Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-lrblm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-27T18:02:29.876Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Chioni Moore
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The enormous twenty-seven-nation post-Soviet sphere—including the former Soviet republics and the former “East Bloc” states—is virtually never discussed in the burgeoning discourse of postcolonial studies. Yet Russia and the successor Soviet Union exercised colonial control over the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics, and Central and Eastern Europe for anywhere from fifty to two hundred years. The present essay interrogates the possible postcoloniality of the post-Soviet sphere, including Russia. The investigation is complicated by Russia's seeming Eurasian status and its history of perceived cultural inferiority to the West. A broad range of theoretical, historical, cultural, and geographic positions are examined, and figures such as Curzon, Conrad, Lermontov, and Shohat are addressed. In conclusion the essay argues against the current occidentocentric privileging of Western European colonization as the standard and proposes a fully global postcolonial critique. Overall, it critiques both too narrow post-Soviet studies and too parochial, too Anglo-Franco-focused postcolonial studies.

Type
Talks from the Convention
Information
PMLA , Volume 116 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies , January 2001 , pp. 111 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.” 1975. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1988. 1–20.Google Scholar
Achebe, Chinua. Telephone interview. 8 Nov. 1997.Google Scholar
Acocella, Joan. “The Soloist.” New Yorker 19 Jan. 1998: 44–56.Google Scholar
Adas, Michael. “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective.” International History Review 20 (1998): 371–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.‘” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aitmatov, Chingiz. The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. 1980. Trans. John French. Fwd. Katerina Clark. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 336–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. London: Routledge, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen., eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Austin, Paul M. “The Exotic Prisoner in Russian Romanticism.” Russian Literature 16-18 (1984): 217–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakic-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54 (1995): 917–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blakely, Allison. Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought. Washington: Howard UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Brower, Daniel R., and Lazzerini, Edward J., eds. Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers. “Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account.” Citizenship and National Identity: From Colonialism to Globalism. Ed. Oommen, T. K. New Delhi: Sage, 1997. 85–119.Google Scholar
Brydon, Diana. “The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy.” Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-colonialism and Post-modernism. Ed. Adam, Ian and Tiffin, Helen. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1990. 191–203.Google Scholar
Buell, Lawrence. “American Literary Emergence as a Post-colonial Phenomenon.” American Literary History 4 (1992): 411–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunche, Ralph J. “Marxism and the ‘Negro Question.‘” 1929. Selected Speeches and Writings. Ed. and introd. Henry, Charles P. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.Google Scholar
Burnley, David. The History of the English Language: A Source Book. London: Longman, 1992.Google Scholar
Butler-Johnstone, H[enry] A[lexander]. Bulgarian Horrors, and the Question of the East. London: Ridgway, 1876.Google Scholar
Chekhov, Anton. The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin. 1895. Trans. Luba Terpak and Michael Terpak. New York: Washington Square, 1967.Google Scholar
Chua, Wai Fong. “Postcoloniality, Accounting and Accounting Research.” Working paper, School of Accounting, U of New South Wales. 1995.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. London: Penguin, 1995.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. Under Western Eyes. 1911. London: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Curzon, George N. Russia in Central Asia in 1889, and the Anglo-Russian Question. London: Longmans, Green, 1889.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel. The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr. London (Black-Fryars): H. Hills. 1708.Google Scholar
Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 328–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. Introd. Sartre, Jean-Paul. New York: Grove, 1968.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Bishnupriya. “The Postcolonial Bazaar: Thoughts on Teaching the Market in Postcolonial Objects.” Postmodern Culture 9.1 (1998). 18 Dec. 2000 <>.Google Scholar
Gladstone, W[illiam] E[wart]. Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. London: John Murray, 1876.Google Scholar
