From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds by Rossen Djagalov (original) (raw)
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The Soviet Invention of Postcolonial Studies
Boundary 2, 2023
The complex relations between the Soviet Union and the Soviet states of the Caucasus that were formerly parts of the Ottoman and Persian empires offer examples of complex cultural and political relations of antagonism and appropriation that go beyond simple binaries of resistance or nationalist anti-eurocentrism. Though their work is little known except to scholars in Slavic Studies, in the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Soviet Orientologists laid the foundations for the critique of Western Orientalism that would be introduced to the West many years later in 1978 by Edward W. Said. The Soviet critique of the imperialist foundations of Eurocentric culture and academic knowledge formed the basis for the huge World Literature publishing project pioneered by Maxim Gorky, an initiative which has been largely disregarded—both historically and theoretically—in the Western rediscovery of World Literature in the era of globalization. Similarly, Western postcolonial scholars have only recently begun to acknowledge the creative, cultural and political affiliations of Global South writers to internationalist organizations such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association which was supported by the Soviet Union in the Cold War period and the importance of publications such as Lotus magazine. The books reviewed here demonstrate the degree to which histories of “postcolonialism” and the late western critique of Orientalism have now been rewritten to acknowledge their sources in earlier critiques by Soviet scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
Introduction: USSR South: Postcolonial Worlds in the Soviet Imaginary
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and The Middle East, 2013
hat could the panoply of relationships have been between the Soviet Union and the colonial and emergent postcolonial world? Even a cursory consideration of this question takes some mental gymnastics, shifting the directionality of our thinking and requiring us to cut across several geographic, political, and historical spaces that have usually been analyzed in isolation from each other. Soviet Union-Turkey, Soviet Union-South Asia, and even Soviet Union-Africa, for instance, have rarely, and that only recently, been taken up by scholars as significant historical or political axes. The work that has been done in this vein has focused, understandably, on the three-world power dynamics of the Cold War. 1 On the one side of this equation we have the Soviet Union, in formation between 1917 and 1922 and in formal existence until 1991: a totalistic political, social, and cultural project with universal (and some would say its own internal colonial/imperial) aspirations, in revolution, continual and often violent evolution, and then devolution, throughout precisely the same period as high colonialism in Africa and Asia, and then of decolonization of those continents. The impetus for the "Soviet project," if indeed there can be said to have existed such a monolith, grew out of Enlightenment thought and the French revolutionary tradition of the nineteenth century and was thus defined in sharp contradistinction to western European capitalism and, by extension, colonialism, even though it was very much part of a larger Enlightenment whole. In serving as a -and often the -world-historical alternative to capitalism and its accompanying forms of extranational domination, imperialism, and colonialism, one would think that various actors in the Soviet Union would have had natural connections to and affinities with colonial peoples and, even more so, a natural tendency to support decolonization movements across the globe. And yet these connections are only now beginning to move out of the realm of assumptions and into that of systematic exploration and scrutiny. Given that the Soviet Union comprised not just Russia but was made up of no less than fifteen "national" republics, there was certainly a perennial "nationalities question" within the Soviet Union, which could be interestingly compared to colonial projects emanating from western Europe. When looking out-Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
eSamizdat, 2021
The Special issue "Beyond the 'Post-': (Post-)Soviet Experience Through (Post-)Colonial Lenses" aims to reflect upon the contribution of postcolonial theory to the study of post-Soviet dynamics on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union: in which ways does the Imperial and Soviet legacy manifest itself? Which postcolonial tools can help us understand and enrich the search for a definition of the post-Soviet as an analytic category? In which ways are the post-Soviet cultures postcolonial? What, on the contrary, makes the geographical area born after the collapse of the Soviet Union different from the so-called ‘Third World’ and its dynamics?
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Russian Literature, 2020
This article investigates the themes of global postwar decolonization, Soviet internationalism, and national identity in the works of the Russophone Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov (b. 1936). Through an analysis of his early autobiographical and historical poems, which commemorate a variety of events ranging from the Second World War and the successes of the Soviet space program to Indian Independence and the American Civil Rights movement, I argue that Suleimenov's synthesis of postcolonial writing and Soviet anticolonial discourse paved the way for a sophisticated critique of cultural imperialism that coincided with, and also contributed to, the birth of postcolonial literature worldwide.
Bridging the Post-Soviet and the Postcolonial
2016
.............................................................................................................................................2 Introduction.........................................................................................................................2 Defining Postcolonialism...................................................................................................4 The Empire.............................................................................................................................6 Postcolonialism and Modernity.........................................................................................7 Soviet Union on Postcolonial terms?....................................................................................10 The Soviet Empire..............................................................................................................10 Empire’s Modernity...........................................................................................................12 Homogenising Soviet colonies in the West...................................................................14 Poland and Romania, stark differences, the same category......................................17 Striving culture, resistance and undermining the “Iron Curtain”............................27 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................30 Bibliography......................................................................................................................33
This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a geo-historical comparativism that seeks to move beyond present narrow definitions. It suggests that the inclusion of East-Central Europe in European identity might help resolve postcolonialism’s difficulties in coming to terms with both postcolonial and neo-colonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. Analyzing post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of experiences such as transformations of time and space (landscapes, cityscapes), migration and displacement, objectifying gaze, collective memory and trauma, cultural self-colonization, and language as a form of power, the book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism. Together the studies map the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art, the latter highlighted through accompanying illustrations.
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