Redux: On the ‘New Totalitarianism,'” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 177.
34. Shteyngart, Absurdistan, 56.
35. Ibid., 12.
36. Ibid., 50. Emphasis in the original.
37. Ibid., 324.
38. Ibid., 329.
39. Ibid., 333.
40. Ibid.
41. Interestingly, the main characters of Absurdistan and Borat move beyond past fetishes—for brown women and “plastic chests,” respectively—via the bounded jouissance of the heterosexual family. This resolution flies in the face of the homoerotic innuendo peppering both works—for instance, Misha's attraction to his best friend Alyosha-Bob, and Borat's drunken, close coverage of gay pride paraders. For crossings of “the color line and the iron curtain” that more radically deconstruct gender and sexuality, see Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, particularly 86-148 and 253-62.
