Humanities in Sesssion: ‘Returning Transitions: Memories of Persistent Crises in South African and Russian Writing’, with Ksenia Robbe

While relations between the anti-apartheid movement and the Soviet Union are well studied from historical perspectives, and while the impact of Russian and East European literatures on South African cultural imaginaries has received attention in literary scholarship, both South African and Russian/Russophone readers know very little, respectively, about the more recent cultural developments in these once interconnected parts of the world. At the same time, since the early 2010s, specters of the transitions have been increasingly ‘haunting’ critical thinking about post-Cold War transformations, in the two regions and globally. Literature has played a major (but often overlooked) role in configuring critical memories that process the traumas and hopes of transformation. In this presentation Robbe will outline a ‘constellational’ approach (inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept) to reading memories as being interconnected by the imaginaries of ‘persistent crises’ – a mnemonic structure that runs counter to common geopolitical narratives.

Bio:

Ksenia Robbe is a Senior Lecturer in European and Russian Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen and, in 2025/26, a Humboldt Fellow at Goethe-University Frankfurt. In the period 20–31 July 2026, she is a visiting researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research, UWC. Her research sits at the intersection of postcolonial and postsocialist studies, with the focus on concepts and practices of memory, time, gender, and feminism in literature and film. Region-wise, her work engages with cultural production from the former Soviet Union and South(ern) Africa. Among her recent publications is the edited volume Remembering Transitions: Local Revisions and Global Crossings in Culture and Media (De Gruyter, 2023) and co-edited special issue Dialogic Remembering: Politics, Practices and Potentialities (Memory Studies, June 2026).