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Harsha RAM

University of California, Berkeley, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Faculty Member

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I was born in New Delhi, India, completed my B.A. (Honours) in Italian and Russian literatures at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales, Australia, studied Philosophy for one year at the Università degli studi di Venezia, after which I came to America to pursue a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University (1995). I have taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Yale University, and at the University of California, Berkeley where I am a member of the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature and affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Italian Culture.
Supervisors: Michael Holquist
Address: Harsha Ram
Associate Professor
Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures
6303 Dwinelle Hall
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA. 94720-2979

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Videos by Harsha RAM

The Scale of Global Modernisms (Berlin, 2015)

How to reconcile the premise of a planetary modernity giving rise to global modernism with the re... more How to reconcile the premise of a planetary modernity giving rise to global modernism with the reality of local, national and regional difference? In this lecture I seek to examine both core/periphery and circulatory models of world modernism, while insisting on the local (urban) and the transregional as alternative models by which to conceive modernist cultural practice. From the Conference “Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetics" (5 - 7 November 2015, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin).

147 views

From Geopolitics to Geopoetics (Berkeley, 2020)

This talk addresses the relationship between literary romanticism, eco-criticism, political theor... more This talk addresses the relationship between literary romanticism, eco-criticism, political theory (specifically sovereignty and political theology), and Area Studies (the Russian empire and the Caucasus). It explores the link between the rise of an aesthetic imagination attuned to alpine landscape and the competing models of political sovereignty that arose as a result of European colonial expansion, the aftermath of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Arising in British romanticism and European political theory, new models of aesthetic experience and political sovereignty were adapted by Russian writers to articulate their own relationship to the Caucasus as a region of singular beauty as well as natural and ethnic diversity. Focusing on the Caucasus, this talk raises wider questions regarding political power, aesthetic autonomy, and the role of landscape, human and natural diversity in imagining alternative models of sovereignty (September 22, 2020)

74 views

Niko Pirosmani: Global, Regional, National, Local (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019)

Is it possible to reconcile the study of art on a planetary scale with site-specific cultural awa... more Is it possible to reconcile the study of art on a planetary scale with site-specific cultural awareness? I explore this question by looking at the celebrated Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani, a painter living and working amongst the urban popular classes. His "discovery" by the Russian avant-garde who viewed him through the lens of modernist primitivism, and his subsequent adoption by Georgian intellectuals as their quintessential national artist is also a story about spatial scale, negotiations between the local, the national, the regional and the global.
This talk was part of a panel entitled "Incommensurability and Untranslatability" held as part of the conference "The Multiplication of Perspectives."Additional resources from the conference can be found in the Museum of Modern Art’s online resource devoted to modernisms in a global context: https://post.moma.org/incommensurability-and-untranslatability/

86 views

"Crosscultural Archives and Contrapuntal Reading: Three Texts from an Era of Transition" (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2020)

How are we to think about areas of the world sandwiched in-between empires, regions, and the disc... more How are we to think about areas of the world sandwiched in-between empires, regions, and the disciplinary formations of Area Studies? One of the many challenges arising from studying such parts of the world arises from the inevitable need for a cross-cultural and multilingual archive. To work with such an archive is to acknowledge the entangled nature of historical events and cultural processes. This talk takes up the challenge of what Edward Said called "contrapuntal reading" to examine three texts, written by a Russian, an Armenian, and a Georgian, respectively. All three texts address the key events of a transitional decade, the 1790s, which saw the South Caucasus pass from Persian into Russian hands. Their distinct perspectives owe much to a complex interplay between ethnicity, social class, political allegiances and aesthetic form.

