Worlds Apart?
A Postcolonial Reading of post-1945
East-Central European Culture
Worlds Apart?
A Postcolonial Reading of post-1945
East-Central European Culture
By
Cristina Şandru
Worlds Apart?
A Postcolonial Reading of post-1945 East-Central European Culture,
by Cristina Şandru
This book first published 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2012 by Cristina Şandru
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-3999-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3999-0
To my parents, who have always believed in me
To my niece and godchild, Natalia, that she
may grow to understand the past and love
books
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Part I: A Controversial Paradigm: Postcolonialism in East-Central
Europe
Chapter One............................................................................................... 14
Cultures of Empire
1.1 Relocating the Postcolonial: Towards a post-Cold War Cultural
Critique
1.2 Imperial Formations and Post-imperial Identities: Nationalism,
Balkanism and Eastern Europe
1.3 Post-Cold War Legacies: Nostalgia, Memory and Neo-colonial
Cultures
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 54
East-Central Europe as Colonised Space: The Empire of Communist
Ideology
2.1. On Ideology, Utopia and its Terroristic Fictions
2.2. The Two-sided Intellectual Wall
2.3. Cooptation, Censorship and Cultural Resistance
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 96
Dissidence, Complicity and Resistance: The Poetics and Politics
of Literary Production in Post-totalitarian East-Central Europe
3.1. Resistance and Overcoding: When Language Means without
Signifying
3.2. Documentary Realism and the Intellectual Novel:
Memorialising Terror
3.3. Postmodernist Intersections and Narrative Experiment
3.4. The Literature of the Parable and the Dystopian Imagination
3.5. In the Footsteps of Bakhtinian Carnival: Post- totalitarian
Fiction and Magical Realism
viii
Table of Contents
Part II: Narratives of Remembering and Forgetting:
Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie
Chapter Four............................................................................................ 170
Translators between Cultures: Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie
4.1. Exilic Sensibility and the Migrant Imagination: Intellectual
Allegiances and Aesthetic Choices
4.2. Sites of Memory, Frontiers, and Worlds In-between:
The Politics of Cultural Translation
4.3. Demystifying “Truths”: In the World of Play, Magic and Carnival
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 208
The Trouble with History: Re-visions and Re-writings
5.1. Inside the Idyll: The Bitter Joke of History
5.2. Pickling the Past, Telling Stories: The Allegories of History
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 240
The “Imagological Age”: A Physiognomy of the Contemporary
6.1. Europe in Disarray: Kitsch and the Commodification of Culture
6.2. Cultures of Excess, or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn
to Love the Present
Conclusions ............................................................................................. 281
Bibliography............................................................................................ 287
Index........................................................................................................ 303
INTRODUCTION
The beginning of any sustained exercise of writing is, as any writer –
whether academic or creative – knows, a rather awkward moment: the
blank screen stretches dauntingly ahead, and one cannot help but wonder
whether the ideas, and the conceptual impulse behind them, will coalesce
successfully into a coherent, persuasive and elegantly-shaped whole. So I
shall start somewhat predictably by sharing a few reflections on the
genealogy, context and intellectual ambitions of this study. As an EastCentral European scholar with a personal investment in my researchsubject, I am acutely aware of writing from within that uncomfortable
space of the “native informant” in the West – or, in postcolonial parlance,
as a “comprador intellectual”, with all the ambivalences that result from
such problematic self-identification. The impulse that has gradually
shaped the contours and substance of this book (in its initial form as a
doctoral project successfully completed a few years ago) was a desire to
translate the ideological and cultural specificity of communist life
experiences into the theoretical and critical languages with most currency
in today’s humanistic studies. The most self-evident paradigm within
which one could articulate this impulse was, it seemed to me, that of
postcoloniality; the long-gestating project has in the meantime acquired
numerous extra-layers and has changed direction a number of times as a
result of developments in postcolonial scholarship, as well as the complex
cultural and intellectual transformations that East-Central European
countries have been undergoing after their release from the grip of
communist autocratic rule in 1989.
A decade after the annus mirabilis of 1989, Salman Rushdie was
summing up the sombre spirit of the times in this somewhat dispiriting
pronouncement:
The collapse of communism, the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the
wall, was supposed to usher in a new era of liberty. Instead, the post-Cold
war world, suddenly formless and full of possibility, scared many of us
stiff. We retreated behind smaller iron curtains, built smaller stockades,
imprisoned ourselves in narrower, even more fanatical definitions of
ourselves – religious, regional, ethnic – and readied ourselves for war.
(Rushdie 2003, 301)
2
Introduction
Indeed, few critical intellectuals would have anticipated in the early
nineties the direction of the momentous changes brought about by the end
of the Cold War. After an initial period of joyous triumphalism at the
prospect of a finally united, happily globalised planet, a variety of hardly
anticipated tensions emerged, as statal units collapsed under vicious ethnic
conflict and economic deprivation set in. The situation replicated in a
paradoxical way the post-independence moment in much of the Third
World half a century earlier, which saw the desired achievement of
decolonisation drown in tribalism, excessive nationalism and political
dictatorship. On a different level, the post-Cold War era – as the
decolonisation decades that preceded it – has recast the players on the
contemporary scene, “with the local and the regional now standing in for
the national or ‘colonised’, and the global rearticulating the imperial”
(Moraru 2005, 89). The end result of the ensuing economic insecurity,
coupled with political ignorance and a variety of popular resentments, is
that sectarian violence and mutated xenophobia have made a triumphant –
if unexpected – comeback.
