Leah Feldman

My book project, "Language on the Threshold: Discourses of Orientalism and Muslim Communism in the Literature and Art of the Caucasus (1905-1929)," discusses the role of philosophy, poetics, film, theatre and visual art in shaping the political and cultural space of the revolutionary and Soviet Caucasus. Highlighting the ways in which the twentieth century interpolated nineteenth century paradigms, I illustrate shifts in the social and political value of language and its impact on discourses of Russian Orientalism and Muslim communism in the Caucasus. Examining the social life of literary discourses and visual media across a supranational scope, I highlight the intersection of imperial structures of power with the Muslim subject. In this way, my book also intervenes in global literary and historical debates, by exposing the role of Marxist-Leninist politics and Avant-garde aesthetics on the development of discourses of Orientalism, as well as the early (post)colonial literature and visual media in the Soviet Caucasus.