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Speakers): Vitaly Chernetsky (U. of Kansas)

Most scholars, both in the West and in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, trace serious attempts to engage the discourse on postcolonialism for discussion of postcommunist cultures only to the beginning of the 2000s. However, scholarship on contemporary Ukraine predates this trend by nearly a decade: Marko Pavlyshyn initiated this engagement with an article he published in 1992, just months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this talk, I trace the history of the scholarly discourse on Ukrainian culture and society as postcolonial, outline its defining parameters and their evolution, and contrast its development with some notable scholarly engagements with postcolonialism in the region that have emerged in recent years, in particular the varieties of this discourse that developed in and around Poland, the Baltic states, and Russia. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the Euromaidan and its aftermath for approaching Ukraine using a postcolonial optics.
 
Vitaly Chernetsky, a native of Odessa, Ukraine, completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he is an Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. His previous teaching experience includes Columbia University and Miami University in Ohio. His research interests include Russian, Ukrainian, East and Central European literatures and cultures; postcolonial theory and postcolonial writing; nationalism and ethnicity; literary and cultural theory; and feminist theory and gender studies. He is also president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies; author of the monograph Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill— Queen’s University Press, 2007), and co-winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies 2006-2007 Prize for Best Book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature, and culture, the . He also published two book-length translations of Yuri Andrukhovych's novels and edited several collections of articles on masculinity, film, and postmodernism. The topics of his scholarly articles range from film and translation studies, sots-art, and contemporary Ukrainian literature to literary theory and criticism.