From Imperial Russia to Colonial Ukraine

Abstract

After the end of the Soviet Union and its eastern European empire and — inspired to a very large degree by the work of Said — the emergence of the subaltern school of south Asian history,1 as well as the publication of Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of ‘postcoloniality’2 and other developments, cultural anthropologists and others have joined with colleagues in comparative literature and made connections between postcolonialism and postsocialism.3 One of the first to propose applying the label ‘postcolonial’ to post-Soviet Ukrainian literature was an Australian scholar of Ukrainian ethnicity, Marko Pawlyshyn.4 Following his ‘postcolonial’ lead, a Canadian scholar of Ukrainian ethnicity, Myroslav Shkandrij, wrote a wonderfully entangled history of Russia and Ukraine in modern literature.5 All the scholars discussed so far are primarily known as literary historians. Literary historians of this post-colonial orientation are a particular subset of cultural historians and are usually held in some suspicion by other historians, who often accuse them of anachronistically reading back into history their own contemporary multicultural politics. But more conventional and mainstream historians, especially those who interrogate categories of identity in national and imperial states, have begun to appropriate some of the commonplaces of the literary scholars and anthropologists who have been the most ardent ‘postcolonialists’.