“Re-envisioning the Black Sea in Literature and Historiography: Backwater or oikoumenē?”

Friday, March 29-Saturday, March 30, 2024

Dome Room, Rotunda, University of Virginia

Registration and Zoom address:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/re-envisioning-the-black-sea-symposium-tickets-772198946837

In this moment defined by Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the Black Sea has become a focal point of world attention. “Re-envisioning the Black Sea” starts with the premise that imagining is the first step toward scripting and enacting a productive future. Most of the speakers at the Black Sea Symposium are from the region. They are cultural critics, writers, historians, and journalists. Together we will investigate the ways in which those living in the Black Sea region imagine their home area, moving between ideas of seafaring adventure and exile, isolation and trading network, empire and decolonized community. Starting with Herodotus and Ovid in antiquity and moving to contemporary cultural interventions, speakers will debate the ways in which the Black Sea has been imagined and how it is being envisioned differently in the 21st century.

Is the Black Sea region an “Ottoman lake,” a borderland between empires, or is it a community of productive interaction and exchange?

 

PROGRAM

FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2024 (Dome Room, Rotunda, University of Virginia)

8:45 a.m.: Breakfast pastries, fruit, coffee, tea, milk, honey

9:15-10:00: Welcome and Introduction

Edith Clowes (USA, Slavic, U. Virginia): “Re-envisioning the Black Sea, Finding ‘Common Ground’”

As a multicultural region, the Black Sea is the object of a rich and varied imagined geography. It has been defined by writers as the “barbarian” edge of various European and Asian empires; a poetic figure for escape from empire; and the central network for a post-imperial identity. Historically, regional authors have ignored common themes and interests, often because of enduring imperial attitudes and behaviors—whether of the colonizers or the colonized. We are living in a moment when shared interests are rising to the surface, partly through imaginative writing, and more cooperative models for the Black Sea world have become thinkable.

10:00-12:15: Classical Narratives of the Black Sea

10:00-11:00—John Dillery (USA, Classics, U. Virginia): “Pontos Euxeinos: The Black Sea in the Early Greek Imagination”

Given that the Greek world experienced massive population movement and settlement from the Archaic to the late Classical periods (roughly late 8th to the 4th cent. BCE), a pertinent question is whether different zones of the Mediterranean Basin area were viewed differently by the Greeks. In particular, was there something specific in the Greek imaginary that was connected to the Black Sea? The historians Herodotus (mid to late 5th BCE) and Xenophon (late 5th to 4th BCE) provide telling insights into the Greek conception of the Black Sea, its coast and hinterlands.

11:00-11:15: Coffee break

11:15-12:15—Ivana Petrovic (Serbia/ USA, Classics, U. Virginia): “The Representation of the Black Sea Region in Apollonius’ Argonautica”

The major third-century (BCE) epic poem Argonautica, by writer Apollonius of Rhodes (who was from Alexandria), reimagines the voyage of the Argonaut and presents the Black Sea region as a geographic and cultural nodal point where Egypt (yes!) meets Greece and where various real and mythic ancient cultures compete for priority. In Apollonius’ depiction of the region, third-century ethnography and geography confront the strange world of myth. The Black Sea coast then emerges as a microcosm containing a collective of diverse communities, each represented from an ethnographic perspective.

12:15-1:30: Lunch break

1:30-2:30: The Traditional Black Sea: Empire and Exile

Sara Myers (USA, Classics, U. Virginia), “Ovid at the End of the World: The Exilic Black Sea Region”

Roman contact with the Black Sea region is famously familiar through the lens of Ovid’s exilic writings in Tomis (today’s Constanța). This talk addresses how Ovid configures his exilic world as a space of myth, as an underworld, as a philosophical ‘chaos’, where even the natural elements do not behave in predictable ways, and as the polar opposite of Rome. Ovid denies the region its civic structures, languages, even agriculture, to underline his sense of dislocation and loss. It is this undiminished creative expression of his misery that made Ovid such a seminal figure of exilic alienation for later writers.

2:30-2:45: Coffee break

2:45-5:00: Re-envisioning Empire and Exile on the Black Sea

2:45-3:45—Roxana Doncu (Romania, Modern Languages, Carol Davila U.), “Hybridity and Osmosis: Recuperating the Multicultural Imaginary of the Black Sea after the 1989 Revolution”

For most of the 19th century, the Black Sea was represented in Romanian literature as the matrix of Latinity displaced from Western Europe. In contrast, the 20th century brought with it an alternative framework, in interwar literature embracing the Black Sea as a multicultural melting pot, only after World War II to be repressed by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's cultural policies. This paper argues that this imagined Black Sea world resurfaced after the 1989 Revolution, through the re-publication and re-evaluation of the “lost generation” of the 1930s and through new literary and cultural production.

3:45-4:00: Coffee break

4:00-5:00—Ivan Kozlenko (Ukraine/USA, independent writer, Amherst C.): “Decolonizing the Odesa Literary Myth”

In Ukrainian literature, the Black Sea has always embodied the idea of freedom, an escape from imperial oppression and the means for contact with other cultures on equal footing without Russian mediation. The Black Sea has become a continuation of the Wild Steppe, the scene of unfolding of Ukrainian modern identity. This talk asks how the Black Sea has functioned in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Ukrainian writing culture as a place of encounter with both current coastal neighbors and those past communities that no longer have a foothold in this area.

