Cold War Spaces: An Online Discussion Series

The 11th Cold War Spaces lunchtime talk with Choi Chatterjee, Professor of History at California State University at Los Angeles (CSULA), and Joes Segal, the Wende Museum’s Chief Curator and Director of Programming.

Segal and Chatterjee will discuss Soviet ideology in late socialism and in postcolonial India, and zoom in on the careers of Anna Politkovskaya in Russia and Arundhati Roy in India. Raised under communism, Politkovskaya spent much of her career as a journalist and human rights activist fighting post-Soviet imperialism, for which she had to pay with her life in 2006. In her political activism, the Man Booker-prize winning author Roy is critically responding to generations of Indian communists who followed the Soviet or Maoist model of development without much care for indigenous people or the environment. A story of two strongly engaged women in a post-Cold War world order carving out their careers in a political minefield.

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An online program reflecting on space as a gateway to cultural history, the Wende Museum presents this series of weekly interviews asking questions about Cold War spaces.

How does space impact the way we live and experience our environment? What did private space really mean under socialism? What was the function of public space between state planning and private appropriation? Who was sent to the secluded spaces of prisons, mental institutions, and gulags? Which global connections were established in spite or because of Cold War borders? What imaginary spaces were created by art, science fiction, and utopian dreaming? And how did all these spaces change after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union?