The Centre Cannot Hold: Imagining the Soviet Union from the Global South

Abstract

Postcolonial scholarship has long called for the contestation of eurocentrism in its multiple guises. In order to decentre Europe while maintaining a nuanced grasp on spaces constituted as European, I propose a reading of the imaginative production of the Soviet Union by travellers from the global South: Specifically, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's Letters from Russia (1930), South African writers Laurens van der Post's Journey into Russia (1964) and Alex La Guma's A Soviet Journey (1978), and Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam's The Revenue Stamp (1974), to suggest how they allow us to move beyond ossified geopolitical demarcations and received power relations. Reading together the imagined worlds produced in the accounts of these four writer-travellers recalibrates the co-ordinates of centre and periphery according to a frame better understood as Eurasian. While these imaginative constructions productively reshuffle established narratives and allocations of power, "civilisation" and "culture", they also do so by falling back on binary constructions, as well as teleological progress narratives. In this sense, these narratives display a double agenda: they might invert the binary, or displace the narrative, but keep problematic structures in place. In this article, I trace how these texts may yet afford insight into how to fracture these logics in their ability to suspend momentarily narratives of progress, and point to temporary, contingent solidarities.