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature.” Comparative Literature: The Early Years—An Anthology of Essays. Ed. Schulz, Hans-Joachim and Rhein, Phillip H. U of North Carolina Studies in Compar. Lit. 55. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1973. 1–11, 227-28.Google Scholar
Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.Google Scholar
Huggan, Graham. “Postcolonialism and Its Discontents.” Transition 62 (1993): 130–35.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia. Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Soc. of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1934.Google Scholar
Hulme, Peter. “Including America.” Ariel 26.1 (1995): 117–23.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda. “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’: Post-colonialism and Postmodernism.” Ariel 20.4 (1989): 149–75.Google Scholar
Juraga, Dubravka. “Literature, History, and Postcolonial Cultural Identity in Africa and the Balkans: The Search for a Usable Past in Farah, Ngugi, Krleza, and Andric.” Diss. U of Arkansas, 1996.Google Scholar
Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. L'aventure ambiguë. Paris: Julliard, 1961.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Robert D. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. New York: St. Martin's, 1993.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Robert D. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. New York: Knopf, 1997.Google Scholar
Kapuściński, Ryszard. Cesarz. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1978.Google Scholar
Kapuściński, Ryszard. El Emperador: La historia del extrañísimo señor de Ethiopia. Historia inmediata. Trans. María Dembowska. México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980.Google Scholar
Kapuściński, Ryszard. The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat. Trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.Google Scholar
Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.Google Scholar
Kiberd, Decían. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Kiberd, Decían. “White Skins, Black Masks? Celtism and Négritude.” Éire-Ireland 31.1-2 (1997): 163–75.Google Scholar
King, C. Richard, ed. Postcolonial America. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. Ed. and introd. Edward Said. London: Penguin, 1987.Google Scholar
Krupat, Arnold. “Postcolonialism, Ideology, and Native American Literature.” The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996. 30–55.Google Scholar
Layton, Susan. Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Lazarus, Neil. “Great Expectations and After: The Politics of Postcolonialism in African Fiction.” Social Text 13-14 (1986): 49–63.Google Scholar
Lazzerini, Edward J. “Defining the Orient: A Nineteenth-Century Russo-Tatar Polemic over Identity and Cultural Representation.” Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Ed. Kappler, Andreas et al. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 33–45.Google Scholar
Lee, Grace C., Chalieu, Pierre, and Johnson, J. R. [James, C. L. R.]. Facing Reality. Detroit: Correspondence, 1958.Google Scholar
Lermontov, Mikhail Y. A Hero of Our Time. 1840. Trans. Paul Foote. London: Penguin, 1966.Google Scholar
Lewis, Martin, and Wigen, Karen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, Shawn Thomas. “Uzbek Historical Fiction and Russian Colonialism, 1918-1936.” Diss. U of Wisconsin, Madison, 1999.Google Scholar
McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism.‘” Social Text 10.2-3 (31-32) (1992): 84–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGhee, Fred Lee. “Toward a Postcolonial Nautical Archaeology.” MA thesis. U of Texas, Austin, 1997.Google Scholar
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. 1957. Trans. Howard Greenfield. New York: Orion, 1965.Google Scholar
Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur. Paris: Buchet, 1957.Google Scholar
Mesbahi, Mohiaddin, éd. Russia and the Third World in the Post-Soviet Era. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1994.Google Scholar
Moore, David Chioni. “Local Color, Global ‘Color’: Langston Hughes, the Black Atlantic, and Soviet Central Asia, 1932.” Research in African Literatures 27.4 (1996): 49–70.Google Scholar
Motyl, Alexander J., ed. Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Najder, Zdzislaw. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986.Google Scholar
Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ wa. Devil on the Cross. 1980. Trans. Ngũgĩ. Oxford: Heinemann, 1982.Google Scholar
Ning, Wang. “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Decolonization’ of Chinese Culture.” Ariel 28.4 (1997): 33–47.Google Scholar
Ning, Wang, and Xie, Shaobo, eds. “China and Postcolonialism: A Special Section.” Introd. Ning and Xie. Ariel 28.4 (1997): 7–72.Google Scholar
Padmore, George, in collaboration with Dorothy Pizer. How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire: A Challenge to the Imperialist Powers. London: Dobson, 1946.Google Scholar
Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford Literary Review 9.1-2 (1987): 27–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pavlyshyn, Marko. “Post-colonial Features in Contemporary Ukranian Culture.” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 6.2 (1992): 41–55.Google Scholar