This has led to the resurgence of the same old/new set of stereotypical
images, projected by a media thirsty for scandal and the extraordinary, and
entailing a reduction and simplification of complex situations into what
Samuel Huntington has dubbed a “clash of civilisations” (1996). His
formulation of inherent civilisational rifts has uncovered a form of
“metaracism” which no longer works on visible assumptions of superiority,
but locks individuals and groups a priori into their cultural genealogy and
insists on maintaining frontiers and a healthy distance from the Other,
typologically “incompatible” cultures1. This forma mentis is the obverse
side of the “ethics of competition” set by the Western world to its
decolonised peripheries and the newly liberated Eastern neighbours across
1
The following excerpt from Etienne Balibar, the Frech social theorist who has
originally coined the term ‘metaracism’, is illuminating: “The new racism is a
racism of the era of ‘decolonization’, of the reversal of population movements
between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity
within a single political space. Ideologically, current racism … fits into a
framework of ‘racism without races’ which is already widely developed in other
countries, particularly the Anglo-Saxon ones. It is a racism whose dominant theme
is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism
which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples
in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the
incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short, it is what P. A. Taguieff has
rightly called a differentialist racism” (E. A. Balibar 1991, 21).
Worlds Apart?
3
the Berlin Wall, in which the strict monitoring of economic parameters has
only served to re-confirm old structures of civilisational difference.
This presumed “post-ideological” universe of pragmatic
administration, consensus and dialogue goes hand in hand with an
“aestheticised hedonism” (Žižek 1997, 37) working under the guise of a
“plurality of ways of life” which conceals a foreclosed political passion
that makes its triumphant comeback under the guise of xenophobia and
terrorism. In his study After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial
Melancholia? (2004), Paul Gilroy uses the concepts of melancholia and
conviviality to explore Britain’s failure to come to terms with the loss of
its empire and pre-eminent global position, and its inability to value the
unruly and non-standard multi-culturalism that has evolved organically
(but off-centre) in its major cities. Instead, “multiculturalism” has been
reduced to a multitude of “ethnic cuisines” and the traditionally-clad
colourful populace that one can see in the London public transportation
system (Žižek 1997, 37). It has become, in Balibar’s terms, an “othernesswithin-the-limits-of-citizenship” (E. Balibar 2002, 159), signifying that
which is tameable, assimilable, regimentable. The “Other” is only
tolerated in its aseptic, benign form – when its irreducible alterity emerges
out of the ghettoised quarters of big cities, the shock of its unexpected
hatred shatters the thin layer of peaceful coexistence. The “real Other” reemerges as the violent, fundamentalist, deceitful beast that it had always
been, its essential alien-ness from “our values” vindicated by the
unpardonable atrocities it perpetrates.
As a result, the crises of cultural authority, national identity and
democratic conscience persist in spite of – or maybe also because of – the
much bandied about multicultural vocation of Western liberal-democratic
society. While the social body implodes into group particularity and
exclusivist fragmentariness, each element of a fractured subjectivity –
race, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual affiliation – claims totality
and primacy over the others. Such “universals” that the postmodern
moment has so cleverly dismantled have returned to haunt us with a
vengeance, reinstating religious, national and ethnic structures of feeling
as powerful categories of human action. For in the economic, political and
intellectual spaces between the West and the “rest”, relationships continue
to be uneven, polarized, and, above all, remembered differently – hence a
certain “rhetoric of blame” (Said 1994, 19) and the resurrection of various
enemy figures, chief among which the illegal immigrant and, recently, the
4
Introduction
“terrorist”2. Imperium might have become a “shared memory”, but it has
preserved a “highly conflictual texture of culture, ideology, and policy”
(Said 1994, 11).
These somewhat unexpected developments have sent ripples through
the newly-settled and increasingly canonical mode of postcolonial cultural
analysis, forcing the discipline to respond to the challenges that
globalisation poses, and to modulate its engagement with contemporary
neo-imperial practices by supplementing a certain set of preoccupations
centred around the narrative of decolonisation with others (environmentalism,
the war on terror, new geographies etc.). By and large, it succeeded in
adapting its modes of critique to the new, post-Cold War dispositions of
power and influence, and their resultant inequities; indeed, so successful
has it been that the postcolonial has moved in recent years from being a
historical marker to a globally inflected term applicable to a variety of
regions, as the recent collection of essays I co-edited with Janet Wilson
and Sarah Lawson Welsh (Rerouting the Postcolonial, Routledge, 2009)
suggests. Yet in one crucial respect the postcolonial paradigm has fallen
short of its critical potential and ethical ambition, namely in its interaction
– or lack thereof – with the communist “Second World” and its postcommunist aftermath.
Clearly the most significant event marking the end of the 20th century
was the fall of the Soviet Union and its outlying satellite system; the
break-up of communist modes of government has been posing a variety of
challenges – ideological as well as economic – ever since. In particular, as
far as our discipline is concerned, it has stressed the need to reformulate
neo-Marxist models of postcolonial critique to account for a postcommunist set of realities and the resurgence of neo-liberalism in the
former Second World. Yet concrete efforts in this sense have, so far, been
few and far-between; and, with notable exceptions, relatively little account
has been taken of the communist historical experiment in theorisations of
2
In his interview with Homi Bhabha in Relocating Postcolonialism, John Comaroff
traces a number of metaphorical connections between the two: the immigrant as
“the living metonym of the global age … [the] cipher of new signs and practices,
of novel imaginings, of possibility, of danger and pollution, illness and contagion”,
trespasser of boundaries, inhabiting an interstitial space of ambiguity and
contradiction, becomes a figure of symbolic transgression that is uncannily
paralleled by the image of the ‘international terrorist’, an equally shadowy figure,
invisible and anonymous, who slips easily across borders, impersonating the
‘civilised citizen’: “like the immigrant, the international terrorist erases boundaries
and opens up new ruptures in which the uncontrollable, the unmentionable, might
take place” (Goldberg 2002, 26; 28).
Worlds Apart?
5
the postcolonial. It is in this particular scholarly context that I would like
to situate my comparative project, starting from the premise that the
postcolonial paradigm is open and flexible enough to be able (and willing)
to address its own blind spots and ideological biases, of which the
reluctance to engage with (post)communist experiences is surely one of
the most significant. While fully aware of the difficulties in bringing
together perspectives that are differentially charged across historical and
ideological contexts, my view is that, if we are to revitalize postcolonial
studies, we need to search for a dialogic space that is beyond the
discipline, but adjacent to its interests and sensitivities. Such a space, I
contend, is East-Central Europe, whose cultural identity has been crucially
shaped by its history of subjection to foreign rule. Postcolonial
perspectives and methodologies can be used productively in order to shed
light on instances of ideological colonisation and resistance common to the
cultures of the region. Such a comparative approach could help amend a
state of undertheorisation of postcommunism, and simultaneously enhance
the scope of postcolonial theory to an area where it can meet, and thus
conceptualise, its borders.
