Russia and Ukraine. Literature and Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times

Conversation around Professor Shkandriy's book Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times.

Drawing on colonial discourse and postcolonial theory to reinterpret key writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Myroslav Shkandrij shows how the need to legitimize expansion gave rise to ideas of Russian political and cultural hegemony and influenced Russian attitudes towards Ukraine. These notions were then challenged and subverted in a counterdiscourse that shaped Ukrainian literature.

Concepts of civilizational superiority and redemptive assimilation, widely held among nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, helped to form stereotypes of Ukraine and Ukrainians in travel writings, textbooks, and historical fiction – stereotypes that have been reactivated in ensuing decades. Both Russian and Ukrainian writers have explored the politics of identity in the post-Soviet period, but while the canon of Russian imperial thought is well known, the tradition of resistance – which in the Ukrainian case can be traced as far back as the meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian polities and cultures in the seventeenth century – is much less familiar. Shkandrij demonstrates that Ukrainian

literature has been marginalized in the interests of converting readers to imperial and assimilatory designs by emphasizing narratives of reunion and brotherhood and denying alterity.

The public interview will be hosted by professor Olena Haleta