Deadline: September 1, 2025
Special Issue on Russian Postcolonial Studies
Guest Editor: Tamar Koplatadze, Christ Church, University of Oxford, tamar.koplatadze@chch.ox.ac.uk
Russia and the countries that were incorporated into the Soviet Union have not historically received extensive critical attention within the postcolonial discourse. In the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, scholarly interest has grown in re-assessing established methodologies and engaging with postcolonial theory when studying these countries. Postcolonial approaches can be key to analyzing the link between imperialism and situations of core-periphery disparity, both past and ongoing, whether expressed in the man-made famines in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the overproduction of cotton in Central Asia, the nuclear testing in Semipalatinsk, the extraction of natural resources in Siberia, or post-Soviet migration patterns. Moreover, local writers, creative artists and activists addressing these questions are increasingly situating their works within the global postcolonial tradition.
This special issue aims to provide an interdisciplinary inquiry of the current decolonial turn, build on existing scholarship and bring to the fore new postcolonial interventions, while also countering the pitfalls of the “decolonial bandwagon” (Moosavi) such as tokenism and uncritical use of decolonial terminology. We welcome contributions that critically engage with postcolonial and decolonial theory, attempt to bridge Western and local epistemologies, compare different geographical contexts of (post)coloniality, or untangle various types of decoloniality – including political, epistemological, cultural and aesthetic, while addressing, among others, the following themes:
- Critical theory
- Literature, Culture and Language
- Comparative studies of (post)coloniality
- History
- Race
- Gender
- Environment
- Migration
- Activism
Submission Instructions
Manuscripts following the journal guidelines and formatted in MLA style should be submitted by September 1, 2025 at https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps/submit