Clearly, there are several levels of difficulty in such a comparative
enterprise. With its mix of ethnicities, religions, and imperial legacies,
East-Central Europe poses similar problems to those faced by postcolonial
critics seeking a synthetic cross-cultural approach to the question of
empire and its aftermath. The pressure of nationalist impulses has often
precluded a collective examination of the region’s historical experiences
and their reflection and imprint on the cultures thereof; as M. Corniș-Pope
and John Neubauer remark in their introduction to the monumental 4volume History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (20042010), there are many local and national literary histories, but very few
comparative and/or collective enterprises. In political science or sociology
this has sometimes been tried, with theorists looking at the outcomes of
the transition period in postcommunist East-Central Europe, for instance,
in parallel with similar cases of nation and state (re-)building in the
postcolonial world, particularly Latin America. Yet in terms of culture,
each national entity tends to compare itself primarily, often exclusively,
with the Western model it seeks to emulate, much more rarely with
neighbouring cultures, to say nothing of non-European ones.
The yet more salient difficulty concerns the multiple levels of
disjuncture that one must consider when attempting a comparative analysis
of the two major “posts” of the 20th century: differential inflections in
terms of historical and geographical coordinates; divergent types of
imperial occupation; asynchronous advents of modernity; different practices
6
Introduction
of othering; and, finally, post-Cold War ideological emphases. It is
therefore important to discuss briefly some of the ways in which the two
“posts”, both marking the nominal fall of empires, can be seen to
simultaneously converge and diverge. Clearly, a parallel can be traced
between the development of postcolonial, respectively postcommunist,
critical analysis within emerging sub-disciplines: postcolonialism, insofar
as it existed as a distinct field of inquiry at the time, was dominated at its
inception by monumental studies such as Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978), with its emphasis on colonial representations of the “Other”; it
then shifted gradually to a preoccupation with forms of active resistance
on the part of the colonised – even when this resistance was construed as
ambivalent or ambiguous in relation to its object. A similar process is now
occurring in postcommunist studies – there already exists a wealth of
research on the ideological and structural underpinnings of the communist
system, as well as on the various forms and embodiments this has taken in
East-Central Europe, much of it the preserve of political science; a lot less
has been produced on the cultures of accommodation and resistance during
communism (in both its totalitarian and “post-totalitarian” phases3), which
is the main reason why I dedicate a substantial part of this book to amend
this state of relative neglect. Although the past decade has seen a rapid
acceleration of this particular trend, few studies have attempted to link the
two majors “posts” of the 20th century, and, indeed, one can more readily
see the obvious ways in which they differ rather than the subtler ways in
which they inform each other.
If one looks at an abridged version of the century that has recently
ended, one can discern an asymmetrical historical timeline between much
of the “Third World” (used as a purely functional term here, for reasons of
brevity and inclusiveness) and the East-Central and South-East European
regions: Europe’s Eastern regions have entered their first post-imperial
decades immediately after the end of the First World War, and have
experienced thereafter the birth-pangs of national projects of development,
as well as the excesses of nationalism and the lures of extreme ideologies;
during this time, the rest of the colonial world was still very much alive,
even though signs of its impending decay were already evident to
perspicacious analysts. Then, after the end of the Second World War,
when the colonial world started crumbling, East-Central Europe entered a
new imperial age, driven by ideology, but imposed by the military and
3
See Vaclav Havel’s definition of the ‘post-totalitarian’ phase of communism in
his essay “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) included in the volume Living in
Truth, 1986. For an online version of the essay, see
http://vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=eseje&val=2_aj_eseje.html&typ=HTML
Worlds Apart?
7
political might of the Soviet Union. In this respect, as many commentators
have argued, the true significance of the Cold War, beyond its political
repercussions, emerges from its role as a form of knowledge and
representation of the world which has neatly filled the gap left by the rapid
dissolution of Western empires after WWII: it laid down, in a different
fashion, but using old assumptions and binaries, the conceptual geography
grounded in the East / West opposition. Not only was East-Central Europe
part of this new epistemic paradigm, but the “Third” (non-aligned) World
too, itself a creation of the Cold War and subject to its action on both sides
of the ideological divide. The relevant question that any postcolonial
approach should ask, therefore, does not only concern the construction of
the “West” and its forms of globalised capitalism, but also how numerous
postcolonies were affected by socialist ideological pressures and promises.
Indeed, while the post-1945 rhetoric common to both the Third World
and East-Central Europe was one of liberation and independence, a more
or less overt neo-colonial process was taking place: the post-imperial
“liberation” assumed either a capitalist globalising flavour (in much,
though by no means all, of the Third World), while “liberation” in the East
of Europe, by and large undesired and deeply resented, took the form of
applied Marxist-Leninism. While a large chunk of the postcolonial
intelligentsia was advocating or, in some cases, seeking to implement, the
Marxist project (as a liberating alternative to neo-colonial capitalism),
East-Europeans were waiting (in vain) for “the Americans” with their
capitalism to free them from under the boot of the Big Socialist Brother…
. Hence the continuing misunderstanding and suspicion between the two
worlds, if I may be forgiven such a lack of theoretical subtlety, the
reluctance – on both sides – to engage in a meaningful dialogue, a wilful
opacity to the other’s particular baggage of historical experience, only
occasionally illuminated by (mostly timid and over-hedged) comparative
forays.
