Indigenous Writers, Soviet Spaces: Notes on Reading and Relation in the Contact Zone with Dr. Naomi Caffee

This talk examines the context behind a remarkable literary event: the meeting of Audre Lorde and the Indigenous Chukchi poet Antonina Kymytval’ at a 1976 writers’ conference in Soviet Uzbekistan. What brought them together? What did they really mean to each other? I borrow a concept first developed by Mary Louise Pratt (“Arts of the Contact Zone,” 1991) in order to offer some ideas for how to approach their encounter and its significance for their respective bodies of work. I will discuss the experiences of Indigenous writers who passed through the Soviet Union’s myriad “contact zones” at home and abroad, from classrooms and museums to congresses and public demonstrations. Examples include Chukchi writer Yury Rytkheu's essay on encountering "himself" in an ethnographic museum exhibit, the joint Kazakh and Western Shoshone ritual protest actions of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Antinuclear Movement, and Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday's poetic exchanges with Nenets and Khanty counterparts in Western Siberia. For Kymytval’ and Indigenous writers of her generation, Soviet “contact zones” offered new avenues of connection and collaboration, yet also presented intractable problems of misrepresentation, translation, and mediation.

Naomi Caffee is an Associate Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College. Her main area of research is Russophone literature — authors who write in Russian, but at a distance from ethnic, national, or civic notions of Russian-ness. Her scholarship has been published in numerous academic journals and edited volumes, including Comparative Literature Studies and Experiment: a Journal of Russian Culture. Her recent collaborative projects include Tulips in Bloom: an Anthology of Central Asian Literature (Palgrave, 2024) and "Beyond Caricature: the Oskar Schmerling Digital Archive."

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