Postcolonial Empire: Ab Imperio. 2011. #1.

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Ab Imperio. 2011. #1.

Review prepared by Aliaksei Lastouski, sociologist, Candidate of Sociological Sciences, and researcher at the Political Sphere Institute.

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The journal Ab Imperio, published in Kazan, Russia, is a kind of flagship of the new imperial history for a vast territory whose borders and content are difficult to define precisely (is it post-imperial or post-Soviet?), although one can still speak, if skeptically, of some sense of shared fate among the inhabitants of these lands.

The journal is published in Kazan, and this distance from the “center” of speech results both in an unusually low concentration of great-power pathos and in a deeper interest in the “borderlands.” Moreover, “new imperial history” is understood here not as yet another return to the glorification of imperiality, but as a principled interest in the diversity and layered character of imperial space. This prism absorbs many phenomena that are usually easily discarded when history is read from Russo-centric positions, where all history acquires logical meaning in the unification of a “single Russian people,” divided solely by hostile intrigues, and where all local branches and particularities therefore appear insignificant. At the same time, reading history exclusively in the context of national historiographies also often makes historical material simple and linear, through the consistent ignoring of events that cannot be explained by the heroics of national movements.

Since its foundation, Ab Imperio has promoted a different approach, aimed at restoring the multidimensional and multilayered character of the past. This also became the main theme of the first issue of 2011: “The Diversity of Otherness: Studying the Second World and New Historical Paradigms.”

For those who have not yet encountered new imperial history, two articles by the British historian Stephen Howe, with which the issue opens, provide a very good introduction to the state of affairs in this research field. The first article, through a thorough overview of the most debated points, examines the state and problems of new imperial history on classic material (above all the British Empire); the second discusses the changes this approach undergoes when transferred to the terrain of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

The main feature of the issue, however, is its critical adaptation of postcolonial theory, in which both rejection and borrowing of this quite contradictory intellectual phenomenon are mixed. If we recall Belarus, many hopes were placed on the postcolonial perspective in the second half of the 1990s, reflected above all in the legacy of such journals as Fragmenty and Perekrestki, as well as in texts by authors such as Ihar Babkou and Uladzimir Abushenka. It is therefore difficult to call the application of postcolonial theory to Eastern Europe original, but it also cannot be said that it had been fully worked out at that time.

A Russian response to Edward Said’s foundational work Orientalism is offered by Alexander Etkind, who turns to similar sources — famous works by British writers (Defoe, Kipling, Conrad) — and analyzes how they reflect the image not of overseas colonies, but of Russia. These descriptions do not reveal the same intellectual strategy of domination that Said so elegantly deconstructed; rather, they substantiate the impossibility of carefree use of the existing toolkit when addressing the “Second World.” For those interested in Alexander Etkind’s approach, the conversation with this scholar will also be useful, as it mainly discusses his concept of internal colonization, which is intended to explain the particularity of the modernization process in the Russian Empire.

The Polish researcher Jan Kieniewicz is also skeptical about applying postcolonial theory to the East European region. In his article on the situation of Polish intellectuals in an imperial context and their search for forms of resistance (including through the strategy of “silence,” which has recently become close to Belarusians), he relies on an alternative approach based not on the idea of colonial policy, but on civilizational pressure from Russia.

The Russian historian Anatoly Remnev is much more sympathetic to this theory in his article “Coloniality, Postcoloniality, and ‘Historical Politics’ in Contemporary Kazakhstan.” Although the title itself may somewhat mislead the reader, since much space is devoted to clarifying the actual place of the Kazakh lands in the Empire through a description of hybrid practices that also do not fit very well into the familiar formula of subordination to colonizers.

For the Belarusian reader, the central text of the issue will undoubtedly be Sergei Ushakin’s article, which examines the process of estrangement of the socialist past in Belarus through an analysis of two well-known “sites of memory” (Khatyn and Kurapaty). Again, the postcolonial approach is chosen as the theoretical and methodological basis, but the difference between the “classical” South Asian case and the Belarusian situation is identified as a different intellectual tradition: for local intellectuals, the basis for resistance was not the work of Gramsci or Foucault, but merely romantic nationalism. The article itself leaves a very strange impression, since the understanding of the Second World War as a period of occupation, in my opinion, derives rather from the rehabilitation of the everyday experience of Belarusians who actually lived through that war, and the attribution of “strategic immoralism” to such an understanding looks entirely strained. Likewise, the discussion of Kurapaty in Ushakin’s version is interpreted as the deprivation of “subjectivity” in relation to Soviet time, the recognition and consolidation of one’s subordination. At the same time, the official strategy for working through the Soviet past is left aside, although it simply includes and subordinates the Soviet experience to the tasks of state-building (and in that case estrangement proceeds along radically different trajectories). It is also very difficult to agree with the author’s general skepticism toward the search for other forms of subjectivity beyond the recent past.

This article is followed by a forum discussing the latest book by the same Sergei Ushakin on patriotism of despair and communities of loss, based on anthropological research in Barnaul. Finally, the main section of Ab Imperio #1/2011 ends with Zaur Gasimov’s article on literary images of Baku.

The journal also contains a fairly substantial review section, of which the most interesting for our readers may again be Alexander Pershai’s response to Oleh Latyshonak’s book Nationality: Belarusian. Here too, however, it is difficult to agree with the main line of criticism, which focuses mainly on the incompatibility of the author’s concept of an “ideational nation” (with an emphasis on symbolic continuity) with the postulates of the social-constructivist approach, which places greater emphasis on discursive ruptures and acts of inventing traditions. But the radical modernist version is only one theory of nationalism, even if it is currently the most popular and influential one; therefore Latyshonak’s search for the roots of Belarus deeper than the nineteenth century is fully justified from another perspective.

Overall, Ab Imperio is oriented toward developing dialogue and the exchange of ideas among scholars of the First, Second, and Third Worlds, and it demonstrates a rather attractive model of producing scholarly knowledge, one that may also be useful for Belarusian historians, whose publications in the journal can so far be found only sporadically.