This, of course, is a very schematic representation, for the Marxist
experiment took hold of a sizable part of the liberated Third World as well,
before it crumbled under the weight of its own atrocities or
mismanagement; and the post-1968 decades in East-Central Europe lost
much of their revolutionary Marxist flavour and became bureaucratically
frozen in a state-capitalism of sorts, the contours of which are best
described by Vaclav Havel’s term of “post-totalitarianism”. After 1989,
the blanket domination of global capitalism has placed the two regions in
even closer proximity to each other, though arguably the East/West
rhetoric has given way to an earlier “North/South” divide. East-Central
Europe is now going through its own accelerated postcolonial period,
8
Introduction
which is many ways replicates more closely a whole range of postdecolonisation social, political and cultural phenomena than the antitotalitarian movements of the 1970s and 1980s.
In this asymmetrical historical timeline, one can nonetheless identify a
certain overlap of ideological/ cultural stages that post-imperial nations
have gone through. Thus, for instance, forms of nationalism or Marxism
have marked the history of both post-imperial East-Central European
cultures and postcolonial societies, and, as suggested in the brief synopsis
above, many aspects of the latter’s historical development are refracted in
the evolution of East-Central Europe today. For every disjuncture one can
respond with an equal number of potentially shared experiences – hence a
certain commonality, or, rather, certain shared dispositions in the way
cultural representations in postcolonial societies and East-Central Europe
have responded to their various imperial legacies. A dialogic space can
thus be created, which could accommodate problems common for both,
such as: structures of exclusion/ inclusion (the centre/ periphery model and
theorisations of the liminal and “in-between”); formations of nationalism,
structures of othering and representations of difference; forms and
historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience
of trauma (which involves issues of collective memory/amnesia and the rewriting of history); resistance as a complex of discourses ranging from
openly oppositional to carnivalesque and magical realist.
Insofar as East-Central Europe has been seen through a postcolonial
lens, the main approaches have been variations on the Orientalist model
(in key studies by Larry Wolff, Maria Todorova and Vesna Goldsworthy).
The main achievement of these studies lies in their recovery of the
“silenced voice of Europe” – that other Europe whose invisibility in both
Western and postcolonial theorisations of the continent’s historical
development was central to the formation of a certain occidentalist vision
of what it means to be “European”. At the same time, they highlight the
specific character that imperial domination has taken in the region, of
which the tendency towards “self-colonisation” in relation to the West is
central and goes a long way in explaining the current ideological climate
in East-Central Europe, in which the Western model of economic and
social development (in its most libertarian forms) reigns uncontested.
These have provided central findings for my own comparative enterprise,
and will be probed extensively in chapter one.
Yet this analytical framework, while of undisputed scholarly
significance, does not in itself explain the persistence of certain modes of
thinking in the West in relation to the “new members” of the European
Worlds Apart?
9
family4. The critical space occupied by dissident voices in communist
times has by and large been filled in the post-communist decades by
unrestrained capitalism, conspicuous consumption and an ever-widening
gap of wealth and opportunity between various categories of citizens. As
Katharine Verderey and Sharad Chari remark in their seminal article on
the conjunctures and disjunctures between postcolonialism and postsocialism, the process of “transition” in post-Cold War East-Central
Europe has brought with it a cocktail of accelerated marketisation,
commodification and integration in the global circuit of capital; this,
coupled with a large supply of cheap labour and the very postcolonial
phenomenon of economic migration to the affluent metropolis (from
brain-drain to the siphoning off of skilled labour), has turned the region
into the capitalist West’s proximate “Third World”. The dominant
response to these complex post-Cold War developments has been to
attribute all failings of democratic governance and capitalist enterprise to
the negative political, social and cultural legacies of the communist
regime. In more ways than one this is a valid argument, borne out, as we
shall see, by the traumatic disruptions in the fabric of both public and
private life that almost half a century of imposed ideological orthodoxy
has inevitably effected. Yet the conglomerate legacies of communist
political and economic governance cannot by themselves explain the
nefarious aspects of contemporary policy-making in the region. The
political and economic developments in the countries of East-Central
Europe also raise difficult questions about how one can conceptualise
post-colonial futures in the absence of a competing framework to
capitalism. While the traditions of critical Marxism can be used to throw
light on certain aspects of the rapacious form that unregulated capitalism
has taken in the more vulnerable parts of the world (and, increasingly,
within its core Western region), I do not believe that the failed socialist
experiment can offer any basis from which we can start thinking the
conditions of possibility for an alternative to the current dominance of
finance-based capitalism.
On the other hand, the “retrieval” impulse characteristic of postcolonial
modes of investigation can and should be extended to post-Cold War EastCentral Europe and its complex and turbulent communist past. Where my
project differs from similar undertakings, of which Natasha Kovacevic’s
study Narrating Postcommunism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s
Borderline Civilization (2008) is probably the most sustained and
4
By ‘European family’ I specifically mean the EU here; the East European nations
– either ex-Soviet or ex-Yugoslav republics – which have not yet joined this
political organisation pose an even more challenging problem.
10
Introduction
systematic, is in the insertion of the postcolonial problematic into a
comparative framework in which communist (post)totalitarianism is the
main analytic category, rather than the various forms of Western
hegemony over East-Central Europe, both predating and post-dating the
20th century communist experiment. That said, I am not interested in how
the postcolonial can provide a theoretical matrix for postcommunist
transitions; nor will I be “applying” ready-made postcolonial precepts and
methodologies to examine communist ideological imperialism in EastCentral Europe. The key question to pose here is not whether postcolonial
modes of analysis are applicable in the wider post-communist context (a
question that has had many positive replies in the past decade or so,
particularly from scholars working from within postcommunist studies in
East-Central Europe), but, rather, how they might be applied. Many
postcolonial approaches – particularly those formulated in neo-Marxist
terms, from an ideological position that cannot accommodate a coupling of
the “post”-phase of socialism with the “post” of capitalist colonisation –
are certain to view such comparative enterprises as, at best, of doubtful
scholarly effectiveness, or, at worst, as fallacious and illegitimate. Yet
while all disciplines must have a relatively circumscribed field of inquiry
and a clearly defined area of investigation, they also generate knowledges
that go beyond the preoccupations defining their initial emergence; they
create, in other words, “translational spaces”. The trope of translation used
in this particular sense (of one culture into another, of a cultural object
from one context into another etc.) thus opens up the possibility of
“(re)shaping and (re)conceptualizing the relationship between postcommunism and post-colonialism”, as Monica Popescu suggests in her
article “Translations: Lenin’s Statues, Post-communism, and Postapartheid”, with reference to post-Soviet and post-Apartheid cultures
(Popescu 2003, 408). It is on this translational premise that my study is
based, that the two different “posts”, both marking the wake of empires,
can successfully “translate” their methodologies, instruments and
hermeneutic practices within the space of differential cultural contexts.
Accordingly, the following chapters will look at the ideological
structures, cultural trends and literary practices in communist and postcommunist East-Central Europe in terms of their reflection of, and
response to, previous decades of imperial influence or occupation. My
contrastive approach in both theory and textual interpretation capitalises
on points of confluence such as: the constitutive “splitting” at the level of
both culture and subjectivity; the construction of colonialism/communism
as ambivalent processes, triggering differential moments of resistance,
accommodation and complicity; the phenomena of nationalism, exile and
Worlds Apart?
11
immigration; the role of an imaginatively shared past and memory in the
re-writing of history; the complex trajectories of complicity and resistance
in the post-1945 cultures of East-Central Europe; textual resistance as a
doubly-inscripted or overcoded discourse, with particular focus on literary
and filmic modes (from documentary realism to dystopian visions, from
postmodernist experiment to magical realism and black humour). At the
same time, it reveals moments of rupture, which pre-empt the conflation of
differentially constituted historical and cultural experiences, and the
valorisation of certain types of subjectivities or political agencies at the
expense of others.
Structurally, the book consists of two interrelated parts. Part one is a
critical discussion of the ideologies, cultural imaginaries and representational
practices articulated in a diverse range of representative postcolonial and
post-1945 East-Central European texts; these are shown to share, despite
dissimilar conditions of production, uncannily related narrative modes and
thematic emphases. Part two is a comparative literature case-study which
discusses two authors whose work is both highly representative of the
cultural formations I compare (Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie) and,
at the same time, highly controversial. While I do not construe their work
to stand, metonymically, for postcolonial, East-Central European or
(post)communist fiction in general, they are highly visible practitioners of
the genre, and do provide a measure of illustrativeness – many of the
thematic emphases and narrative devices that their novels embrace stem
from more general tendencies, as I show in my discussion of the literatures
of accommodation and resistance in post-totalitarian East-Central Europe
in the third chapter of this book. My main interest is in the “cultural
geography” of Kundera’s and Rushdie’s novels, particularly in the writers’
use of memory and story-telling to reconfigure history and personal
identity in conditions of literal and metaphorical dis-placement. While
their novels thrive on ironic subversion and ambiguity, they simultaneously
gesture towards a redemptive space of the imagination, transcending the
constraints of both locality and history.
One final caveat: I should add that I do not intend to examine and
discuss the phenomenon of “resistance” in all its diverse and complex
embodiments; nor will I be able to offer a comprehensive assessment of
the multiplicity of literary production in what is – culturally and
linguistically – a very variegated region. Objective limitations of working
with translations aside, I do not think it is possible, or even desirable, to
perform such a mammoth task. Rather, this book is an attempt to look at
some of the ways in which a selection of writers in East Central Europe
have used practices of subversion, resistance and experimentation in order
12
Introduction
to breach the monolithic political and cultural order in which they were
forced to create. I must avow, too, that my selection of writers and
writings reflects my own background, interests and cultural attachments;
other choices and comparisons could have been made, with equally fruitful
results. I should hope, however, that this will not prevent my readers from
engaging with the arguments I advance, and, in the process, think of
alternative examples based in their own backgrounds and historical
experiences. The interpretive model I have sought to build does not
exclude other readings and meanings – I would like to believe it
complements them.
PART I:
A CONTROVERSIAL PARADIGM:
POSTCOLONIALISM IN EAST-CENTRAL
EUROPE
CHAPTER ONE
CULTURES OF EMPIRE
In his study Culture and Imperialism (1994), Said argues for the
necessity of a contrapuntal approach in the examination of the overlapping
territories and intertwined histories of imperial domination, one whose aim
is to identify distinct moments of resistance excluded from standard
accounts of European rule. Such an approach would not involve solely an
examination of overseas colonial settlements, but also engage the
complexities of the “making of Europe”, its own internal colonies, its
history of internal conquest, annexation, disruption and devaluation of
certain cultures and languages. Internal expansion, after all, predates
overseas expansion by several centuries, and the coalescing of nationstates began as an enterprise of overland conquest, thereafter consolidated
by competition in overseas colonisation. This analytic approach, insisting
as it does on the faculty of boundary-crossing (both in geographical and
disciplinary terms) and reading cultures and histories together
synchronously and coevally, enables me to interrogate the multiple
versions of the “Orient”, not only outside, but also inside Europe,
particularly in the guise of its Eastern spaces. In other words, I intend to
use Said’s double-inflected notion of “travelling theory” in its revised
acceptation, rather than in its initial formulation as domesticated analytical
paradigm1.
1
In his 1982 essay “Travelling Theory” (included in the collection The World, the
Text and the Critic, 1984), Said questions the ability of theories that have
originally been developed in specific locations in response to a definite set of
historical and social circumstances to preserve their “insurgent” spirit and
sharpness when they “migrate” to different historical-ideological locations. With
the passage from one location to another, theory runs the threat of becoming
tamed, domesticated from an insurrectionary idea into just another analytical
paradigm that is useful mostly for professional mobility or for policing a new
orthodoxy. A dozen years later, Said revised this argument by proposing that ideas
and theories can also be reinvigorated and made to speak to whole new political
situations when they travel from one location to another. See “Traveling Theory
Reconsidered” (Said 2000, 456-452).
