Colonialism and Coloniality
Author: Oleksandra Kotliar
Translation from Ukrainian: Viktoria Grivina
Editor: Clemens Poole
Considering the variety of forms of colonialism in history, the notion can be conceptualised around its imperatives (both obvious and hidden), which reveal the essence of the phenomenon. The official status of a dependent territory is not decisive in identifying colonialism and its consequences, because legal equality could be formal or not implemented. Colonialism manifests itself rather through the instruments and mechanisms of influence, used by the coloniser, including not only physical (political, economic coercion), but also ideological and symbolic strategies. The coloniser sees the desired object of subjugation, both in practice and in their mind, as something that has to belong to their body — political, historical, mythical. In this way the subordinate territory is fully integrated in a space, controlled by the coloniser, where hierarchies and classifications act as the elements of control. For example, the modernity formed by European colonialism, centred around the category of progress, according to which those who don't meet its criteria, are to become objects of a "civilising mission". Focusing on variability and universality of colonial mechanisms of control gives grounds to speak not only about European colonialism, but about Russian colonialism as well, which is still typically excluded from this discourse.
The notion of colonialism is characterised by temporality, which is inherent to it from the very beginning. Colonialism is often interpreted as a period in human history that has a beginning and an end, marked by the development and collapse of colonial institutions [1]. However, the mechanisms of colonial control proved to be capable of living past these institutions — in this way, according to the Puerto Rican researcher Ramón Grosfoguel, a myth has formed about a postcolonial world where the prefix "post-" should indicate the end of the history of colonialism [2]. Meanwhile, getting rid of the colonial statuses and establishing the borders of national states proved to be insufficient for the destruction of the specific model of power created by colonialism [3]. The fact that the existent terminology did not correspond to reality prompted the search for a new decolonial vocabulary, that brought forward the notion of coloniality, introduced into public communication with the purpose to make colonialism visible.
Coloniality has several dimensions at once:
a) as a space that has been politically hierarchical, preserving and reproducing colonial structures;
b) as a state of those who, despite decolonisation in political and legal spheres, remained in the space, built and equipped by the coloniser, where the colonial model continues to (self-)reproduce.
c) as a new form of interaction between the coloniser and the colonised outside of colonial structures.
The phenomenon of coloniality was first theoretically explicated by the Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano in the 1992 work, Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality [4]. The concept of coloniality was further developed by the Latin American researchers Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Maria Lugones. They see coloniality as a hidden side of the present, since the institutes that define it, such as national states, citizenship, and democracy were created as a result of colonial interaction. Coloniality is revealed in the contemporary division of labour, preservation of political, racial, aesthetic hierarchies, Western monopoly on knowledge, control of the global media space, etcI just [5]. Grosfoguel described the forming of these multiple hierarchies with the term global coloniality. According to Torres, “as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday” [6].
For coloniality, the dichotomy of the coloniser/colonised preserves its relevance, which is, however, not as easily revealed [7]. Instead, this dichotomy acquires an intersubjective character — the most viable legacy of colonialism includes mental constructions, cultural models, myths and stereotypes, imposed by the coloniser and firmly fixed in the minds of both the coloniser and the colonised.
The concept of coloniality can also describe the experience of those who have suffered from Russian (including Soviet) expansion [8]. After the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine found itself in a state of multiple (post-)dependencies that have significantly affected its political and cultural development. For its part, contemporary Russia continues to claim an exclusive role in the fate of former subordinates and conducts expansion using colonial methods. At the same time Ukraine remains excluded from general decolonial discourse. The invisibility of Russian-Soviet colonialism is caused by several factors: First, due to the USSR’s use of anti-colonialist rhetoric, and today's Russia’s presentation of itself as a victim of the West. Second, due to the hidden character of coloniality, produced by Russia, and its painstaking ideological work of the latter. Third, due to the absence of classic, centre/periphery-based, colonial relations between Ukraine and Russia, resulting from Russian and Soviet administrations view of Ukraine as a part of the imperial nucleus [9]. Despite this, as Grosfoguel rightly points out, the term colonial does not necessarily have to refer to the classic colonialism [10]. Consequently, in order to use the methods of control similar to colonial ones, the USSR also did not need the colonial structures to be identical to those used in the West.
Being in a space that combines the experiences of Russian colonialism and global coloniality, Ukrainian society faces the double danger — to be physically and mentally absorbed by the aggressor and (or) to become a grey zone for the Western “civilised” world [11]. Attempt to enter the latter only elucidate the hybridised coloniality of perception. Examples here are the practices of rethinking the world and Ukrainian history through the prism of Western approaches and paradigms. They include West-centric concepts of post-industrial society, the Technetronic age, the end of ideology, the end of history, European civilizational choice, all of which are aimed to reintroduce Ukraine to world (in reality, European) history. This approach spreads all the more actively in education and science. The danger of the tendency is in presenting the aforementioned universalized concepts not as one possible theoretical lens, but as objective reality. At the same time, the directing of intellectual efforts to the West is natural. The reason is a fear of rejection, because, as Saurabh Dube, scholar of postcolonial and decolonial theories, aptly noticed, Western optics of time and space filter out those that do not fit into the European worldview [12]. Attempts to prove that Ukraine belongs to Europe contribute to a new mythologisation of Ukrainian history, which, aiming to make Ukraine visible to the West, is being orientalised by Western epistemes instead [13]. Such a view of history and the present only turns Ukraine into a utopian space, which paradoxically lacks room for either dialogue or its own positionality.
Endnotes
02. Ramón Grosfoguel, World-Systems Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 29, no. 2 (2006): 174.
03. Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America", Nepantla: Views from South, 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–534.
04. Aníbal Quijano, "Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality", Cultural Studies, 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 168–178.
05. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "On the coloniality of being. Contributions to the development of a concept", Cultural Studies, 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 243.
06. Walter D. Mignolo, "Prophets Facing Sidewise: The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference", A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, 21, no. 1 (2005): 111–127.
07. Selbi Durdiyeva, "‘Not in Our Name:’ Why Russia is Not a Decolonial Ally or the Dark Side of Civilizational Communism and Imperialism", The SAIS Review of International Affairs, May 29, 2023.
08. Yaroslav Hrytsak, "The Postcolonial Is Not Enough", Slavic Review, 74, no. 4 (2015): 732.
09. Ramón Grosfoguel, World-Systems Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 29, no. 2 (2006): 175.
10. Олександра Котляр, “Деколонізувати знання і побачити постсоціалістичного “Іншого” (Tlostanova, M., 2017, Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan Cham.), Текст і образ: Актуальні проблеми історії мистецтва, 14, no. 2 (2022): 75.
11. Saurabh Dube, Subjects of modernity. Time-space, disciplines, margins (Manchester University Press, 2016), 41.
12. Galyna Kotliuk, "Colonization of minds: Ukraine between Russian colonialism and Western Orientalism", Frontiers in Sociology, no. 8 (2023). Accessed February 18, 2024.
13. David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA, 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–128.
For further reference
Julia Buyskykh, "Old-New Colonial Tendencies In Social Anthropology: Empathy In Wartime", Ethnologia Polona, 44 (2023): 55–85.
Author
Oleksandra Kotliar
About the author