Table Of ContentAre We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space
Author(s): Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nancy Condee, Harsha Ram and Vitaly Chernetsky
Source: PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 3 (May, 2006), pp. 828-836
Published by: Modern Language Association
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828 Forum:C onferenceD ebates PMLA
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beyond the normative coordinates of selfhood lies -. "Is the Rectum a Grave?" AIDS: Cultural Analysis I
an orgy of connection that no regime can regulate. Cultural Activism. Ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge:
MIT P, 1988. 197-222.
Tim Dean Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
University at Buffalo Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Trans. Daniella
Works Cited Dangoor. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
Snediker, Michael. Queer Optimism. Minneapolis: U of
Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Minnesota P, forthcoming.
AreW e Postcolonial? Post-SovietS pace
Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of
Slavic and East European Languages
29 December 2005, Washington, DC
Are You Postcolonial? To the Teachers of beginnings inm onopoly capitalist or mercantile
Slavic and Eastern European Literatures colonialisms and transform itself in the process.
Every postcoloniality is situated, and therefore
You have involved yourselves in the rethinking of different.A Critique ofP ostcolonial Reason was
Soviet studies as not only post-Soviet studies but Kant's use of thew estern Australian
provoked by
also postcolonial studies. The first wave of post Aborigine. How will this travel to the "European"
colonial studies was based on the British empire. imagination of "the Other Europe" today? How
We have a lot to learn as thatm odel travels out of will you displace our modern notions of hybrid
its firstc ontained sphere into the aftermatho f old diasporas when you think of the restlessness of,
multicultural empires. Does postcolonialism lead say, Armenia?
to nationalism? Is postcolonialism appropriated In response to students in the Slavic depart
by the metropolitan diaspora? Is "scientific so ment at Columbia University, I wrote as follows:
cialism" comparable to "civilizing mission"? Is the
"Other Europe" movement?in Poland, Hungary, When an alien nation-state establishes it
Bohemia, the Balkans, and elsewhere?manage self as ruler, impressing its own laws and sys
able within a specificallyp ostcolonial framework? tems of education and rearranging the mode
Must the post-Soviet world be thought of as a new of production for its own economic benefit,
Eurasia in order for the postcolonial viewpoint to "colonizer" and "colonized" can be used. The
stick, as Mark von Hagen has suggested? The ar consequences of applying them to a wide ar
gument about women as the surrogate proletariat rayo f political and geographic entitiesw ould
in central Asia traveled out of Soviet studies. How be dire if colonialism had only one model.
will thatf igure? On the other hand, ifw e notice how different
This rethinking implies that them ost eman kinds of adventures and projects turn into
cipatory vision of the Enlightenment could not something that fits the bare-bones descrip
withstand thew eight of the objective and subjec tion given above, we will have a powerful
tive history of older, precapitalist empires. Our analysis of the politics of progressivism, of
current and so-called emancipatory programs do one sort or another. How do political philos
not engage with this. There might be some use, ophies of social justice relate to the overdeter
then, in rethinking postcolonialism for this new minations of practical politics? This venerable
task. But itm ust unmoor itself from its provisional question receives interesting answers ifw e
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121.3 Forum: Conference Debates 829
consider the irreducibilityo f the colonial in a based comparative literaturem, uch more like
situation-specific and flexiblew ay. Addition cultural studies than like the older model of
ally, ifw e cast our glance at the place(s) colo eastern European comp lit?where the dis
nized (according to the rarefied formula), we cipline began. Colonial discourse and post
encounter great heterogeneity. This provides colonial studies have not been good with
us an opportunity to study thep olitics of cul languages. The areas you study can turn this
tural and epistemic transformation. around. Your field can offer spectacular op
The problem with applying these terms to portunities forh istory to join hands with lit
the area you cover would be merely to follow erary criticism in search of the ethical as it
the threem ost powerful models of colonial interrupts the epistemological.
discourse theory currently available, belong Postcolonial theoryw ill engage analytic
ing to theM iddle East, South Asia, and Latin representations of positions other than the
America. These refer to colonial adventures colonizers' (old and new) in them odel of the
undertaken by single nations as exploration organic intellectual ("permanent persuaders"
and conquest nourished mercantile capital ?Gramsci). But it is the theory thatm ust be
ism?followed by the expanding market needs made to engage with this, not ourselves as
of industrial capital. Your area displaced the academic narcissists. The gendered approach
political lines of old multiethnic imperial is particularly effective in postcolonial work
formations, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian. because it often seeks to expose the patriar
The eastern edge pushes into terrain that is chal collaboration between colonizer and
even further from the single-nation model. colonized. Feminism and postcolonial the
Another great difference is the presence of ory have a certain concern for social justice.
an articulated ideal?versions of "scientific Iw ould like to think that this is the case for
socialism"?which gave a seemingly greater all humanities and social science work, per
specificityt o the epistemic change. The single haps for all work. But too narrow a definition
nation model was accompanied by "civilizing of political commitment leads tow ork with
missions" that were relatively autonomous the same dull litany of foregone conclusions.
from political and economic structures. I have always found such "research" tedious.
Historically, it has always been the pow These are warnings from a battle-scarred vet
erful who have spoken or been spoken of. eran on the eve of your new departure.
I don't know enough about the area under
study to go intod etail here, but, as a feminist They were students. You are colleagues. I will
and a subalternist, I am used to looking at the lety ou add the pinch of salt.
pores of elite texts to tease out excluded itin Gayatri ChakravortyS pivak
eraries. As we move eastward, the nature of Columbia University
the texts changes. Here my disciplinary com
mitments kick in. I want us to use the literary
imagination to read sagas and chronicles. I The Anti-imperialist Empire and After:
spoke with women from inner Asia ten years In Dialogue with Gayatri Spivak's "Are
ago and with folks from former Soviet Arme
You Postcolonial?"
nia more recently.T hey spoke of thed ifficulty
of communication with their mothers?and, Debates within Slavic studies are increasingly fu
for sure, their grandmothers?because Rus eled by this question: are we now also postcolo
sian gets in the way. The fracturing of gender nial?"we" being some unstable combination of
is somewhat different from the national postsocialist citizenry, their diasporas, and the
ist insistence on native-language politics in research communities that study them.H ow is it
the "new" nations bordering on the Russian best to get at this question? Can we point to Soviet
Federation. However one approaches this, it colonizers who have withdrawn?either physi
seems to me a fertile field for real language cally or in terms of a systemic failure of power and
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830 Forum: Conference Debates PMLA
knowledge?leaving behind some distinct group In terms, therefore, of the question as it is posed?
to engage in the cultural reclamation project of Are we postcolonial??we are left as yet with an af
nation building (linguistic, educational, and legal firmative, but still deeply unsatisfying, answer.
reforms; reconstructed institutions of the media Ifw e have inm ind the internal Soviet em
and the electoral process; the emergence of au pire?the formerf ifteen republics?then the ini
tonomous civic associations)? A reasoned answer, tial answer, again, is yes. But, of course, as soon as
whatever it is,w ill respond to this line of question things begin to seem simple, the empire's radical
ing. Let us bracket culture for the moment and ad internald iversitym akes thism onosyllabic answer
dress the question in geographic terms, from the problematic, and not only for the reasons cited
outside?that is to say, external empire?in. above. How productive is a consistent vocabulary
Ifw e are speaking of Central Europe, the fora radically inconsistente xpansionism? This last
countries that?some would argue?had a status question concerns not merely the diversity of colo
analogous in certain respects to that of Britain's nized territoryb ut also the profoundly different
white colonies, the answer initially, of course, is modes of metropolitan expansion: if, for example,
yes, we are postcolonial. That affirmative is tem in the Baltics Russo-Soviet appropriation of an al
pered, however, by an awareness that "postcolo ready existing German elite provided one?in some
nial" might be an unlikely choice by, for example, respects, anglophile?model, then in the Far East
most Czech citizens. First of all, theirp ost-Soviet Russo-Soviet missionary and mercantile expan
reclamation is surely aimed as much at a reinte sionism provided another, more Spanish, model,
gration into post-cold war Europe as it is toward which produced very differentc ultural symptoms.