Cultures of Empire
15
Much has been written in the past decades about the various
postcolonial regions of the world, in great detail and specificity and across
an impressive range of disciplines (from historiography, anthropology,
colonial discourse analysis, and sociology to literary criticism and cultural
studies), while comparatively little has been written and published about
Europe’s Eastern regions, beside traditional books of history, political
science or travelogues. The kind of interdisciplinary, theoretically
informed, and ethically-engaged investigation that has been applied to
postcolonial histories and cultures is still underdeveloped in the region of
Europe formerly under Soviet influence. Other scholars have also
remarked on the lack of a synthetic theoretical construction similar to the
conceptual reach of postcolonial theory from Canada and Australia to
Nigeria and India, as well as on the scarcity of critical utensils of wide
applicability in the region (Moore 2001; Oţoiu 2003; Popescu 2003). The
competing disciplines that have emerged (such as Central European
Studies, or postcommunist studies), and the sometimes minute analyses
confined to specific geographical regions, still fail to encompass them all:
in the thirteen years since the fall of the Berlin Wall the yet-to-becoalesced discipline of postcommunist studies has failed to produce a
theoretical construction that should have acquired the intellectual force,
cultural prestige, and scholarly coherence that postcolonial studies have in
the Western world. (Oţoiu 2003, 89)
This book is, among others, an attempt to address this failure, and an
exercise in the type of cultural critique that postcolonialism has
consistently practiced in the past few decades. What gives the postcolonial
its theoretical force and makes it a suitable point of departure in my
comparative analysis is the articulation of how structures of domination
work, how models of alterity are formed, and how the imbrication of
power and knowledge produces ideologically interpellated subjects, as
well as the emphasis on how subjects negotiate and contest these
hegemonic ideological structures. This is why it has been taken up, with
varying degrees of success, by Central and Eastern European scholars
based at academic institutions in the West, since it has proved to be a
useful paradigm for interrogating the construction and representation of
this “other Europe” in the Western imaginary. Indeed, a growing body of
research has diagnosed the structures of domination and representation
that mark the interaction between Western metropolitan centres and the
“Third World” as very similar in style, accent and underlying attitude to
those practiced by the same Occidental powers towards their “adjacent
others” in East-Central Europe. In identifying the strategies of othering
16
Chapter One
and practices of discursive (and often also political and economic) mastery
deployed by Western Europe over its Eastern half, such work has
borrowed from and reworked extensively key concepts in postcolonial
theory and criticism. This was not a favour much returned by scholars
working in the postcolonial field, who, with notable exceptions – and these
of a very recent date2 – have remained largely uninterested in the potential
parallels that could be traced with East-Central Europe’s own imperial
past, whether distant or more recent.
In particular, there is a curious lack of engagement on the part of
postcolonial theorists and critics with the situation specific to the former
Soviet “colonies”, which has led to various analysts’ observation that
postcolonialism is the paradoxical example of a world system with no
theory of its former Second World (Moore 2001, 117). Thus, the Eastern
part of Europe, which until recently constituted the “Second World”, either
appears to fully partake of the discourse of Eurocentrism, or is figured as
an absence – there is nothing in-between Western Europe and the “Third
World”. When East-Central Europe is mentioned at all, it is only as a
passing reference to the collapse of communist ideology (usually
connoting regret at the foundering of the utopian-revolutionary ideal of
anti-capitalist liberation struggle) and the embrace by the “Second World”
of the globalising-capitalist West3. Anne McClintock is among the few
postcolonial critics who refers to the totalitarian rule of the former USSR
over East-Central Europe in the context of imperialism, touching on the
implications that the demise of the socialist idea – now a morally
discredited narrative of progress and emancipation – might have for a
politically-engaged postcolonial criticism (McClintock 1993). Her
intervention is all the more remarkable in the context of continued
exhortations to “join [the] intelligible and still viable indigenous resources
and old-age traditions of colonial resistance with the ethical horizon and
utopian reach of socialism” (Parry 2004, 301, my emphasis). After the
downfall of one of the century’s most horrendous projects of social
2
See the 2010 conference at the University of York entitled “What Postcolonial
Theory Doesn’t Say” and a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing
dedicated to a comparative discussion of postcolonialism and postcommunism
(48.2, May 2012).
3
Thus, in his article “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality”, Aijaz Ahmad
speaks about “the progressive projects of socialism and anti-imperialist
nationalisms” (285) and makes a derisive reference to the “rise of conservative,
market-friendly regimes in the erstwhile Comecom countries” (285), in which one
can read more than a tinge of regret at the collapse of socialist regimes in EastCentral Europe.
Cultures of Empire
17
engineering, and the revelation of the violence and indignity it has
perpetrated, it is disturbing to read pronouncements of such a project’s
“ethical horizon”.
The elision of communist and postcommunist experiences in a variety
of postcolonial discourses4 addresses indirectly the difficulty of situating a
phenomenon which cannot be comfortably framed within either an
“Occidentalist” or a “Third World”-ist paradigm. It is also indicative of the
potentially disabling problem posed by a comparative approach which
seeks to find a common ground in intellectual perspectives that are
differentially charged across historical and ideological contexts. It is,
indeed, highly unlikely that a left-wing Western academic, a postcolonial
Neo-Marxist critic and a civic-liberal Eastern European intellectual will
share many commonalities in a dispassionate examination of Marxism and
its historical consequences. This begs the question, before any further
comparative effort is expanded, of whether the respective systems which
they purport to be supplanting share anything ideologically or in terms of
practices. Apparently colonialism and communism could not be more
different: one capitalist, pragmatic, based on competition, exploitation of
labour and maximal return of profit, and, politically, on a paternalistic/
hierarchical system whereby the (superior) elite (the colonials) govern the
(inferior) masses (the colonised). The ideology of communism, on the
other hand, is nominally based on equality, community of decision,
communal labour and sharing of profit, and government representative of
the working people.
