From Siberian dawn to midnight in Siberia: the geopolitics of Anglophone travel writing about post-Soviet Siberia

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened Siberia as a new "travelers' frontier." Travel writers seeking destinations unspoiled by the encroachment of global capitalism and the resultant "placeless" landscapes made Siberia the subject of numerous travel books. This thesis critically examines the geopolitical discourses embedded in those books. Through a close reading and discourse analysis of three representative samples spanning the post-Cold War period, it highlights the key tropes, images and discourses that Anglophone travel writers have deployed in their constructions of Russia as a geopolitical Other. Travel writers writing about Siberia during the post-Cold War period explicitly and implicitly engaged with, reproduced, argued against, adopted, and adapted popular geopolitical treatises such as Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis, Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, and Robert Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy" thesis, ultimately producing works that frame Russia as an irredeemable and timeless rival to a normalized West. More generally, this thesis argues that scholars of critical and popular geopolitics need to engage more directly and more robustly with literary productions such as travel writing in order to elucidate the geopolitical messaging of such texts.