Publicizing Pussy Riot: Translating (Inter) (Trans)National Memories on the Global Memoryscape

ABSTRACT

Pussy Riot’s 2011 protest performance emerged as a (inter) (trans)national polysemic memory event. Remembered differently by news and digitally networked medias, the memory event illustrates the role of translation strategies on the global memoryscape, especially domestication and foreignization. Translation is broadly understood as an exercise where discourses, symbols, and cultural vocabularies work to render phenomena intelligible to a target audience. This paper argues that Pussy Riot’s memory event translated differently between a variety of Russian and United States memory communities via the global memoryscape. I argue that the global memoryscape was a site international and transnational domesticating and foreignizing translation strategies. Understanding that not all memories reach communities universally, I suggest that domestication, foreignization, and transnational translation are three ways to characterize the complex polysemy that emerged out of the Pussy Riot’s protest performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Pussy riot
• transnational
• international
• memorsyscape
• translation