Session 4: Georgian Voices
Session 4: Georgian Voices Drinks at 6:30pm, event at 7pm With Harsha Ram, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, and guests. In his forty-eighth letter to Max, Eric wrote: “Perhaps it’s unfair of me to decide to make a film with a single voice, yours, and then ask you to represent another perspective, to speak for a hypothetical Georgian whose voice is absent from this film. Perhaps I should let the camera speak instead of you. Search the landscape for images that will speak of absence. Can we let images replace what is unsaid in the story of Abkhazia? Will this be enough?” In this session, Professor Harsha Ram invites writers and poets from the Georgian community in the Bay Area to reflect on this question and discuss the issue of voice and representation in the conflicting narratives of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict. Follows a screening of Eric Baudelaire’s 2014 film Letters to Max at 4:45 p.m. Harsha Ram is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature at UC Berkeley. He specializes in the cultural and political history of Russia, the Caucasus, and Eurasia, as well as modern Indian literature and Italian literature. His most recent book is The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (2003); his forthcoming book is entitled City of Crossroads: Tiflis Modernism and the Russian-Georgian Encounter .