141 views

Khlebnikov, Tatlin and the Utopian Geopoetics of the Russian Avant-garde (New York, 2018)

The Russian avant-garde's response to the Russian revolution was not merely utopian but "geopoeti... more The Russian avant-garde's response to the Russian revolution was not merely utopian but "geopoetic," a meditation on the planetary that was mediated by the transregional nature of the Soviet Union, spanning as it does both East and West. This geopoetic premise was best illustrated by the great Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov whose final masterwork, the performance piece "Zangezi" was staged by Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. (New York, NYU Jordan Center, October 11, 2018).

227 views

Videos by Harsha RAM

"Sovereignty as Enlightenment Allegory: Russia and the Caucasus" Jordan Center NYU (2022)

Modern Russian literature arose as an Enlightenment initiative, actively promoted by the absoluti... more Modern Russian literature arose as an Enlightenment initiative, actively promoted by the absolutist state. For this reason, Russian eighteenth-century texts devoted to the Caucasus reflected the Enlightenment’s stated goals of cataloguing natural and human diversity, celebrating the civilizing mission, and advocating self-discipline as a means of mitigating the effects of arbitrary power. At the same time, in colliding with the refractory realities of newly incorporated peoples and territories, these texts also dramatize the need for alternative modes of symbolization. In anthropological terms, they express sovereignty in the mode of reciprocal if asymmetrical exchange – in the form of gifts, tribute, or sacrifice – rather than as the coercive imposition of external authority. This paper examines a series of literary texts penned by Russians, Georgians and Armenians: closely associated with Enlightenment literary forms, they also shed light on the Caucasus in a moment of transition.

Papers by Harsha RAM

Soneti da mukhambazi (in Georgian) [Translation of PMLA article 2007]

Sakartvelos demokrat'iuli respublika: formisa da shinaarsis dziebashi , 2024

This article seeks to flesh out the idea of uneven and combined literary modernisation in the glo... more This article seeks to flesh out the idea of uneven and combined literary modernisation in the global peripheries by offering an empirical history of two poetic genres: the sonnet, which experienced a belated but accelerated boom in Georgia during the early twentieth century as a marker of European culture, and the mukhambazi, a Near Eastern genre with deep roots in the urban centres of the Caucasus. The collision between these two genres produced a "genre war" that substantially mirrored the wider stakes of political modernity in Georgia from the late imperial era through the Menshevik Republic to the early years of Sovietization. This essay is the Georgian translation of a PMLA article which you can find below.

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Oct 1, 2016

He is the author of The Imperial Sublime (U of Wisconsin P, 2003) and is completing a book on Rus... more

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2016

One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cu... more One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cultural Phenomenon, is the question of scale. In declaring the contemporary world to be “one, andunequal,” several recent theorizations of world literature rest on the foundational assumption of a unified—albeit uneven—planetary scale (Moretti, “Conjectures” 56; see also Casanova 62-74; WREC 6-12). As such they model the dynamic of literary circulation across world regions according to the geographic distances, as well as the disproportionate access to socioeconomic and cultural resources, that separate and distinguish the world's centers from their peripheries. These distances, and the inequalities they generate, are perceived as the necessary by-products of two spatial logics, that of the expanding world market and that of the modern Westphalian system of sovereign and competing nation-states. To posit the modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of acknowledging th...

Spatial Scale and the Urban Everyday: The Physiology as a Traveling Genre (Paris, St. Petersburg, Tiflis)

