“Scottish Question” and Its New Cultural Meanings in “Culture Capitalism” by Alasdair Gray

An interpretation of the story “Culture Capitalism”, placed in the authoritative anthology “Every Short Story: from 1951 to 2012” of the classic of Scottish literature Alasdair Gray, in the context of the original interpretation by the patriotic writer of the “Scottish question «is offered in the article. It is noted that the problems of the story, written in 1990, are closely related to the establishment in the same year of the status of Glasgow as a cultural capital. Gray’s doubt about the declared cultural messages is analyzed through the prism of the concepts of P. Bourdieu and S. Žižek. It is proved that certain plots and images indicate the development in Gray’s work of ideas close to researchers of postcolonial literature, and in particular the idea of “internal colonization" of Scotland. An interpretation of a number of images that have an allegorical meaning in the light of criticism of English cultural, political and economic hegemony is offered in the article. In addition, based on the ideas of J. Homberg-Schramm about the nature of the nation’s ideas about its gender, class and linguistic identity, the author considers the representation of national auto-stereotypes and their consistent revision. The author concludes that Alasdair Gray sees the possible peaceful coexistence of England and Scotland beyond the boundaries of the model of exploitative colonialism.

“Subalterns” of Colonization in the Scholarly, Journalistic and Literary Heritage of Nikolai Yadrintsev

Modern postcolonial studies have developed the definition of internal colonization as a system of regular practices of colonial government and knowledge within the political boundaries of the state. On this scale, relations are formed between the state and its subjects, in which the state treats its subjects as subdued in the course of the conquest, and its own territory as conquered, mysterious, and requiring settlement and “inculturation” from the center. At the same time, the main elements of imperial domination, implemented through coercion, are cultural expansion, hegemony of power, ethnic assimilation within the state borders. The Russian culture of the 19th century formed the plot of internal colonization. It was built around the conflict between the “Man of Power and Culture” and the “Man from the People”. The latter is positioned in the article as a “colonial subaltern” – a disadvantaged, marginalized individual (group) with limited subjectivity. The concept of the subaltern, which is based on A. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony as a variant of voluntary acceptance of relations of domination, suggests that the dominance of the “Man of Power and Culture” is based on the consent of the governed rather than on the methods of violence and genocide. The assertion of the fact that Russia is created through self-colonization and self-sacrifice, and Russian identity is both that of the sovereign and of the subaltern, requires adequate argumentation through rereading and interpreting the plots of internal colonization. In the center of internal colonization are the well-known events of Siberian history: exile and katorga, resettlement, non-Russian question, social life of the borderland, etc. The literary heritage of Nikolai Yadrintsev (articles, poems, feuilletons) provides an opportunity not only to reconstruct the images of “colonial subalternity”, to reconstruct significant episodes of the collective biography of subalterns or to rank them as the indigenous population, old-timers of the region, resettlers from European Russia, but also to hear the voices of the “subalterns” themselves. The postcolonial perspective of the study of the literary works of Yadrintsev, a representative of the liberal segment of the Russian sociopolitical discourse, opens up prospects for identifying the practices and forms of resistance of the voiceless subalterns, the mechanisms of their oppression by both the colonialists and the traditional patriarchal power. When formulating the key findings of the study, the author takes into account that “subalterns”, as a category of the internal colonization process, are initially in double exclusion: their “invisibility” and “inaudibility” is replaced by the right of competing political actors to represent the interests of the subaltern. This invariably creates the danger of perceiving subalterns as coherent political subjects.

Thinking Technocratically

Although Polish politics moved to the right after the death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935, demographic anxieties about Volhynia had already been expressed by academics who supported the Sanacja’s technocratic program in the province. Focusing most particularly on geographical Polesie (which covered the northern part of the province of Volhynia), some scholars fostered the concept of national uncertainty in order to support more aggressive measures of Polonization. By dispensing with the regionalists’ patience for the provincial framework and in line with broader political radicalization across Europe, Polish officials increasingly used scholarly conclusions to advocate for redrawing internal borders and launching internal colonization. By the late 1930s, the army and border guards carried out forced religious conversions (“revindications”) of Orthodox Christian, Ukrainian-speaking populations to Roman Catholicism, based on the idea that these people were descended from Polish Catholics. Their concurrent support for policies of Jewish emigration was based on the opposite assumption—that Jews could never be considered Polish.

Russia: Colonial, anticolonial, postcolonial Empire?

This article is devoted to the discussion of Russian colonial and anti-colonial social imaginaries. It starts by delving into the definitions of colony and colonization, and proceeds to the analysis of the colonial experience of the Russian continental Empire. The internal colonization thesis is also analyzed in the context of the imperial reality. The complex Soviet experience is understood as, on the one hand, a radical break with the past, through decolonization and anti-colonialism. The author, on the other hand, agrees with those who claim that Stalinism can also be understood in terms of an internal colonialism theory. This article, however, emphasizes the metaphoric nature of the internal colonialism arguments. In conclusion, the author describes different features of Russian colonial/anti-colonial experience as aspects of what he calls the modernity of control and what he describes as the dominance of the rational mastery discourses over imaginary signification of autonomy.

The Meanings of Mobility in Bolivia’s March to the East

The introduction introduces the diverse migrants that settled in lowland Bolivia after the country’s 1952 National Revolution. These include low-German speaking Mennonite farmers from Mexico and Paraguay, Okinawan and Japanese settlers, and Indigenous Andeans from the nation’s own highlands. In contrast to earlier scholarship the introduction places the “March to the East,” a program of internal colonization and infrastructure development as a major, long-lasting, and relatively unexplored legacy of Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution with parallels in other South American nations.

Круглый стол «Возможна ли «колонизация» пространства?»

The era of mobility erases territorial identity, but this does not diminish the relevance of its study, even if only as a historical phenomenon. For “regions of late development”, such as the Far East, identity is associated with the concepts of colonization / development, and, moreover, inherent in the name of the region. Our team has already addressed the problem of correlating the concepts of “colonization” and “development”; this time we decided to focus on the approach of Alexander Etkind, who published another book in the outgoing year. The purpose of our meeting was to discuss the system of Alexander Etkind’s views on the essence of coloniality, to analyze one of the central concepts used by Etkind in many studies, “internal colonization”, and to assess the limits of this concept’s applicability. Main issues for discussion: 1) in “The Nature of Evil: Raw Materials and the State” Etkind writes about natural resources as raw materials for production; are the author's categories suitable for analyzing space as a resource for development, space as such, without taking into account the raw materials available there? Can the Far East, for example, be interpreted as a “presence colony”? 2) the logic of the concept of internal colonization is based on the idea of exoticization of the outskirts by the center, commoners by the ruling class, society by the state; in this case, is it possible to interpret the toponyms “Russian Far East” and “Pacific Russia” used today as two images of the territory – traditional colonial (exoticizing and dividing) and modern non-colonial (normalizing and integrating)?

Take Back Our Future

This book unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The chapters ask, how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? The book argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The chapters outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, the book demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.