‘The Tranquil Lakes of the Transmontane Commune’: Literature and/against Post-coloniality in Ukraine after 1991

In the proposed paper I make one definitional and one substantive point. The term “postcolonial” needs to be demarcated against “colonial” and “neo-colonial,” on the one hand, and against “anti-colonial,” on the other. The postcolonial is that which embodies, or at least points toward, a supersession of the oppositions and traumas inherited from the period of colonial domination. The postcolonial is not to be conflated with the anticolonial, which, while endeavouring to demolish colonial structures of dominion, erects alternative ones.
In Ukrainian literature soon on the eve of, and soon after, the implosion of the USSR there could be observed, both in the works of older-generation writers like Valerii Shevchuk and those of such neo-avantgardist newcomers as the Bu-ba-bu grouping, tendencies toward postcoloniality as defined above. The relative weight of these has since diminished (though they continue to be in evidence) in favour of texts and circumliterary phenomena better classified as anticolonial. Marko Pavlyshyn is the author of the books Ol’ha Kobylians’ka: Prochytannia and Kanon ta ikonistas, numerous chapters and articles on modern and contemporary Ukrainian literature, and translations into English of novels by Yuri Andrukhovych and Yuri Izdryk. He is Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Monash University and Director of the Monash European and EU Centre, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Moderation: Dr. Klavdia Smola