Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation wonders how an entity defined by its very immobility — a place — might in fact be in motion after all. The “movement” under examination is both literal and figurative: amidst Eastern Siberia’s post-WWII industrial boom, the creation of a massive water reservoir and hydroelectric station at Bratsk necessitated the relocation and flooding of over 200 villages in the Angara River valley, including that of “Old” Bratsk, and displacing over 70,000 people. Paying particular attention to articulations of position and movement, both spatial and temporal, I take seriously the phenomenal context in which Bratsk was transposed to higher ground, and attempt to understand how movements in the physical world can either give rise to, or hinder, movement in the affective sense. In the case of people at Bratsk, the direction and destination of their trajectories were supposedly pre-given, even if their experience did not always match their itineraries. The question of what constitutes movement, and how that movement is perceived and known is the primary focus of this study. To this end, I track the ways in which change and transformation occurs, exploring how history, as the study of change over time, attempts to capture, convey, and understand a place in motion. In asking how the entity which cannot move in fact does, I have also tried to explore how history might set fixed things in motion, even in the face of perceived immobility — and in what ways, and at what cost. In this sense, I have explored what a movement of the body has to do with a movement of the mind.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2024
Citation
Tsundu, Jenny Lhamo Tso,
"How A Place Moves: Soviet Bratsk and the Practice of History"
(2024).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/mkeg-8d46
