2014 01/16 Serguei Oushakine

SubalterNation: On Postcolonial Histories of Socialism

Serguei Oushakine

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Anthropology, Princeton University

The talk follows closely public debates associated with three historical locations in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. One is the Khatyn' memorial built near Minsk in the 1960s to commemorate the victims of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). Another one is the killing site Kuropaty. Discovered in 1988, Kuropaty hides bodies of people executed in 1937-1941. The final site is an amusement park, Stalin's Line, built near the capital in 2005. Intense public discussions about the history and significance of these locations have had a considerable impact on the process of national identification in Belarus. By analyzing these debates, I suggest that this practice of historical iterability allows us to perceive postsocialism not only as an operation of dismantling the key configurations that have been produced by seven decades of Soviet way of life, but also as a form of an intense postcolonial investment in these structures, conventions, and forms; an investment that makes the very critique of these historical forms and their originary narratives possible.

By linking postsocialism and postcolonialism, I want to draw attention to issues and dynamics of a process that has been somewhat overshadowed by discourses of the nation-building in newly independent countries. The debates associated with the three historical sites will help to reveal a trend that appears to be common for many post-Soviet countries, namely, an uneasy process of a retroactive creation of the colonial subjectivity. Placeholders of sorts, these three locations demonstrate that reclaiming a place is often indistinguishable from being beholden by this place.

About the speaker: Serguei Oushakine has conducted fieldwork in the Siberian part of Russia, as well as in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. His first book The Patriotism of Despair: Loss, Nation, and War in Russia focused on communities of loss and exchanges of sacrifices in provincial post-communist Russia. His current project explores Eurasian postcoloniality as a means of affective reformatting of the past and as a form of retroactive victimhood. Oushakine’s Russian-language publications include edited volumes on trauma, family, gender and masculinity. Prof. Oushakine is Director of the Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Princeton. For more on Prof. Oushakine see http://www.princeton.edu/anthropology/faculty/Serguei_Oushakine/.