Research Colloquium | Elisa Kriza (Bamberg) | Justice as Crime? Explorations of the Ironies of Authoritarian Oppression and Impunity in Soviet and Mexican Literary Satires

The talk is part of the research colloquium "History and Social Anthropology of Southeastern and Eastern Europe." It takes place in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Anne Brüske, Professor for Spatial Dimensions of Cultural Processes, at the Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies (DIMAS) at the University of Regensburg.

Abstract:

What is crime in an authoritarian state? What oppressive governments consider a crime is often not seen as such from democratic perspectives, and what these governments do to their citizens, in turn, can be regarded as crimes. Discussions about state brutality in the USSR and Mexico coincided in the late 20^th century, despite having strongly divergent levels of repression. Avoiding trivialising Soviet state crimes, a comparative study is very revealing of complex political and societal mechanisms that cross continents, ideologies, and cultures. The abuses of the justice system in authoritarian countries are in many ways ironic, and satirical texts have explored this topic exhaustively. Satire is uniquely apt to reveal the discrepancies, contradictions, and absurdities of authoritarian oppression, as this lecture will show. The focus will lie on an analysis of literary representations of abuses of justice committed during the Soviet era and during the hegemonic rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico in satirical novels by Andrey Sinyavsky, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, and Armando Ramírez. These texts reveal the intersectionalities of oppression in single-party authoritarian regimes that have also been observed by social scientists while offering a unique perspective on these issues that resonates until today.

Elisa Kriza:

PD Dr. Elisa Kriza teaches at the University of Bamberg, Germany, where she was awarded the postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) in 2023 for her study on ‘Satirical Interpretations of State Crimes in the Soviet Union and in 20th Century Mexico’. Among her recent publications are an article about the trial of Soviet satirists Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel published by HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, and the article ‘Blood Carnival and Its Variations in Mexican and Soviet Subversive Satires by René Avilés and Fazil Iskander’ which appeared in the journal Comparative Literature Studies. Elisa Kriza is a comparatist with a focus on the intersection of politics, history, and literature. Her research examines cultural narratives surrounding modernization practices and their impact on societies, with a particular interest in authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union, present-day Russia, and countries in Latin America.