Translating Memories Speaker Series: Memory and Decolonization in Ukraine
We welcome you to join the Translated Memory lecture series on December 5: "Memory and Decolonization in Ukraine." The seminar will take place from 2 PM to 5 PM at Tallinn University (Uus-Sadama 5, room M-213). Speakers include Yuliya Yurchuk from Södertörn University and Valentyna Kharkhun from Tallinn University and Nizhyn Mykola Gogol State University. The lectures will be followed by a discussion moderated by Tallinn University professor Linda Kaljundi.
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iCal calendarYuliya Yurchuk
Decolonial Approach to Memory Studies in Ukraine
Decolonization in relation to Ukraine started to be discussed intensively with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The scholarly discussions began much earlier, but public discussions became viral after the invasion. Despite the wide usage of the word “decolonization,” there is a limited shared understanding of what decolonization means in practice. In this presentation, I will try to understand what decolonization in the field of memory means. Memory as a narrative about one’s past is central to decolonial thinking. The possibility of reclaiming one’s own (hi)story is central to the resistance to epistemic violence created by the coloniality of power. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes, “imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world”. The question of decolonization of memory is thus inextricably linked to the desire to connect to one’s own history. The fundamental role of history in the process of decolonization is indeed mentioned by many decolonial writers. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o mentioned that decolonization means “seeing oneself clearly” (1986) which involves having a clearer narrative of one’s own past, removing the distorting lenses of colonial alienation. Jill Jarvis, in her “Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony Memory,” also writes about decolonization as a possibility to “see or hear what history has rendered ghostly” (2021). Connecting to one’s own history becomes then part of a decolonial project of liberation. But how is it possible to “see and hear” clearly what has been forgotten, erased, or, indeed, never fully re-constructed in memory?I argue that decolonization of memory in Ukraine is driven by three main logics: reclamation, decanonization, and memory activism. These logics do not exclude each other and very often work together in producing memory work that can be seen through the perspective of decolonization.
Yuliya Yurchuk, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Ideas at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research encompasses memory studies, religious history, and intellectual history. Her research includes projects on memory politics in Ukraine, propaganda and uses of history in Russian-Ukrainian war as well as religion and politics in Ukraine. Now she works on transnational intellectual history that deals with the circulation of ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries and the questions of Ukrainian resilience, resistance, and decolonization of memory in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Valetyna Kharkhun
Decolonization in Action: Dealing with (Un)wanted Heritage During the Russo-Ukrainian War
In applying the concepts of “political iconoclasm” and “urban fallism”, this presentation provides an analysis of “Leninfall” and “Pushkinfall” as two major phenomena of dealing with monumental heritage in Ukraine since 1990. The paper focuses particularly on the last decade between 2014 and 2024, the Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian cases of monumental political iconoclasm will be viewed within the context of decommunization and derussification, two identifiable trends in Ukraine’s current politics of memory, which exemplify decolonization as being the primary method in opposing Russian aggression, for remodeling the Ukrainian cultural space, and ultimately in strengthening Ukrainian national identity by eliminating Soviet and Russian imperial domination. This presentation delves into the following questions: What are the political, economic and cultural circumstances which forced a reconsideration of the (un)wanted heritage and eventually led to the toppling and destruction of monuments? What indicative actions have the various state bodies and grass-rooted initiatives had in deciding the fate of contested monuments? How does decolonization of a public space mirror contemporary identity politics? And what makes Ukraine’s undertakings with monumental heritage unique in comparison with other concurrent cases of political iconoclasm? Ultimately, this presentation should contribute to the understanding of Russia’s war in Ukraine within the framework of (de)colonization, as a struggle between Russia’s political and cultural imperialism embodied within the Lenin and Pushkin monuments and Ukraine’s intentions to build an independent and democratic future.
Valentyna Kharkhun is a professor at Nizhyn Mykola Gogol State University (Ukraine). She is an author of two books, six textbooks and more than one hundred articles published in Ukrainian and international journals such as Nationalities Papers, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Krytyka and other. She has participated in two Fulbright fellowships (Pennsylvania State University, 2005-2006; Columbia University, 2011-2012), the J. Mianovsky and Queen Jadwiga fellowships at Jagellonian University, Poland (2008, 2009), the Ivan Vyhovsky fellowship at Warsaw University, University of Rzeszow and Maria Curie-Sklodowska University (2014-2015), the George F. Kennan fellowship (Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, 2016), the Stuart Ramsey Tompkins Professorship (University of Alberta, Canada, 2023), Memory Studies fellowship (“Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena,” Tallinn University, Estonia, 2024). Through her career, she has worked on the relationship between ideology and culture focusing on the following topics: Ukrainian modernist writings; the art under Soviet rule; the socialist realist canon in Ukrainian and Russian literatures; representation of communism in museums of Central and Eastern European countries. Currently, she is working on a book entitled Multi-faceted Memory: Exhibiting the Soviet Era in Ukrainian Museums.
Linda Kaljundi is a historian and curator, Professor of Cultural history at Estonian Academy of Arts and Senior Research Fellow at Tallinn University. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki. Kaljundi has published on Baltic and Nordic history and historiography, collective memory and nation building, as well as the entangled histories of environment, colonialism and science. She has also co-curated a number of interdisciplinary exhibitions, including The Conqueror’s Eye (2019), Art or Science (2022), and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023), all at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn. She has co-edited several article collections and exhibition catalogues, as well as published a monograph on visual culture as a medium of cultural memory (History in Images – Image in History: National and Transnational Past in Estonian Art, with Tiina-Mall Kreem, 2018).
The speaker series is part of the project Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past on the Global Arena, Tallinn University, Estonia that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No 853385),