Red Allah's Oil: Arts of the Revolution and the Energy of the Colonized

press release: Anindita Banerjee, associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University.

This talk offers a counter-narrative from a hitherto unexamined frontier of Russian literature and art in the heady years following the October Revolution. Combining insights from the emerging field of energy humanities with new archives of writers, artists, and filmmakers who congregated in the oil city of Baku in 1920, Professor Banerjee will examine how the material potentials of petroleum converged with the spiritual energy of anti-imperial struggle to shape a unique imagination of Red October’s internationalist promises.