It appears that the two systems share very little indeed. In practice,
however, communist systems could be accused of all the evils of
capitalism, and many more besides, and in many respects the workings (if
not the theoretical premises) of the two ideological systems have led to
similarly disastrous consequences in terms of human suffering,
deprivation, humiliation and destruction of cultural traditions. With one
crucial difference – communism’s roots in radical, utopian emancipatory
ideals, its universalist tenor, is precisely what rendered it both so
dangerously appealing and so essentially terroristic: because it could not
conceive of compromise, pragmatism, or negotiation, and tended to see
things in black and white, it has gone to greater lengths of systematic
violence than most colonial systems did; the latter, despite sharing the
4
Speaking of the great outrages of the twentieth century, John Comaroff mentions
all (the Holocaust, apartheid, colonialism, racism, the excesses of industrial
capitalism) except the Gulag and the wholesale destruction of traditional civilisations
perpetrated by communism, not only in East-Central Europe, but also in various
parts of the formerly colonised world, in Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, etc.
18
Chapter One
logic of “us” and “them”, did not deny the ontological basis of otherness
and alterity. The non-Western “Other” may have been perceived as
“different”, indeed “inferior” to the Western self; the main point, however,
was not to exterminate it, but chiefly to dominate and, perhaps, “civilise”
it (and in the process make it indistinguishable from the self). No such
desire existed in the totalitarian version of “us” and “them” – whether of a
fascist or a communist stripe; in these systems, the racial or class “Other”
was the “Enemy”, and no ethical considerations could forestall its
systematic annihilation. If in their expansionist foreign policies liberal
democracies applied principles that ran against the premises that prevailed
in their domestic systems of governance, they also benefitted from the
compromising and pragmatic influence of the economic system on which
they were based – capitalism. Chapter two of this study will have a great
deal more to say on why a postcolonial examination of post-war EastCentral Europe under Soviet-style communism is not only a good idea, but
essential in understanding the dynamics of the post-Cold War ideological
order. In addition, there is a strong case to be made for such a
rapprochement to start coalescing at this time – as postcolonial modes of
analysis become institutionalised and increasingly canonical, thus partly
losing their critical edge, approaches which situate colonialism in the
context of the century’s other major sites of trauma, such as the Holocaust
and the communist camp and forced-labour system, could serve to
reinvigorate the discipline and help propel it beyond its comfort zone and
its mainstay object of critique, global neo-colonial capitalism.
1.1. Relocating the Postcolonial:
Toward a post-Cold War Cultural Critique
Imperialism can be defined as the policy or practice whereby a state
extends its rule over other territories, cultivating unequal international
relations of economic and political authority, coupled with an exercise of
knowledge and representation that construes the metropolitan centre as
superior in material, intellectual, and moral terms. Yet it has most often
been construed as a specifically Western overseas practice – quintessentially
British, or American in its more contemporary forms. This assumption, or
construction, has been at the heart of most “classic” versions of
postcolonialism, firmly placed there by the discipline’s founding figures.
Thus, for instance, the late Edward Said, while acknowledging the
existence of other imperial projects (such as the Habsburg, Russian or
Cultures of Empire
19
Ottoman ones, which Hannah Arendt usefully described as “continental”5),
only chooses to examine the British, French and American experiences of
empire, because, in his view, they possess a “unique coherence and a
special cultural centrality” (Said 1994, xxv)6. Moreover, in deconstructions
of Western structures of authority, postcolonial theorists all too often
conceptualise “Europe” as specifically Western, in effect replicating the
homogenising gesture which construes the “Third World” as a unitary
field of analysis. They treat “Europe” as their opposite pole, and as a result
conflate their concept of “Europe” to fit the European/postcolonial binary
opposition. Even while deploring the totalising gaze of Western
knowledge that seeks to subsume distinct traditions, cultures and
subjectivities under a coherent system of representation (such as
“Orientalism”), many postcolonial critics perpetuate a similar type of
epistemic violence by “erasing” from the intellectual and cultural map of
Europe those small nations which have never been part of the imperial
project. This conflation effectively “screens out non-European
colonisation and ignores colonial-type regimes within Europe, both of
which have features analogous to those that came into being as a result of
European colonization overseas” (Peiker 2006). The nominal geographical
location of Europe when adopted as a homogenous validation of otherness
(as represented by “non-Europe”) thus occludes the relevant case of the
“otherness within” (or what I call “adjacent otherness”).
5
As critic Pascal Grosse (2006) remarks, Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is a
constitutive book of postcolonial studies, one whose premises anticipate the
present comparative excursus in that it links colonialism as a social and political
formation to totalitarian ideologies in Europe, primarily National Socialism, but
also communism.
6
As David Moore Chioni remarks in a seminal article on the ‘posts’ of
postcolonial and post-Soviet, Said’s granting of primacy to overseas colonisation
over colonisation by adjacency is somewhat odd, for it overlooks a drive of power
that was in many ways in direct competition with, for instance, British imperial
ventures in South-Eastern Asia. On the other hand, Russian expansion in the 19th
century was consciously mimicking the colonial drive of Western powers, as
admittance into the select club of the rich and strong was conditioned by the
existence of colonies. Even if Western European powers regarded this advance into
Central Asia contemptuously as a conquest of Orientals by other Orientals (as
different from the noble-minded “crusade of manners and morals” that civilised
Europe pursued against the barbaric Asians), in Russia itself it was perceived as a
kind of ‘revenge’ against previous conquests of Christian Orthodox Russians by
pagan Turkic and Mongol tribes in the 13th and 14th centuries. (Moore 2001, 119120)
20
Chapter One
The above tendency testifies to a surprising lack of awareness of the
connections between empires (in the plural) and our common inheritance
of ideological predispositions, as well as the problems of remembering and
forgetting posed by these connections. As Dennis Walder remarks in his
recent study of memory and nostalgia in a postcolonial context
(Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Memory and Representation, 2010),
most postcolonial critics seem to forget, or to place under erasure, the fact
that the British empire was only one among many; he suggests that it
would be constructive to examine with more diligence the sometimes
barely visible connections and affiliations across as well as within
empires. The following section will take up his suggestion and seek to
uncover precisely those “structures of feeling and reference” that align the
Western European imperialist project (essentially overseas) with other
European imperial projects (essentially continental). The resulting
framework is premised on variant forms of power-imposition and
ideological/cultural dominance, in which race and the historical experience
of colonialism are not allowed to obscure other Western (and nonWestern) European constructions of alterity. The “(post)colony” thus
becomes a signifier of cultural violence and ideological imposition – a
“colonisation of the mind”, as much as a project of geographical expansion
and economic exploitation7.