Pavlyshyn, Marko. “Ukrainian Literature and the Erotics of Postcolonialism: Some Modest Propositions.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 17 (1993): 110–26.Google Scholar
Petkovic, Nikola. “The ‘Post’ in Postcolonial and Postmodern: The Case of Central Europe.” Diss. U of Texas, Austin, 1996.Google Scholar
Prakash, Gyan. “Who's Afraid of Postcoloniality?” Social Text 14.4 (1996): 187–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prakash, Gyan. “Writing Post-orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (1990): 383–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rampersad, Arnold. “The Universal and the Particular in Afro-American Poetry.” CLA Journal 25.1 (1981): 1–17.Google Scholar
Ray, Sangeeta, and Schwarz, Henry. “Postcolonial Discourse: The Raw and the Cooked.” Ariel 26.1 (1995): 147–66.Google Scholar
Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” 1882. Nation and Narration. Ed. Bhabha, Homi K. Trans. Thom, Martin. New York: Routledge, 1990. 8–22.Google Scholar
Report of the Afro-Asian Convention on Tibet and against Colonialism in Asia and Africa. New Delhi: Afro-Asian Council, 1960.Google Scholar
Riasonovsky, Nicholas V. “The Emergence of Eurasianism.” California Slavic Studies 4 (1967): 39–72.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.Google Scholar
Schöpflin, George, and Wood, Nancy, eds. In Search of Central Europe. Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 1989.Google Scholar
Scotto, Peter. “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Ideologies of Imperialism in Lermontov's ‘Bela.‘” PMLA 107 (1992): 246–60.Google Scholar
Sembène, Ousmane. Les bouts de bois de Dieu. Paris: Le Livre Contemporain, 1960.Google Scholar
Shannon, R. T. Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876. 2nd ed. Hassocks: Harvester; Hamden: Archon. 1975.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Jenny. “Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism. Immigration, and Race.” Diaspora 4.2 (1995): 181–99.Google Scholar
Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ”Post-Colonial.“' Social Text 10.2-3 (31-32) (1992): 99–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singh, Amrijit, and Schmidt, Peter, eds. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2000.Google Scholar
Slemon, Stephen. “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World.” World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 30–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slezkine, Yuri. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Slezkine, Yuri. “The USSR as a Communal Apartment; or, How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic Review 53 (1994): 414–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stratton, Jon. “The Beast of the Apocalypse: The Postcolonial Experience of the United States.” New Formations (1993): 35–63.Google Scholar
Sugirtharajah, R. S., ed. The Postcolonial Bible. The Bible and Postcolonialism. Sheffield: Sheffield Acad., 1998.Google Scholar
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Tottossy, Beatrice. “Hungarian Postmodernity and Postcoloniality: The Epistemology of a Literature.” Trans. Aristide Melchiouna. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue canadienne de littérature comparée 22 (1995): 881–91.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Ed. Fox, Richard G. Santa Fe: School of Amer. Research P, 1991. 17–44.Google Scholar
Trubetzkoy, N. S. “Europe and Mankind.” 1920. Trans. Brostrom, Kenneth. Trubetzkoy, “Legacy” 1–64.Google Scholar
Trubetzkoy, N. S. “The Legacy of Genghis Khan,” and Other Essays on Russia's Identity. Ed. Liberman, Anatoly. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic, 1991.Google Scholar
Trubetzkoy, N. S. “The Legacy of Genghis Khan: A Perspective on Russian History Not from the West but from the East.” 1925. Trans. Brostrom, Kenneth. Trubetzkoy, “Legacy” 161–231.Google Scholar
Trubetzkoy, N. S. “Pan-Eurasian Nationalism.” 1927. Trans. Brostrom, Kenneth. Trubetzkoy, “Legacy” 233–44.Google Scholar
Von Eschen, Penny M. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Waters, John Paul, ed. Ireland and Irish Cultural Studies. Introd. Waters. Spec, issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 95.1 (1996): 1–278.Google Scholar
Watts, Edward. Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998.Google Scholar
Williams, Patrick, and Chrisman, Laura, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Wolff, Larry. “Voltaire's Public and the Idea of Eastern Europe: Toward a Literary Sociology of a Continental Division.” Slavic Review 54 (1995): 932–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xie, Ming. “The Postmodern as the Postcolonial: Recognizing Chinese Modernity.” Ariel 28.4 (1997): 11–32.Google Scholar
Xie, Shaobo. “Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism.” New Literary History 28 (1997): 6–19.Google Scholar
Yekelchyk, Serhy. “The Location of Nation: Postcolonial Perspectives on Ukrainian Historical Debates.” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 11.1-2 (1997): 161–84.Google Scholar
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. “Scythians.” 1918. A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Ed. and trans. Ginsburg, Mirra. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970. 21–33.Google Scholar
Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar