José Alaniz - ‘My Own Atlantis’ and the Anthropocene in Russian Comics

St. Petersburg artist Olga Lavrenteva’s sprawling 2023 graphic novel My Own Atlantis (Своя Атлантида) is many things - rollicking treasure hunt, tragicomic reflection on classic Russian literature/history - all anchored by the work’s setting: the Karelian Isthmus. This region, fought over for centuries by the Swedes, Finns, Russians and indigenous peoples, is Lavrenteva’s home. She invests the novel with her affection and admiration for the area’s cultural, historical and ecological complexity. Ironically, coincident with My Own Atlantis’ production and publication there emerged a new threat to the isthmus: a massive government-sponsored infrastructure project, the Primorsky Universal Transshipment Complex. Environmentalist activists - including Lavrenteva - protested what they see as the thoughtless development of a diverse ecosystem. In this talk professor José Alaniz, author of Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (2022), discusses My Own Atlantis as an example of modern environmentalist Russian comics in the Anthropocene.
This event will be hosted in person and virtually on Zoom. Register for the Zoom meeting here. Non-NYU affiliates must RSVP for in-person campus access.
José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published three monographs, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (OSU Press, 2022). He has also co-edited two essay collections, Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (with Martha Kuhlman, Leuven University Press, 2020) and Uncanny Bodies: Disability and Superhero Comics (with Scott T. Smith, Penn State University Press, 2019). He formerly chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) and was a founding board member of the Comics Studies Society. He has published three comics/prose collections: The Phantom Zone & Other Stories (Amatl Comix, 2020), The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl, 2023) and Puro Pinche True Fictions (FlowerSong Press, 2023). His current scholarly book projects include Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature and a monograph on the representation of historical trauma in Czech graphic narrative.