The Cambridge History of World Literature, 2021

Many current paradigms of world literature, aligned to world-systems theory or Casanova’s “world ... more Many current paradigms of world literature, aligned to world-systems theory or Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” assume a diffusionist model of literature that situates the origins of literary modernity in the West. This model has found particular favour in the privileged case of the novel, but how do things stand with other genres? This essay examines the physiology, a popular quasi-journalistic genre dedicated to the taxonomic description of mores, customs and social types. Popularly associated with the figure of the urban flaneur and subsequently critiqued by Walter Benjamin, the physiology peaked under the July Monarchy in France and gained unprecedented success in Russian letters where it served to generate the basis of a non-bourgeois public sphere, after which it was also adapted to the circumstances of Russia’s own imperial borderlands. This paper outlines the essential contours of the physiology as it arose in France, in terms of its internal poetics as well as its social currency, and compare its French life with its Russian metropolitan counterpart, where it was transformed from a paraliterary genre to one that would occupy the centre of the Russian literary life in the transition from romanticism to realism. Its subsequent life in the Caucasus region reveals the rise of a colonial urban aesthetics of the picturesque. Does this story confirm or confound the diffusionist model? The essay’s external trajectory confirms the European origins of the genre and its subsequent circulation throughout the Russian empire, from metropole to periphery. A discussion of genre, however, requires more than an account of its its immanent structural features or its subordination to a singular external socio-spatial logic. The social life of circulating genres points to their divergent role in different literary systems, and to the distinct formal and ideological solutions they propose within regional or local contexts. It would appear, then, that the diffusionist model is pertinent to the movement of some hegemonic genres in the modern era, but that the centre/periphery model needs to be complemented by greater attention to the trans/regional and the local as defining levels of geographic scale in the realm of cultural production. Only a trans-scalar analysis, moving between multiple spatial levels, allows us to honour what humanists celebrate as cultural specificity without sacrificing the global perspective offered by world-systems theory.

World Literature as World Revolution

Comintern Aesthetics, 2020

Most theories of world literature assume a normative spatial model based on geographically bounde... more Most theories of world literature assume a normative spatial model based on geographically bounded nations and empires. How might we rethink the theory and practice of world literature from the perspective of political revolution, whose utopian impulse can be associated with a deterritorializing as well as a reterritorializing effect? In early 20th century Russia, many artists associated with the radical avant-garde embraced the internationalist premise of the Russian revolution, giving rise to many genre-shattering "world-texts." This article examines one such text, Velimir Khlebnikov's "Zangezi," a highly experimental performance piece first staged in 1923 by the celebrated constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. This article begins by examining the utopian "geopoetics" of the Russian avant-garde alongside Comintern debates on uneven development and socialist internationalism, as well as contemporary discussions of world literature. It then turns to Khlebnikov's poetic-scientific theories, ending with an analysis of Zangezi, both on its own terms and with respect to the aesthetic goals of Tatlin's production.

From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism

Slavic and East European Review, 2020

Review article on the legacies of Georgian modernism during the transition from Independent Mensh... more

Towards a Cross-cultural Poetics of the Contact Zone

Comparative Literature, 2007

What were the specific stylistic, literary-historical as well ideological modalities by which lit... more

RUSSIAN MODERNISM: The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism

Cambridge Companion to European Modernism, 2011

Modernism in the Caucasus (Two annotated texts on Niko Pirosmani)

Global Modernists on Modernism, 2019

Annotated translations from the Russian of two articles on Niko Pirosmani by Kirill Zdanevich and... more

К вопросу о поэтических источниках грузинского тоста.pdf

(Сокращенный перевод статьи "The Literary Origins of the Georgian Feast. The Cosmopolitan Poetics... more

Pushkin and the Caucasus.pdf

A survey of the "Caucasian theme" in Pushkin's work

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

World literature, western and non-western modernisms, and the problem of scale. Genealogies of ur... more

From "Petersburg" to "Petrograd": The creative history of a Georgian lyric poem and its Russian recreation by Boris Pasternak

Spatializing the Sign. The Futurist Eurasianism of Roman Jakobson and Velimir Khlebnikov

The Scale of Global Modernisms (Berlin, 2015)

How to reconcile the premise of a planetary modernity giving rise to global modernism with the re... more How to reconcile the premise of a planetary modernity giving rise to global modernism with the reality of local, national and regional difference? In this lecture I seek to examine both core/periphery and circulatory models of world modernism, while insisting on the local (urban) and the transregional as alternative models by which to conceive modernist cultural practice. From the Conference “Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetics" (5 - 7 November 2015, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin).

147 views

From Geopolitics to Geopoetics (Berkeley, 2020)

This talk addresses the relationship between literary romanticism, eco-criticism, political theor... more This talk addresses the relationship between literary romanticism, eco-criticism, political theory (specifically sovereignty and political theology), and Area Studies (the Russian empire and the Caucasus). It explores the link between the rise of an aesthetic imagination attuned to alpine landscape and the competing models of political sovereignty that arose as a result of European colonial expansion, the aftermath of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Arising in British romanticism and European political theory, new models of aesthetic experience and political sovereignty were adapted by Russian writers to articulate their own relationship to the Caucasus as a region of singular beauty as well as natural and ethnic diversity. Focusing on the Caucasus, this talk raises wider questions regarding political power, aesthetic autonomy, and the role of landscape, human and natural diversity in imagining alternative models of sovereignty (September 22, 2020)

74 views

Niko Pirosmani: Global, Regional, National, Local (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019)

Is it possible to reconcile the study of art on a planetary scale with site-specific cultural awa... more Is it possible to reconcile the study of art on a planetary scale with site-specific cultural awareness? I explore this question by looking at the celebrated Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani, a painter living and working amongst the urban popular classes. His "discovery" by the Russian avant-garde who viewed him through the lens of modernist primitivism, and his subsequent adoption by Georgian intellectuals as their quintessential national artist is also a story about spatial scale, negotiations between the local, the national, the regional and the global.
This talk was part of a panel entitled "Incommensurability and Untranslatability" held as part of the conference "The Multiplication of Perspectives."Additional resources from the conference can be found in the Museum of Modern Art’s online resource devoted to modernisms in a global context: https://post.moma.org/incommensurability-and-untranslatability/

86 views

"Crosscultural Archives and Contrapuntal Reading: Three Texts from an Era of Transition" (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2020)

How are we to think about areas of the world sandwiched in-between empires, regions, and the disc... more How are we to think about areas of the world sandwiched in-between empires, regions, and the disciplinary formations of Area Studies? One of the many challenges arising from studying such parts of the world arises from the inevitable need for a cross-cultural and multilingual archive. To work with such an archive is to acknowledge the entangled nature of historical events and cultural processes. This talk takes up the challenge of what Edward Said called "contrapuntal reading" to examine three texts, written by a Russian, an Armenian, and a Georgian, respectively. All three texts address the key events of a transitional decade, the 1790s, which saw the South Caucasus pass from Persian into Russian hands. Their distinct perspectives owe much to a complex interplay between ethnicity, social class, political allegiances and aesthetic form.

141 views

Khlebnikov, Tatlin and the Utopian Geopoetics of the Russian Avant-garde (New York, 2018)

The Russian avant-garde's response to the Russian revolution was not merely utopian but "geopoeti... more The Russian avant-garde's response to the Russian revolution was not merely utopian but "geopoetic," a meditation on the planetary that was mediated by the transregional nature of the Soviet Union, spanning as it does both East and West. This geopoetic premise was best illustrated by the great Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov whose final masterwork, the performance piece "Zangezi" was staged by Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. (New York, NYU Jordan Center, October 11, 2018).

227 views

"Sovereignty as Enlightenment Allegory: Russia and the Caucasus" Jordan Center NYU (2022)

Modern Russian literature arose as an Enlightenment initiative, actively promoted by the absoluti... more Modern Russian literature arose as an Enlightenment initiative, actively promoted by the absolutist state. For this reason, Russian eighteenth-century texts devoted to the Caucasus reflected the Enlightenment’s stated goals of cataloguing natural and human diversity, celebrating the civilizing mission, and advocating self-discipline as a means of mitigating the effects of arbitrary power. At the same time, in colliding with the refractory realities of newly incorporated peoples and territories, these texts also dramatize the need for alternative modes of symbolization. In anthropological terms, they express sovereignty in the mode of reciprocal if asymmetrical exchange – in the form of gifts, tribute, or sacrifice – rather than as the coercive imposition of external authority. This paper examines a series of literary texts penned by Russians, Georgians and Armenians: closely associated with Enlightenment literary forms, they also shed light on the Caucasus in a moment of transition.

