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Power/Memory: New Elite, Old Intelligentsia, and Fixing of the Georgian Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2019

Nutsa Batiashvili
Nutsa Batiashvili*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Free University of Tbilisi, Tbilisi, Georgia
*
*Corresponding author. Email: n.batiashvili@freeuni.edu.ge
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Abstract

This article examines an ideological and a narrative rift between two elitist formations and two forms of nationalism that a practice of memory-making embodies. In the subterranean polemic where Soviet generation intelligentsia and liberal intellectuals animate the past on Russian–Georgian relations in two distinct ways, past becomes a critical terrain where the struggle over Georgia’s geopolitical belonging and the resulting disputes on national identity take place. This analysis not only flashes out recent discursive rifts, linking them to the broader political processes, but traces the genealogies of the narrative practices that enable two idioms of nationalist discourse. It is both an analysis of post-socialist class formations and of the semantic fields within which their idioms are embedded.

Keywords

Soviet intelligentsiamemory-makingnational narrativesRussian–Georgian relations
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1083 - 1099
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

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