Transit Culture and Postcolonical Trauma

Tamara Hundorova is Principal Researcher at Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine and Associate of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. She is the author of several books, including the acclaimed The Post-Chornobyl Library. The Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (2019). She taught at Princeton and Harvard University and had fellowships in the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan and Germany. Currently, she is a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany).

"As anyone who has studied Ukrainian history will know, Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of 2022 did not come out of nowhere. It is the latest phase in a centuries-old imperialist campaign to eradicate Ukraine as a political subject and a cultural entity. That campaign has left deep scars on Ukrainian culture, yet it has also created a culture of resistance and resilience, of ingenuity and irreverence. To help us understand how Ukraine not only survived but also thrived culturally after it won its independence, there is no better guide than Tamara Hundorova, one of Ukraine’s most influential cultural critics. From colonial traumas to imagined geographies, from raucous hybridity to biopolitics, Hundorova leads us down the myriad roads that Ukrainian culture has taken through the challenges of recent decades to emerge bruised but unbowed. The book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand Ukraine, a country on whose reserves of cultural strength the future global order, to a large degree, depends." — Uilleam Blacker, Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Co-host of the podcast The Ukraine Shelf.

• PrefacePOSTCOLONIAL TRANSITMaidan: Revolution and PerformanceMaidan as an Intellectual ChallengeSociocultural Codes of the MaidanCarnival and RevolutionPerformance as SocializationMaidan as a Cornucopia of Possibilities“Internal Colonization” and Re-colonization“Internal” and “External” Colonization“Internal Orientalism”The Symbolic Place of the Author: Who Is Writing?POSTCOLONIAL RESSENTIMENTRessentiment: Resentment and Colonial Resistance Eastern European (Res)sentiment: Biography and GeographyThe Ideal GeographyEurope as the “East-Central Part of the Body”Galicia: a Collection of “Alternative History”The Ideal AutobiographyLooking from the Center and the Periphery