Across Languages and Revolutions: A Conversation with Julia Alekseyeva
How does multilingualism function not just as a biographical condition but as a political, aesthetic, and pedagogical practice? In this interview, Julia Alekseyeva, a multimodal scholar, graphic memoirist, translator, and leftist activist whose scholarship spans Soviet, French, Japanese, and US cultural contexts, reflects on language acquisition through displacement, translation across media, and the role of comics and documentary forms in antifascist politics. The conversation foregrounds Alekseyeva’s perspective as a post-Soviet Jewish immigrant to the US working across four languages and multiple artistic registers, from graphic memoir to academic monograph and public-facing essays. It offers an account of how multilingualism shapes intellectual formation, creative practice, and political commitment, while also advancing a critical argument that multilingualism can challenge ethnonationalist identity frameworks. The interview presents multilingualism as a form of intellectual and political bridging that unsettles fixed identities and speaks directly to urgent contemporary cultural debates.