Soneti da mukhambazi (in Georgian) [Translation of PMLA article 2007]

Sakartvelos demokrat'iuli respublika: formisa da shinaarsis dziebashi , 2024

This article seeks to flesh out the idea of uneven and combined literary modernisation in the glo... more This article seeks to flesh out the idea of uneven and combined literary modernisation in the global peripheries by offering an empirical history of two poetic genres: the sonnet, which experienced a belated but accelerated boom in Georgia during the early twentieth century as a marker of European culture, and the mukhambazi, a Near Eastern genre with deep roots in the urban centres of the Caucasus. The collision between these two genres produced a "genre war" that substantially mirrored the wider stakes of political modernity in Georgia from the late imperial era through the Menshevik Republic to the early years of Sovietization. This essay is the Georgian translation of a PMLA article which you can find below.

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Oct 1, 2016

He is the author of The Imperial Sublime (U of Wisconsin P, 2003) and is completing a book on Rus... more

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2016

One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cu... more One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cultural Phenomenon, is the question of scale. In declaring the contemporary world to be “one, andunequal,” several recent theorizations of world literature rest on the foundational assumption of a unified—albeit uneven—planetary scale (Moretti, “Conjectures” 56; see also Casanova 62-74; WREC 6-12). As such they model the dynamic of literary circulation across world regions according to the geographic distances, as well as the disproportionate access to socioeconomic and cultural resources, that separate and distinguish the world's centers from their peripheries. These distances, and the inequalities they generate, are perceived as the necessary by-products of two spatial logics, that of the expanding world market and that of the modern Westphalian system of sovereign and competing nation-states. To posit the modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of acknowledging th...

Spatial Scale and the Urban Everyday: The Physiology as a Traveling Genre (Paris, St. Petersburg, Tiflis)

The Cambridge History of World Literature, 2021

Many current paradigms of world literature, aligned to world-systems theory or Casanova’s “world ... more Many current paradigms of world literature, aligned to world-systems theory or Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” assume a diffusionist model of literature that situates the origins of literary modernity in the West. This model has found particular favour in the privileged case of the novel, but how do things stand with other genres? This essay examines the physiology, a popular quasi-journalistic genre dedicated to the taxonomic description of mores, customs and social types. Popularly associated with the figure of the urban flaneur and subsequently critiqued by Walter Benjamin, the physiology peaked under the July Monarchy in France and gained unprecedented success in Russian letters where it served to generate the basis of a non-bourgeois public sphere, after which it was also adapted to the circumstances of Russia’s own imperial borderlands. This paper outlines the essential contours of the physiology as it arose in France, in terms of its internal poetics as well as its social currency, and compare its French life with its Russian metropolitan counterpart, where it was transformed from a paraliterary genre to one that would occupy the centre of the Russian literary life in the transition from romanticism to realism. Its subsequent life in the Caucasus region reveals the rise of a colonial urban aesthetics of the picturesque. Does this story confirm or confound the diffusionist model? The essay’s external trajectory confirms the European origins of the genre and its subsequent circulation throughout the Russian empire, from metropole to periphery. A discussion of genre, however, requires more than an account of its its immanent structural features or its subordination to a singular external socio-spatial logic. The social life of circulating genres points to their divergent role in different literary systems, and to the distinct formal and ideological solutions they propose within regional or local contexts. It would appear, then, that the diffusionist model is pertinent to the movement of some hegemonic genres in the modern era, but that the centre/periphery model needs to be complemented by greater attention to the trans/regional and the local as defining levels of geographic scale in the realm of cultural production. Only a trans-scalar analysis, moving between multiple spatial levels, allows us to honour what humanists celebrate as cultural specificity without sacrificing the global perspective offered by world-systems theory.

World Literature as World Revolution

Comintern Aesthetics, 2020

Most theories of world literature assume a normative spatial model based on geographically bounde... more Most theories of world literature assume a normative spatial model based on geographically bounded nations and empires. How might we rethink the theory and practice of world literature from the perspective of political revolution, whose utopian impulse can be associated with a deterritorializing as well as a reterritorializing effect? In early 20th century Russia, many artists associated with the radical avant-garde embraced the internationalist premise of the Russian revolution, giving rise to many genre-shattering "world-texts." This article examines one such text, Velimir Khlebnikov's "Zangezi," a highly experimental performance piece first staged in 1923 by the celebrated constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. This article begins by examining the utopian "geopoetics" of the Russian avant-garde alongside Comintern debates on uneven development and socialist internationalism, as well as contemporary discussions of world literature. It then turns to Khlebnikov's poetic-scientific theories, ending with an analysis of Zangezi, both on its own terms and with respect to the aesthetic goals of Tatlin's production.

From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism

Slavic and East European Review, 2020

Review article on the legacies of Georgian modernism during the transition from Independent Mensh... more

Towards a Cross-cultural Poetics of the Contact Zone

Comparative Literature, 2007

What were the specific stylistic, literary-historical as well ideological modalities by which lit... more

RUSSIAN MODERNISM: The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism

Cambridge Companion to European Modernism, 2011

Modernism in the Caucasus (Two annotated texts on Niko Pirosmani)

Global Modernists on Modernism, 2019

Annotated translations from the Russian of two articles on Niko Pirosmani by Kirill Zdanevich and... more

К вопросу о поэтических источниках грузинского тоста.pdf

(Сокращенный перевод статьи "The Literary Origins of the Georgian Feast. The Cosmopolitan Poetics... more

Pushkin and the Caucasus.pdf

A survey of the "Caucasian theme" in Pushkin's work

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

World literature, western and non-western modernisms, and the problem of scale. Genealogies of ur... more

From "Petersburg" to "Petrograd": The creative history of a Georgian lyric poem and its Russian recreation by Boris Pasternak

Spatializing the Sign. The Futurist Eurasianism of Roman Jakobson and Velimir Khlebnikov

Андрей Белый и Грузия: Грузинский модернизм и переосмысление петербургского текста в периферийном пространстве

Сокращенный перевод английской статьи

"Vam" (1909). Interpreting an Early Lyric by Velimir Khlebnikov

Velimir Chlebnikov's "Odinokij litsedej"

რუსული პოეზია და იმპერიული ამაღლებული (2)

რუსული პოეზია და იმპერიული ამაღლებული (1)

Georgian translation of article summarizing the findings of my book The Imperial Sublime (Part 1).

Кавказские пленники. Культурные мифы и медиальные репрезентации в чеченском конфликте

Перевод одноименной статьи, вышедшей на английском языке (см. ниже).

The Imperial Sublime. A Russian Poetics of Empire (BOOK).pdf

The establishment of the imperial state by Peter the Great led to the birth in Russia of the mode... more The establishment of the imperial state by Peter the Great led to the birth in Russia of the modern literary system. The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme alongside the creation and evolution of modern Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840. Arising from the need to glorify the Russian state and its expanding territories, the imperial theme quickly became enmeshed in a wider range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and Russia's ruling monarchs. From this arose a specifically Russian tradition of linking poetics and politics, which I term the "imperial sublime." Whether utilised in praise of the tsar or to question his authority, the imperial sublime provided a powerful means of formulating the relationship of poetic language to the state: the reconstruction of this genealogy allows us to see the connections between Petrine ideologies of the state Boileau's revival of the Longinian sublime, and the enthusiastic adaptation in Russia of new genres such as the ode and even the elegy.