Postcolonial Slavic Literatures after Communism

The conference discusses post-communist Slavic literatures from a postcolonial perspective, with an emphasis on Russia, Ukraine and Poland. The main areas of focus are: the study of parallels between the post-communist and postcolonial situation as negotiated on the symbolic level of literature, the applicability of postcolonial scientific tools to post-communist literature and the specific postcolonial dimensions of different branches of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish con-temporary literature.

The appropriation of postcolonial models is becoming more complex and productive due to the fact that Russia and Poland have been perceived both as colonisers (of marginal regions such as the former Polish borderlands kresy, the Baltic countries, Ukraine or the Caucasus region) and as colonised (Russia in relation to the West, or Poland in relation to Russia, the Soviet Union or Germany). At the conference, special attention is paid to phenomena of alterity, hybrid identity and language patterns, stereotyping, Orientalisation and mimicry as performed by literature. The presentations seek to gain insight into the literary poetics of (post-)coloniality, with topics such as the fictional constitution of identities, the fictionalisation of the subject of speech, linguistic hybridisation, stylistic mimicry, con-structions of space and time etc.