People are discussing whether Russia colonised Ukraine. My advice: read Ukrainian authors, all will become clear! Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, Khvyl'ovyi, Dziuba, Andrukhovych, Zabuzhko, & many more have been writing about this forever. 🧵 1/8
(image: Kazakh boy, T. Shevchenko)
(image: Kazakh boy, T. Shevchenko)
Taras Shevchenko's poetry is a model of anti-colonial cultural resistance, & not only about Ukraine, see his brilliant 'Caucasus', for example. Vera Rich's translation: bit.ly/3qV4TOH See also Rory Finnin's analysis @CamUkrainistyka: jstor.org/stable/4214123 2/8
Lesya Ukrainka used multiple historical parallels to speak covertly about Ukraine's anti-colonial struggle. A good place to start is @sasha_weirdsley's essay for @LAReviewofBooks lareviewofbooks.org/article/subver… 3/8
Mykola Khvyl'ovyi combined socialism &avant-garde aesthetics with a belief in national revival, European orientation and anti-colonial sensibility. See Myroslav Shkandrij's volume of his work @myroshk: bit.ly/356x3h1 4/8
The dissident Ivan Dziuba's 'Internationalism or Russification' (1966) is another important text - anticolonial thinking was crucial for the 1960s generation. Marko Pavlyshyn, pioneer of postcolonial studies on Ukraine, writes about this here bit.ly/3rHtXaV 5/8
Yuri Andrukhovych's novel The Moscoviad is a troubling and hilarious postmodern postcolonial take on the collapse of the USSR. Translated by @globalrhizome, who also discusses it and much more in his brilliant book Mapping Postcommunist Cultures (2007) 6/8 spuytenduyvil.net/moscoviad.html
Oksana Zabuzhko has written on Ukraine's postcolonial condition in poetry, prose and essays. See her landmark novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex in Halyna Hryn's brilliant translation: amazon.co.uk/Fieldwork-Ukra…. I also wrote an article about this here: jstor.org/stable/25698706 7/8
Postcolonial approaches are probably better developed in the Ukrainian context than in that of any other east European country. Some scholars to read on this: Vitaly Chernetsky, Marko Pavlyshyn, Tamara Hundorova, Vira Aheieva, Myroslav Shkandrij, but there are many more. 8/8
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