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ABSTRACT
The article discusses the Baltic colonial experience in historical and comparative perspective. It sketches the ways in which Baltic societies are best linked to theoretical discussions on postcolonial issues, and whether they might be looked upon in a more global context. The main question posed by the article is in what ways Baltic identity has been determined by processes of foreign settlement, occupation and colonization of the territory of each respective country and whether we can see Baltic societies as potential agencies of Europe’s internal others.
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Notes
1. The concept of the colonial matrix of power has been elaborated by Walter Mignolo, for example, in Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Citation2000) and The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Citation2011).
2. In this article, colonialism is understood in the traditional sense as the extension of nation’s power over territory beyond its borders either by settler colonies or administrative control. By coloniality, I understand the impact of conceptual and ideological matrix or power which arises from the totality of such sociohistorical configurations whereas decoloniality is interpreted as an opposition to all kinds of political and mental restrictions imposed by the complexity of colonial strategies.
3. The problem of omission is discussed in detail in an article by Epp Annus, “The Problem of Soviet Colonialism in the Baltics.” (Annus Citation2012, 23–25)
4. Among the possible explanations we find both the more global reach of the postcolonial thought in the twenty-first century as well as the impact of economic crisis, which allows for better understanding of the interrelatedness of economic and political processes also on the level of everyday experience.
5. Interestingly enough, another volume in the same series has been devoted to literary cultures of Latin America (Valdés and Kadir Citation2004) – an area subjected to intense postcolonial re-readings in recent years.
6. Karl Jirgens points toward a similar fusion of postmodern and postcolonial discourses in the Baltic context (Jirgens Citation2006).
7. Areas where substantial research has already been carried out are especially former Soviet Asian territories and the Ukraine. Of special importance are the works of Madina Tlostanova and Vitaly Chernetsky, among others. The research on the former Soviet-bloc countries, dealt with later in the article, belongs to a similar category.
8. These dialects are called different englishes by Bill Ashcroft et al. as opposed to the dominating power of the English language (Ashcroft, Grifftihs, and Tiffin Citation2002, 38).
9. Edward Said also argues that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said Citation1978, 3).
10. Parallels between slavery and serfdom as a form of enforced labor become obvious, for example, in the pattern of economic and social development as both forms of exploitation were gradually abandoned during the nineteenth century.
11. One good example here is the work of Gotthard Friedrich Stender (1714–1796), who worked as a pastor in Courland and became the creator of Latvian secular poetry and early scientific literature.
12. On the other hand, the counterbalance for the presumable processes of self-Europeanization as self-colonization, which at times (then and later) has been raised as an issue (Hennoste Citation2006), was provided by a vital dialog with the Russian cultural sphere important for many early twentieth-century modernist writers in the Baltic area.
13. Among those authors were Juhan Smuul in Estonia, Ojārs Vācietis and Vizma Belševica in Latvia. Latvian literary historian Raimonds Briedis writes that “[t]he task of socialist realism was of ideological nature – the authors had to legitimize the new reality with the potentially limited means at their disposal” (Briedis Citation2008, 38).
14. We might want to see a continuation of the Soviet colonial practices here. As Carlos Fuentes has put it, “[c]apitalism has flourished on relentless self-criticism. Soviet socialism fossilized because it suppressed such criticism” (Fuentes Citation1991, 27).
15. A good example of such reservations is provided by the insightful investigation of the Romanian scholar Bogdan Stefanescu, Postcommunism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity. (Stefanescu Citation2013) On the other hand, there are also examples of excellent scholarly cooperation, such as the volume co-authored by Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo, Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (Tlostanova and Mignolo Citation2012), which pays attention to the decolonial moves in Latin America and former Soviet Asian republics. An issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing in 2012, edited by Cristina Şandru and Dorota Kołodziejczyk, was devoted to post-socialist cultures. Two recent scholarly meetings on East-Central European postcolonialism, organized by Dorota Kołodziejczyk at the University of Wroclaw in 2013, and by Dobrota Pucherova and Robert Gafrik at the Institute of World Literature in Bratislava in 2014, respectively, also deserve to be mentioned. However, these are still rather isolated instances looking for the possibilities to develop a more fruitful cooperation on wider international scale.
16. See, for example, the contribution by Gerhard Simon (Citation2009), included in the series of investigations on the history of Eastern Europe published by the Institute of Eastern European Studies at the Free University in Berlin.
17. Characteristically, Foucault was not addressing colonial aspects, which, in these contexts, have been further elaborated by other scholars, among them the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler (Citation1995).
18. The confrontation of contemporary East–Central Europe with the West is the focus of, among other scholarly efforts, investigation by Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization. Perhaps the most challenging argument of this line of thought is to be found in the internal critique addressed toward East–Central Europeans themselves, especially as “reflected in the attempts of various Eastern European peoples to market themselves as civilized, developed, tolerant, or multicultural enough to be geo-graphed as European” (Kovačević Citation2008, 3).
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Benedikts Kalnačs
Benedikts Kalnačs is the Deputy Director of the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art at the University of Latvia, Riga, and Professor at the University of Liepāja. He is co-editor of 300 Baltic Writers: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Vilnius, 2009), Back to Baltic Memory: Lost and Found in Literature 1940–1968 (Riga, 2008), We Have Something in Common: The Baltic Memory (Tallinn, 2007), Ibsen in Poland and the Baltic Nations (Oslo, 2006), and editor and author of several books in Latvian, most recent among them Postkoloniālā Baltijas drāma (Riga, 2011).