the building of the nation-state. Whether this Our colleagues in other disciplines have debated
re-Europeanization is in fact integration into an thish eterogeneity at length,w hile theh umanities
emergent empire of the European Union I will have been slower to address these issues.2
leave unaddressed.1 Second, a descriptor more If we turn our attention to the Russian Fed
familiar than Soviet colonialism?given the geo eration today, a curious paradox obtains, since
graphic, historical, and conceptual proximity to the federation's internal relations with Chechnya,
Nazism?has been Soviet occupation. The insis Bashkortostan, and elsewhere show little trace of
tence on this term?indeed, its naturalization decolonization; in fact, the historical contradic
raises an interesting question. Is it correct to say tions of itsd isciplinary systemsf ind themselves in
that the Czechs, for example, were occupied but crisisb etween thed ead empire and then ewly emer
theU zbeks colonized? If so, then for the Czechs gent one. Only the greatest optimist would claim
was it the period's brevity, the absence of a tsar that Russia's civil associations?independent elec
ist legacy, their relative technological parityw ith tion monitoring, the media, veterans' associations,
the Soviet Union, their mastery of the discourse environmental and public-health advocacy groups,
of occupation, or our unacknowledged racializa policy research institutes, and so forth?have con
tion of language that drives this distinction? In tinued to develop. Instead (in a clumsy paraphrase
deed, the absence from 1946 to 1967 of an alien, ofM onk Filofei),3a dynastic empire fell,a socialist
occupying military or governance on Czech soil one followed, and a third is now consolidating its
furtherp roblematizes thev ocabulary. These habits institutions along familiar trajectories. The col
of thought?in the northwest sector of the Soviet lapse of the Soviet Union?internally imperialist
empire, "occupation"; in its southeast sector, "co but (in itsd eclared animosity to FirstW orld pre
lonialism"?suggest that the Soviet case (Eurasia, dation) externally anti-imperialist?resolved one
after all) is an important crossroads for postcolo core contradiction, but substituted another: Rus
nialist debates, a site where familiar terms encoun sia, recovering gradually from its postimperial
ter each other anew. Is itw orth asking, How white fatigue, remains (though reconfigured) an empire
must one be to be occupied? And, conversely, does nevertheless. Does that repetition, like a stubborn
the vocabulary of postcolonialist debates oriental habit renounced again and again, nullify change?
ize those whom it sets out to emancipate conceptu An adequate account of the current conjuncture
ally from cold war categories of Soviet occupation? must address the simultaneity of Soviet postcolo
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i2i.3 Forum: Conference Debates 831
niality and Russian colonialism, their contradic Suny has been at the center of the debates on the legacy of
tions and yet their intense compatibilities. Austro-Hungary and the emergence of what Martin has
A discussion of post-Soviet culture must pro dubbed the Soviet Union's "affirmative-action empire."
ctehede dwifitfheinr entcheessb e etpwareamenet etrhs, e symtakpintgo misn otfo tachceou cnotn kSuinngy2,, . 1D aonmrde ifMneiarcr kto wLvioeorvnke nH,b aygTe Menra,r ryk aMmaBorentiisgns i,n ogtehIrel,yr sa. GPeroizfeflr, eyR oHnaolsd
tiguous empire and those of them ore familiar tha 3. Filofei (Philotheus), an early-sixteenth-century
lassocraticm odel of British postcoloniality. Russia hegumen of Pskov's Eleazarov Monastery, is said to have
differsi n itsm arkers ofm odernity; the relative im written a letter containing the admonition that after the
poverishment of its center in contrast to itsW estern fall of Rome and Constantinople, Muscovy had inherited
borders; its constructions of ethnicity, nationality, the burden of preserving the true faith: "Two Romes have
and race; its state-driven, highly centralized struc finaMl leanli.n Tinh,e Thapirpd. 5s4ta-n55d)s. . A fourth there shall not be" (qtd.
ture; and?as Geoffrey Hosking has eloquently
argued?the relative weakness of its own national Work Cited
formations. Yet these conditions provide only the
merest guide to the complex tasks of cultural anal Malinin, Vasilii N. Starets Eleazarova Monastyria Filofei
ysis, for Russian contiguity produces not cultural i ego poslanie. Kiev: Tip. Kievo-Pecherskoi Uspenskoi
homology but rather,a t times, itso pposite: a libidi Lavry, 1901.
nal engagement, under certain conditions, with the
great overseas empire, as is surely suggested, for Between 1917 and 1947: Postcoloniality
example, in Aivazovsky's evocative seascapes. In a and Russia-Eurasia
similarly contradictory fashion, the cultural tropes
of landscape in cinema, literature, oil painting, and Has the postcolonial become a new universal, one
mass song?figuring, on the one hand, Russia's capable of subsuming under one conceptual rubric
"unencompassibility" (Heo6i>iiTHocTb) and, on the such very differenth istorical experiences as the
other, the need for constant vigilance at the bor emergence ofN ew World states out of the legacy
ders?share a common anxiety about the outer of white-settler colonialism, the decolonizations
reaches of Russia's expanding drive, a response of Africa and Asia, and the much more recent dis
to its shifting boundaries as encoded cultural integrationo f the Soviet bloc? If so,w hat is gained
wish and fear. We must read these marks against and what is lostb y such a way of viewing history?
the grain in two distinct fashions: first,a gainst a Postcolonial theoryh as a specificp olitical his
postcolonialism thatf itsu neasily with our subject tory and intellectual genealogy that are distinct,
of study and, second, against our own discipline, but not entirely divorced, from Soviet history.
which has understood these debates as occurring Postcolonial theory became possible with the post
between the First and Third Worlds, with little war decolonizations of Africa and Asia and the
resonance for Russia. The largest country in the related ascendancy of various national intelligent
world, still very much in possession of its imperial sias. The success of secular nationalism enabled
holdings, Russia remains a challenge to scholars of these intelligentsias to reexamine the recent past,
the First and Third Worlds who would see moder just as the subsequent crisis of secular nationalism
nity as inextricably intertwinedw ith capitalism, enabled them to critique the failures of the post
the nation-state, and liberal democracy. colonial state and its complicities with older and
newer imperialisms. The resulting proliferation of
Nancy Condee revisionist historiography and theoretical critique
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh was further empowered by the increasingly trans
national location of its practitioners, manifested
Notes most visibly by the emergence of postcolonial di
tion 1a.Hn dab ecromoradsi'sn atiownr itionfg ss ovoenr eitghne pdoissctonuartisoens al migchotn stienllvai te arseploartase d shacitfivtes ini snt uthdee nAmt dereimcano grapahcaidcesm. y and by
such a polemical response from those who have weathered Although Nasser, Sukarno, and Nehru clearly
the twentieth-century "friendship of peoples," with all its looked in part to the Soviet state for inspiration,
federalist claims. Here work by Terry Martin and Ronald the twentieth-century encounter between the
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832 Forum: Conference Debates PMLA
Second and ThirdW orlds can no longer be read global intellectual debates, is probably as much re
as one of inspired continuity. The gap between sponsible for the underdevelopment of Eurasian
the two emblematic dates 1917, the year of the postcolonial studies as the purelym ethodological
Russian Revolution, and 1947, the year of Indian question of postcolonialism's applicability to the
independence, seems far greater today than dur post-Soviet region.
ing the heyday of nonalignment, formulated at So where does the question stand today, in
the Bandung Conference of 1955. Taking place our field?
