The Postcolonial and the Imperial in Literature

The representation of postcolonial ideas and ideologies in literary texts is an extremely broad topic, which is why this section focuses on one specific angle. Usually postcolonial discourse is understand as an opposition to dominant imperial discourse, a revolt against it and attempts to overcome it. These articles, meanwhile, show that the real interactions between the postcolonial and the imperial can be much more complicated and intertwined. All three of them demonstrate that the traditional terminological oppositions "imperial vs. anticolonial," "colonization vs. decolonization," "nationalism vs. internationalism," "nationalist vs. imperial identity" et al. fail to fully describe the problem by not taking into account the myriad nuances and complex interconnections of tendencies that are postulated as opposed to one another. In "Russian, Soviet and Other in Post Stalin National Discourse: Initial Remarks," Gasan Gusejnov examines an example of an early anti-globalist "nativist" [pochvennicheskii] reaction to the internationalization of culture, or early multiculturalism. Using the book My Dagestan, translated into Russian by Vladimir Soloukhin, as well as the latter's own writing, he analyzes the formation of Soviet postcolonial discourse. In her "Transitional Culture and Post-Colonial Ressentiment", Tamara Hundorova suggests a post-colonial interpretation of ressentiment as one of the "weapons of culture" and a key concept in phenomenology after Nietzsche. Examining ressentiment as a distinguishing feature of transitional culture, Hundorova notes the topicality of this concept in the analysis of colonial protests, revolutions, wars and uprisings. She emphasizes certain features of ressentiment including the existential envy of the Other's existence, the corporeal splintering of the subject, the suppression of the object of envy and its replacement by figurative substitutes.Regarding the post-colonial critique, Hundorova analyzes Andrzej Stasiuk's European ressentiment in the form of an "ideal cartography" and Yuri Andrukhovych's topos of "envying history." Natalia Poltavtseva offers "A Dynamic Model of (Post-)Colonial Studies: The Sociocultural Paradigm of Conflict as a Form of Social Interaction," an attempt to use twentieth-century prose (G.K. Chesterton, Vladimir Makanin) to reconstruct, within the postcolonial studies paradigm, different variations of the model of conflict as a form of social and cultural interaction. Poltavtseva traces the dynamics of such a conflict (in depictions of war in Makanin and Chesterton's work) in a cultural anthropological cross-section within the broader cultural style of modernity.