Event Date: January 20-21, 2023
We are pleased to announce the international conference “Provincializing Russian” that will be held at Justus Liebig University Giessen (Germany) on January 20-21, 2023.
Organizers: Tamara Hundorova (Kyiv/Giessen), Dirk Uffelmann (Giessen)
In his seminal monograph “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference” (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty invited to decolonize the historical narrative produced by the West because, as he stated, all national histories were traditionally considered variations of the main narrative of the history of Europe.
The Kenyan scholar Simon Gikandi reformulated Chakrabarty’s decolonial thesis of the provincialization of Europe, bringing up the task of “provincializing English” (2014). He questions his belonging to such a postcolonial intellectual community, calls himself a “child of empire,” and speaks of the necessity of “constantly rethink[ing]” his ambivalent relation with the English language, “a language that is both mine and someone else’s, one that I am simultaneously inside and outside.” Is “creative writing, seen as the most immediate form of self-assertion, possible in the language of the colonizers?”–he asks.
Envisaging the ardent intellectual project of “provincializing Russian,” we would like to raise the question as to how cultural and linguistic decolonization can be applied to contemporary Ukraine: how is it possible to express anticolonial thoughts in Russian, the language of a colonizer and the aggressor? What can “canceling Russian” actually mean in the time of Russo-Ukrainian war? Can an occasional or a total language shift from Russian to Ukrainian constitute a solution to the former Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism? Must mixed varieties such as Surzhyk be viewed as detrimental infection, or can they rather serve as a means of “provincializing Russian”? Which could be the linguistic and literary strategies of a decolonization of Russophonia–the hybridization, creolization or minorization of a no-longer Russia-centered Russian language? These and other aspects of postcolonial interpretations of present-day Ukrainian literature and culture are the topics we would like to discuss at the conference.
The conference features paper presentations by Vitaly Chernetsky, Oleksandr Chertenko, Miriam Finkelstein, Tamara Hundorova, Yulia Ilchuk, Mykhailo Nazarenko, Liudmyla Pidkuimukha, Marco Puleri, Ulrich Schmid, Maria Shvedova, Iryna Tarku, Dirk Uffelmann, and poetry readings by Iia Kiva, Liudmila Khersonskaia, and Boris Khersonskii.
Conference program: https://www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties/f05/slavistics/department/professors/slavic-literature/prof-dr-dirk-uffelmann/pr-program.pdf
— Prof. Dirk Uffelmann Justus Liebig University Giessen www.uni-giessen.de/slavic/uffelmann Head of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures www.uni-giessen.de/fbz/fb05/slavistik