some thirtyy ears before the South Asian and Af In Russian literary studies, a small body of
rican decolonizations, the first decolonization of works examines the correlation of literature and
the Russian empire was proclaimed in the name empire. I will confine myself to noting two seri
of a revolutionary socialism thatw ould crucially ous limitations of thesew orks. First, they tend to
equivocate on what was called the national ques read Edward Said's Orientalism as a synecdoche
tion. The Soviet Union was expressly internation for postcolonial criticism as a whole, in order to
alist yet zealously territorial and expansionist, assert itsq ualified applicability toR ussian studies
denying the autonomy of its constitutive peoples and to make a case for Russia's quasi-European,
while retaining a federal structure thatw ould quasi-Asiatic particularism. This is combined
nonetheless permit an elaborate discourse of lo with strategies of reading that largely focus on
cal specificity.T his equivocation led to the para mimetic-representational categories at the ex
doxical emergence of what Nancy Condee recently pense of formal or rhetorical modes. All of this
called an anti-imperialist empire. If the Soviet ignores a much larger body of literary criticism
Union was an empire, itw as one that combined an and historiography (e.g., from South Asia or Latin
exceptionally violent and coercive centralism with America) whose meditations on the distortions or
a paternalistic internationalism whose relation mutations produced by the importation of Euro
to the peripheries of theU SSR was by no means centric modernizing and developmentalist models
purely exploitative. The subsidizing of republican to the non-West might throw a useful lighto n the
economies, the indigenizing of regional party Russian-Eurasian region. More serious still has
structures, and the fostering of national cultures been our neglect of the non-Russian literary and
from theU zbek to theA rmenian were pursued in intellectual traditions of the formerS oviet Union.
tandem with the ostensibly homogenizing vision We remain trapped in the Petrine paradigm of
of "Soviet man." It was surely the sustained, of Russia's eternally anxious opening to the West;
ficial Soviet cultivation of national republican where we look to the East, we remain content with
elites, as much as the efforts of local nationalisms, Russian representations of it.
that permitted the rapid emergence of a plethora The postcolonial question has certainly been
of post-Soviet nation-states. better articulated in related fields such as Rus
The distinctness of Soviet experience finds sian history and post-Soviet anthropology. In a
an inverted corollary in the evolution of Russian review essay-cum-manifesto on these develop
studies in the United States. A child of the cold ments, Mark von Hagen recently claimed the term
war, Russian studies combined historical investi "Eurasia" as an "anti-paradigm for the post-Soviet
gations that largely reproduced a centralist or met era" that "signals a decentering of historical nar
ropolitan vision of Eurasian historyw ith a study ratives from the powerful perspectives of the for
of literature that fashioned a canon out of the Rus mer capitals, whether imperial St. Petersburg or
sian nineteenth-century classics, the modernists, tsarist-Soviet Moscow" (par. 2). Von Hagen takes
and the postwar dissidents. The influxo f Russian strategic advantage of the toponymic crisis caused
emigres did little to upset these assumptions, since by the collapse of the Soviet Union and claims for
one of their primary intellectual and existential a counterhegemonic intellectual initiative a term
reflexes was to counterpose politics and culture. Eurasia?that has in fact had a relativelym uddy
The underrepresentation of other Soviet ethnici intellectual history. Far more than other toponyms
ties in American universities and in America at (such as those for nations and continents), Eurasia
large, not to mention their regional isolation from remains to this day an indeterminate category with
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i2i.3 Forum: Conference Debates 833
an uneven history of discursive elaboration, and it epistemology was generated by theK azakh poet
had a weak institutional legitimacyu ntil its recent, philologist Olzhas Suleimenov,w hose book Az i la
rapid adoption by area studies institutes and cen (1975) influencedS oviet culture as Fanon's or Said's
ters in theU nited States. Conceived of originally in work did other parts of thew orld.
theW est to describe the landmass of Europe and What I am proposing, then, is a renewed fo
Asia combined, the term has been used in Russia cus on the regions of the Eurasian periphery, a
as part of attempts to rethink the relation between commitment to the local archive that requires
the European and Asiatic regions of the Russian careful study of languages and sources outside
empire, with a focus on the central Asian steppe as Russian and an ability to contemplate cultural
Eurasia's newly designated core. This conceptual phenomena that exceed the Petrine paradigm of
history has been marked by a rich paradox: while Russia and theW est. This projectm ust be comple
serving to highlight the ethnically diverse nature mented by an openness to the kinds of questions
of the formerS oviet Union, to thep oint of displac already being posed in other parts of the globe by
ing the Eurocentrism of received accounts of the transnational methodologies such as postcolonial
region, the term Eurasia has also been marked by a studies. Such work might point to a convergence
strong totalizing impulse, a desire for spatial unity among Slavic studies, comparative literature, and
and for a principle to guarantee this unity. To be work now pursued in various area studies insti
sure,v on Hagen explicitly repudiates the "faith [of tutes. For the past few years, I have been learning
classical Eurasianists such as Trubetzkoy] in the Georgian and studying revolutionary Tbilisi as a
Russian Empire's self-sufficiency, its 'exceptional cultural site?a site far from the storming of the
path,' and their understanding of Eurasia as a Winter Palace, to be sure, but also one of multiple
closed systemo f interrelationships" (26). languages and ethnicities, where anticolonial na
Von Hagen necessarily limits himself to the tionalism competed with both Menshevism and
work of Western and Russian professional histo Bolshevism, where fin de siecle aestheticism co
rians of Eurasia who have been enriched by the existed with the futurist avant-garde and Near
insightso f newerm ethodologies. This framework Eastern forms of bardic recitation, and where per
neglects one vital element that could become the haps more modernities, local and imported, were
legitimate object of Russian-Eurasian literary imagined than in Paris or Saint Petersburg.
studies: the intellectual or creative interventions of Harsha Ram
writers, poets, philologists, and political activists of University of California, Berkeley
the Eurasian peripheries, whose work constitutes a
set of alternative trajectories that seldom, if ever, Works Cited
coincided completelyw ith thed irectives emanating
from Moscow. The cultural production of the re Larsen, Neil. "Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonial
formist as well as revolutionary national intelligent ism." A Companion toP ostcolonial Studies. Ed. Henry
sias of central Asia and the Caucasus during the Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray. Blackwell Companions to
Lit. and Culture. Maiden: Blackwell, 2000. 23-52.
late tsarist and early Soviet periods is immensely
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Greiochrg, iarna nginmgo derfnriosmts the taoe stthhee tinca tiovnaanl gardciosmmm uniosmf the Suleitmateenloiav., AOlmlzah-aAst. a: Az Zhia Izau. sKhnyi,g a 1b9l7a5g.o namerennogo chi
of the Tatar Sultan Galiev, whose critique of Lenin von Hagen, Mark. "Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas:
ist internationalism casts a more contradictory light Eurasia as Anti-paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era." Amer
on Comintern debates on the nationality question. ican Historical Review 109.2 (2004): 40 pars. 10 July
This varied body ofw orkm ight allow us spatially to 2006 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/
reconfigure the convergence between politics and ahr/109.2/hagen.html>.
aesthetics thatN eil Larsen has suggestivelyf ound
in Lenin's critique of imperialism and the synchro On Some Post-Soviet Postcolonialisms
nous emergence of the artistic avant-garde as a new
"internationale of form." Finally, let us not forget The title "Are We Postcolonial?" begs several re
that the most imaginative critique of Russocentric lated questions. First, who is "we"? The residents
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834 Forum:C onferenceD ebates PMLA
of the formerS oviet Union and its formers atellites a distinction between colonial discourse analy
in Eastern Europe and elsewhere? The intellectual sis and the focus on postcolonialism needs to be
communities in those countries? The diasporas borne in mind. If the former has a venerable his
with roots in those countries? The foreign-based tory in the study of the Russian and Soviet em
(especiallyW estern-based) scholars of the region s pires (Walter Kolarz's 1952 studyR ussia and Her
cultures?A s a citizen of a former" white" colony of Colonies is an example from theW est), the latter
the Russian and Soviet empires and as an academic is a recent and contradictory phenomenon. The
now based in theU nited States, Iw ould argue that remainder of my remarks will focus on the stra
yes, definitely, I am postcolonial; however, my re tegic appropriation of some elements of the dis
marks here will not focus on autoethnography. course on postcolonialism by Russian academics.
The questions outlined above are tangled up Throughout the 1990s, postcolonialism was per
with another, related set of questions. How does haps the only major contemporary theoretical dis
one assert postcoloniality? Is it sufficienmt erely to course persistently ignored by Russian academics.
claim it,a s I just did? Should a legitimation of this As recently as 1998, for instance, a Russian survey
claim proceed by way of argumentation, or does it of the Western discourse on postmodernism la
require a sanction from some external disciplin beled Edward Said a "well-known literarys cholar
ary authority? (In a similar vein, when some fif of a leftist-anarchist orientation" and Gayatri
teen years ago many Slavic and Eastern European Chakravorty Spivak a "socially engage feminist
intellectuals asserted the need to consider their deconstructionist" (Il'in 107-08, 125).1A s itb e
countries' cultural conditions as part of postmod gins to register on the intellectual radar of some
ernism as a global phenomenon, many Western Russian scholars, postcolonialism is finding a
cultural theorists voiced their reservations, and somewhat unexpected application?in support of
at times even strong opposition, to the assertion.) a view that Russia, starting with Peter the Great's
Simultaneously, other questions arise: What kinds reforms, developed as a self-colonizing state.
of uses or appropriations of the discourse on post The roots of this argument have been traced
colonialism can be documented in the cultures of to the writings of the nineteenth-century philoso
this region and in scholarship focusing on them? pher Petr Chaadaev, but its rediscovery in contem
Is a representative of an imperial culture postco porary cultural discourse has been credited to a
lonial too? Is postcolonialism indeed a category 1990 essay by Boris Groys. The reformso f Peter I,
with global applicability, as David Chioni Moore asserts Groys,
argued in PMLA in 2001? Is postcolonialism an
appropriate designation for empirical sociopoliti constitute a sui generis act of self-colonization
cal reality?the broad spectrum of cultural pro by the Russian people: one of its parts, as it
duction?or only for academic discourse? Why were, pretended to be foreigners, in their most
is it that when representatives of academic com frightening and threatening incarnation, and
munities studying non-Russian cultures in the started consistently and radically persecuting
region asserted the need to look at the ex-Soviet everything Russian and imposing everything
world through a postcolonial lens as early as 1992 that by the standards of that time was con
(one of the earliest such attemptsw as made by the sidered modernized and Western-[A]s a
Ukrainian Australian scholarM arko Pavlyshyn), result of this cruel inoculation, Russia saved
theyw ere ignored or ridiculed by the overwhelm itself from real colonization by aW est that
ingm ajority ofR ussian intellectuals andW estern surpassed it technically and militarily. (358)
trained specialists on Russian culture? Why, a
dozen years later,d id many of the same intellec Aleksandr Etkind has attempted to integrate
tuals and specialists, in Russia and the West, sud Groys's thesisw ith the postcolonial paradigm. In
denly have a change of heart? the Russian historiographical tradition, he argues,
One possible explanation for this change lies Russian colonization is viewed as being of a settler
in their strategic move to stake out disciplinary type, "an expansion of the Russian people" as it
authority. In terms of disciplinary designations, created "its own territory," while Western coloni
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i2i.3 Forum: Conference Debates 835
zation is seen as a product of geographic discover Tlostanova's interest in transnational writing
ies and military conquests. "The notions," Etkind in English prompts her to seek similar manifesta
writes, "are used in a way that makes Russian col tions in post-Soviet Russia. She limits her results
onization come across as a good deed and Euro by solely examining conventional, plot-driven
pean as bad. In the case of Europe, colonization is narrative fiction: the only "positive heroes" that
defined in a manner that presupposes decoloniza emerge in her book are Andrei Volos, an ethni
tion,w hile in that of Russia the definitionm akes cally Russian writer who grew up in Tajikistan
decolonization logically impossible" (64-65). and is best known for his novel Khurramahad,
A critical tone barely registers in Etkind's which allegorically portrays the collapse of the
analysis of this model; even the conquest of the (imagined) multilingual and multicultural Utopia
Caucasus was "not quite colonial" for Etkind, of the Soviet project and its descent into ethnic
since "after the incorporation of Georgia it hatred and the ruthless violence of civil war, and
[the northern Caucasus] found itself inside the Afanasii Mamedov, a writer of Azeri Jewish back
empire's territory" (63). In other words, once a ground whose work focuses on the similar col
noncontiguous colony is appended to the Rus lapse of them ultilingual and multiethnic city of
sian empire, the imperative is to naturalize it by his childhood and youth, Baku. Both writers are
conquering the territoryi n between and restoring nostalgic for the purported multiculturalism of
contiguity. In effectE, tkind perpetuates aspects of these colonial Soviet sites, and Tlostanova appears
Russian colonialist ideology, providing evidence to find solidarityw ith them.H er approval of these
of how farR ussian culture still is from "find[ing] texts contrasts with her scorn for the only non
a positive, enlightened solution" to the enduring Russian-language post-Soviet texts she considers:
legacy of colonization, a solution Etkind calls for twoU krainian novels, Yuri Andrukhovych's The
at the end of his essay. Moskoviad and Oksana Zabuzhko's Field Work
Perhaps the most thought-provoking instance in Ukrainian Sex (270-81; 173-82). Published
to date of Russian engagement with postcolonial months before Ukraine's Orange Revolution,
theory can be found in Madina Tlostanova's Tlostanova's book is a paradoxical combination
2004 book Postsovetskaia literatura i estetika of a call to rethink the Russian imperial legacy,
transkul'turatsii ("Post-Soviet Literature and the a symptomatic representation of persisting impe
Aesthetics of Transculturation"). Her book, more rialist prejudices, and a cautionary instance of a
conversant with theorizations of postcolonialism strategic discursive appropriation gone awry.
and globalization than any previous work in the Although thew orks discussed above consti
Russian academy, carries a strong autobiographi tutea somewhat dispiriting instance of theoretical
cal investment and highlights the author's intel travel from theW est into Russia, the fact that Rus
lectual position as a representative of russophone sian scholars are beginning to engagew ith thed is
non-ethnically-Russian intelligentsia. course on postcolonialism can only be welcomed.
This volume's primary trouble lies in its ex One hopes that the recent cultural and geopoliti
cessive privileging of the position of a postcolonial cal realignments within the former Soviet empire
hybrid intellectualw ho is speaking to, and in the sometimes referred to as the "colored revolutions"
context of, the academic institutions of the former will eventually prompt a more radical rethinking,
metropole and in its disdain toward all national and working through, of Russia's imperial legacy,
ist discourses of resistance. Tlostanova's strategi not only by scholars outside Russia but, crucially,
cally difficults elf-positioninga s someonem ultiply by those participating in the country's internal in
colonized and "othered"?someone who rejects the tellectual debate as well.
humiliating positions of a "native informant" and VitalyC hernetsky
of "a political activistw ho uses his otherness in his Harvard University
favor"?is productive when Tlostanova critiques
the mainstream Russian intellectual discourse but
Note
is problematic in its rejection of thep ossibility of a
meaningful politics of resistance. 1.A ll translations are mine.
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836 Forum: Conference Debates PMLA
Works Cited
Etkind, Aleksandr. "Fuko i tezis vnutrennei kolonizatsii: Moore, David Chioni. "Is the Post- in Postcolonial the
Postkolonial'nyi vzgliad na sovetskoe proshloe." No Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial
voe literaturnoe ohozrenie 49 (2001): 50-73. Critique." PMLA 116 (2001): 111-28.
Groys, Boris. "Imena goroda." Utopiia i obmen. Moscow: Pavlyshyn, Marko. "Post-colonial Features in Contem
Znak, 1993. 357-65. porary Ukrainian Culture." Australian Slavonic and
Il'in, Il'ia. Postmodernizm ot istokov do kontsa stoletiia. East European Studies 6.2 (1992): 41-55.
Moscow: Intrada, 1998. Tlostanova, Madina. Postsovetskaia literatura i estetika
Kolarz, Walter. Russia and Her Colonies. New York: Prae transkul'turatsii: Zhit' nikogda, pisat' niotkuda. Mos
ger, 1952. cow: Editorial URSS, 2004.
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