"Europe Started Here": The MedeMoment in Batumi as a site of National Pedagogy
Speaker: Fabio De Leonardis
Fabio De Leonardis holds a BA+MA degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures from Bari University, where he obatined also a PhD in Theory of Language and Sciences of Signs in 2008, and an MA in Russian and Eurasian Studies from the European University at St. Petersburg (2013). In spring 2014 he was Wayne Vucinich Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and from 2012 to 2021 he co-edited the journal Nazioni e regioni. Studi e ricerche sulla comunità immaginata. His research interests focus on discourse analysis, nationalism, Russia and Eurasia and the question of Palestine. He is currently associate professor of Semiotics at Shanghai International Studies University and is a member of Social Semiotics’ and Nazioni e regioni’s editorial staff. Among his publications, Palestina 1881-2006. Una contesa lunga un secolo (La Città del Sole, 2007), «Memory and Nation-Building in Georgia» (in Isaacs R. – Polese A. (eds.), Nation-Building and Identity in the Post-Soviet Space. New Tools and Approaches, Routledge, 2016), Nation-building and Personality Cult in Turkmenistan: The Türkmenbaşy Phenomenon, Routledge, 2018.
Theme
‘Europe Started Here’: The Medea Monument in Batumi as a Site of National Pedagogy
In the period that followed the so-called Rose Revolution, between 2004 and 2012, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia underwent a radical experiment of state- and nation-building promoted by the then president Mikheil Saakashvili and its United National Movement. At the core of this experiment there was a highly articulated ideology of state nationalism. The latter was embedded in a neoliberal and strongly pro-Western agenda that posited Georgia as a country that had been forcefully detached from its ‘European path’ by the Russian Empire first and the USSR later, therefore its ‘Europeanness’ had to be ‘restored’ by a process of rapid de-Sovietization and de-Russianization coupled with a speedy process of ‘modernization’. This ideology, among other things, found expression in a radical reshaping of the Georgian urban landscape, especially in the cities of Tbilisi and Batumi. This paper uses multimodal CDA tools to analyze one such example of resemantization of the public space, namely the Medea monument in Batumi. The analysis shows how this monument and its architectural setting elides the other interpretations and transforms the figure of Medea into a site of nationalist pedagogy aimed at demonstrating Georgia’s ‘Europeanness’.
#2025.04.18 (3pm CST) (Zoom)#
Meeting ID｜ 894 6651 8670
Passcode ｜717892
Organizer｜Dr.Muhammad Afzaal