In certain important respects, there is no such thing as “colonialism” in
the singular, for the practice was an obviously uneven affair: there were
different empires, different colonial strategies, different levels of colonial
penetration, control and exploitation (Childs 1997, 10). There were areas
in which colonialism was violent, vicious and bloody (Algeria, Kenya),
others in which it was relatively swift and peaceful (Nigeria); areas
occupied and settled by white colonialists, others in which political and
7
A similar model – advocating the conjunct examination of overseas and
continental imperial legacies – is sketched by Barbara Fuchs in her article
“Imperium Studies” included in the collection of essays Postcolonial Moves
(Ingham & Warren, 2003). “Imperium studies” as theorised by Fuchs addresses
histories of expansion, conquest, occupation and colonisation on different temporal
and geographical levels, thus dismantling the binary opposition between the
metropolitan core and its colonised peripheries privileged in most postcolonial
approaches. While building on the central preoccupations of postcolonial theory,
i.e. the structure of power-relations, processes of othering, economic exploitation
of marginalised peoples, and the cultural significance of border zones, imperium
studies attend both to the “Europe-in the making” and to its internal and external
colonies. Her article has been very useful in formulating my own inquiry, within a
postcolonial framework, into the dynamics of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires
and their role in the development of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe.
Cultures of Empire
21
institutional control was exercised by a small number of colonial
representatives in regional centres of domination (India). Then, of course,
there is the paradoxical simultaneity of several types of colonisation in
regions such as Australia or Canada, or the equally paradoxical case of the
US, once a colony itself, but now the neo-imperial force of economic and
cultural globalisation. If we add to this complex panorama the continental
imperial projects that have split Europe into a dominant West and a
liminal, underdeveloped and variously othered East, the resulting picture
becomes even more blurred. After 1945, the west’s imperial reach has
gradually become “softer” – in the sense of “soft power”, transferred
largely from European empires to American cultural and economic
hegemony; yet a “hard” version of imperialism, of an altogether different
nature than previously existent ones, was consolidating its grip on half of
Europe and a substantial chunk of the larger world. Yet the Soviet Union
is rarely referred to in imperial terms in Western political and cultural
analysis outside the sphere of Cold War studies or Sovietology. For the
largely leftist Western and postcolonial intelligentsia, that is a label
reserved only for the US. But the Soviet Union was a worthy heir of
Czarist Russia. It undertook a massive colonisation of Asia and Eastern
Europe, both before and after WWII, creating two levels of imperialideological control: an inner (internal) one (the states incorporated into the
Soviet Union – Caucasian states, Central Asia, Ukraine, and, after 1940,
the Baltic states and Moldova), and an external layer of orbiting satellites
in a state of semi-colonisation – the outer (external) Soviet Empire, of
which the states of East-Central Europe were a part. While formally
independent and autonomous, they were de facto under Soviet ideological,
political and economic control, especially up to the late 1960s. Moreover,
USSR colonised politically not only its neighbours, but also remote
countries such as Angola, Cuba, Mozambique, and Laos through
aggressive export of Marxist ideology. For countries in East-Central
Europe, Soviet overlordship had all the ingredients of classical
colonialism: military occupation, economic exploitation, mass deportation
and strategic relocation of Russian-speaking populations in various
occupied regions, forced labour, political repression, religious persecution,
a cult of the invader’s values and culture.
Given such diversity of imperial practices, theorists have made
sustained efforts to come up with consistent and encompassing typologies
of colonialism. Thus, Moore Chioni proposes a triadic structure which
places various historical processes of conquest or imposition into one of
the following three categories: 1) classic overseas colonisation; 2) internal
colonisation or settler colonisation; 3) continental or dynastic colonisation
22
Chapter One
(involving the conquest of neighbouring peoples) (120). This model is
complicated by the economic system on which various colonial empires
were based: whereas Western overseas inroads responded primarily to a
capitalist drive for wealth and profit, the strategic-territorial considerations
of the feudal-bureaucratic Ottoman or Habsburg empires were rarely
formulated in similar terms. In all categories, Soviet imperialism
constitutes a case somewhat difficult to integrate, since its “colonial”
impetus was neither capitalist, nor was it an outmoded form of imperial
expansion based on territorial acquisition. The “glue” holding together the
Soviet empire was clearly not based on capitalist accumulation; and,
although the preservation of already occupied territories in East-Central
Europe in order to offset American influence and impose a status-quo of
power-balance played a major role in Stalin’s considerations, the main
impetus was ideological.
East-Central Europe is therefore the example of an uncomfortably
situated region that has experienced a combination of imperial tendencies
and practices, most often at work synchronically and coevally. On the one
hand, “imperium” often assumed ambiguous forms, as the territories of
East-Central Europe were simultaneously claimed by different imperial
powers. Whether they belonged in them institutionally and politically, or
were orbiting their “zones of influence”8, their relationships with the
neighbouring Western and/or Eastern empires have never been as
unequivocally aligned as those between the metropole and its overseas
dependencies. At the same time, however, Western practices of othering
and peripheralisation, compounded by an uneasy recognition of these
territories’ essential (though backward) Europeanness, have produced a
dialectic movement of acceptance/rejection and the split cultural
consciousness so characteristic of colonised and postcolonial societies.
This “schizophrenic” mode of self-definition most often rested on the
perceived gulf between one’s status as peripheral colony and a constant
aspiration to emulate a somewhat idealised European model – what the
American historian Andrew C. Janos calls the “demonstration effect” of
Western economic and cultural models in a constantly lagging-behind
Eastern part9. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s systems theory, East-Central
8
Much of Central Europe was an administrative part of the Habsburg Empire, as
was (in vastly different ways) most of Southern Europe under the direct
sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. Other territories were often ‘buffer zones’ in
which zones of interest conflicted – as in Poland, for instance, or in the Romanian
principalities.
9
See Andrew C. Janos, East-Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of
the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).