The Donkey Wars: Authority, Satire, and the Political Imagination in the Caucasus

“The Donkey Wars” takes up the role of satirical experiment in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union through a focus on the journal, Molla Nesreddin, and its many afterlives in the Eurasian space that it has helped to define. It is a project that takes the reader across disciplines by connecting historical questions of literary genre to political rule, and by grounding these questions in anthropological study of the normative understandings of authoritarianism, personhood, and propriety in times of great upheaval across this area.

All interested are welcome!