From the postcolonial condition to the decolonial option
Author: Svitlana Biedarieva
Editor: Clemens Poole
There are two ways of drawing a line between postcoloniality and decoloniality in culture. The first, paradigmatic, perspective is proposed by the comparative approach to the postcolonial theory developed by scholars including Frantz Fanon, Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri C. Spivak, and the decolonial theory developed by Aníbal Quijano, Madina Tlostanova, and Walter D. Mignolo, among others. The second way is to look at these two notions from a chronological perspective (Tlostanova 2019; Bhambra 2014; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2012).The postcolonial development in this model occurs when the society of a newly independent country reworks its recent colonial experience, having just passed through periods of anti-colonial resistance and the resulting downfall of an empire. The postcolonial condition implies continuous revisions and recombinations of narratives rooted in the traumatic colonial past. It is, therefore, always backward-looking. The decolonial situation goes one step further by liberation from any colonialism-related elements and the production of new, disentangled narratives that look not anymore at the past but at the present and into the future. Ukrainian cultural spaces along with individual artists and writers produce the key impact on the decoloniality of culture, which is twofold: first, it consists of the dismantling of postcolonial narratives and their substitution with decolonial ones — and second, it presupposes the creation of new narratives that conceptually break with the imperial legacy of Russia.
Art in Ukraine has recorded how Ukrainian society went through the postcolonial stage after 1991, and experienced a transition between the postcolonial condition and the decolonial situation after 2014. This transition followed the re-identifying impulse made visible by the 2014 Maidan Revolution and Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s occupation of Crimea in the south and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east. Contemporary artists actively represented the situation of rethinking and the resulting dismantling of postcolonial hybridity and ambivalence in their works from 2014 to 2022. I propose that Ukrainian society and culture fully entered the decolonial stage in February 2022 with the beginning of Russia’s attempts at a full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory. The recent wartime works created after the beginning of the full-scale invasion reflected the decolonial processes, both with the artists-as-eyewitnesses’ documentation of the war atrocities, and their radical reflections of military violence.
Directly following the historical events of 2014, the work by such artists as Yevgenia Belorusets, Piotr Armianovski, Alevtina Kakhidze, Mykola Ridnyi, Olia Mykhailiuk, and Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, and Dana Kavelina, among many others, turned to engage with the effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine. They addressed colonial memory, contested history, and traumatic contemporaneity through documentary art, reportage practices, photography, text, and video. This work included researching historical archives, as well as creating new ones, and explored postcolonial issues of hybridity and ambivalence for post-Soviet political identity in Ukraine. The artists further examined and reconsidered them using the notions of displacement, violence, and trauma brought about by the war. Several of these artists began to contribute to the fields of documentary production through art, mediating between audiences and ongoing social and political crises.
Post-2022, following the full-scale invasion, the artists turned from social documentation and archival investigation to personal chronicles, in which the different visions of artists’ diaries — in the work of Alevtina Kakhidze, Yevgenia Belorusets, and Vlada Ralko — have become the emblematic form. With the direct impact of the war on Ukrainian society in its entirety, the meaning of artistic reflection of war events changed dramatically. If, since 2014, art and documentary practices have been used as a kind of reported speech to convey the situation on the front line and in the occupied territories to the rest of Ukraine, in 2022, nearly all Ukrainians turned into eyewitnesses of violence and crimes against civilians. Art after the beginning of the invasion, therefore, aims not so much to transmit distant traumatic events to a wider public and to establish a critical dialogue with them as external observers, but to emphatically reflect on the audience’s own traumatic life experiences, including destruction and human loss. The question of historical memory has become secondary with a strong decolonial shift that no longer implies a reconsideration of the elements and the recombination of the disputed narratives of the past, but rather the creation of new narratives and disentangled, liberated epistemologies that mark the full dismantling of the postcolonial perspective and its hybridity (cultural, linguistic, and political) through resistance. The artistic processes manifest a full break with the colonial impacts, with the decolonial aim of returning to a zero-point epistemology.
For further reference
Mignolo, Walter D. and Tlostanova, Madina (2012). Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Ohio State University Press: Columbus, OH.
Tlostanova, Madina (2019). “The postcolonial condition, the decolonial option and the postsocialist intervention.” In Postcolonialism Cross-Examined: Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the New Colonial Present, edited by Monika Albrecht, 165–178. Routledge: London.
Author
Svitlana Biedarieva
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