6:00-7:00: Dinner break

7:00-8:30: Enacting the Black Sea

Saviana Stănescu (Romania/ USA, Theatre Studies, Ithaca College): For a Barbarian Woman, readings from Saviana Stănescu’s Black Sea poetry and drama

Moderated by Sara Myers and Edith Clowes

The concept for this project sprang from Saviana Stănescu’s collection of poems entitled Letters from a Barbarian Woman, written in response to Ovid’s letters from exile (Epistulae Ex Ponto). Taking the perspective of the Barbarian, the letters explore the commerce of imperialism and the conflicting embrace of East and West. For a Barbarian Woman metaphorically touches on the contradictions of "civilization" and the "primitive," conquered and conqueror, power and poverty, the rational and the irrational. Along with Ovid’s voluminous exilic correspondence, recent news reports from Romania (a country that serves as a NATO border with Russia and Ukraine) have served as source material.

 

SATURDAY, MARCH 30, 2024

8:45—Breakfast bagels, fruit, coffee, tea, milk, honey

9:15- 12:30: Decolonizing the Black Sea

9:15-10:15—Bela Tsipuria (Georgia, Comparative Literature, Ilia State U.): “Georgia - the Country on the Black Sea and within the Oikoumenē: Postcolonial Georgian Literature in Support of the Status”

While the life of the Black Sea region is heavily affected by global politics, this diverse cultural area needs, and seeks, a common ground for establishing its imaginary unity, opening cultural borders and overcoming the cultural isolation which indeed characterizes the cultures on the Black Sea coast. Unlike the Mediterranean or the Baltic states, the Black Sea countries still do not have a shared vision of the cultural tendencies and qualities which may play a role in creating a community for understanding the region. Reflecting on our cultural reality can be a way to gain/regain a Black Sea identity, and as such can be a challenge for the postcolonial countries in the region, including Georgia.

10:15-11:15—Vitaly Chernetsky (Ukraine/ USA, Slavic, U. of Kansas): “Odesa City Myth Rethought and Reframed: Ukrainian Black Sea Narratives, Multidirectional Memory, and the Challenges of Decolonization”

The Black Sea figures in both Soviet-era myth and its enduring stereotypes of the port city of Odesa, on the one hand, and decolonial and multidirectional memory narratives, on the other. For the former, Odes(s)a's nickname, the “pearl of the Black Sea,” stands for the colorful smugglers and petty criminals, the women selling fish at the city's markets, and lively beachside entertainment. For the latter, Odesa is envisioned as a heterotopia arising at the liminal point linking the Black Sea with the "sea" of the steppe grasslands alongside its northern coast. How have contemporary Odesa-focused multidirectional memory projects in contemporary writing and art culture challenged these legacies?

11:15-11:30: Coffee break

11:30-12:30—Khatuna Beridze (Georgia, Translation Studies, Rustaveli U.) and Teona Beridze (Georgia, German, Rustaveli U.): “Mare Nigrum et Bellum [The Black Sea and the War]: Literature, Translation, and Scholarship”

Poetry collected in the multilingual 2023 volume “You've been sleeping in the basement of the Mariupol Theater, God!”  protested the Russian war against Ukraine. Poems written by Ukrainian and Georgian poets since the beginning of the war were collected and translated—Georgian poets were translated into Ukrainian, and Ukrainian poets into Georgian. How does this project reimagine the Black Sea world, addressing issues of postcolonial dialogue across the region?

12:30-1:15: Lunch break

1:15-4:15: Revisions and New Visions

1:15-2:15—Eyüp Özveren (Turkey, independent scholar, speaking on Zoom): “Leyla Erbil in Modern Turkish Literature as Yet Another Granddaughter of Medea: The Author-Sorcerer with a Strong Black Sea Connection”

In the 1960s, the prominent novelist Leyla Erbil was one of the first Turkish writers to embrace the Black Sea at a time when almost all other Turkish writers chose to write about Istanbul, Ankara, and the Mediterranean. From a seafaring family, Erbil constructs her Black Sea in such a way that it plays a constitutive role, as if it were an active, shifting character that could assume different non-human forms, such as a ship or a dolphin, no less than the Argo in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes or the Battleship Potemkin in Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film.

2:15-3:15—Yordan Ljuckanov (Bulgaria, Institute of Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences): “Making the Black Sea a Backwater and an Oecumene through the Performance of Literary Criticism: A Bulgarian Reading of Europolis and Santa Esperansa”

Contrasting two novels, Europolis by the twentieth-century Western European writer, Jean Bart, translated into an area language and Santa Esperansa by the twenty-first-century area novelist, Aka Morchiladze, this talk constructs a Black Sea world that is at times a backwater and at times oikoumenē. These novels are as much about the absence of various historical communities that once inhabited this area as they are about those currently inhabiting this area in our day. In this way, this talk challenges the easy binary opposition of “backwater” and “oikoumenē.”

3:15-3:30: Coffee break

3:30-4:30—Viktoria Balon (Ukraine/ Russia/ Germany, German radio): “Chernomoriya (Черномория): The Invisible Country on the Black Sea Coast”

This project explores the horizontal connections of the cultures of the Black Sea coast in the twenty-first century. Are there visions and dreams of common ground in the Black Sea region that take its potential beyond its imperial legacy? Is there an imaginary „invisible “country „Chernomoriya,“ as the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov called it? How are these cultures reshaping their view of themselves and their neighbors? What is the impact of war and Russia’s growing imperial claims? These direct connections will be crucially important for realizing a different Black Sea region.

4:30-5:30: The Potential for a Black Sea Community: Conclusions and further plans

 

The organizers are grateful to these sponsors for their generous support: The Brown-Forman Endowment; Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation; Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Department of Classics; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Program in European Studies