Gate-crashing “European” and “Slavic” area studies: can Ukrainian studies transform the fields?

ABSTRACT

Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine has brought Ukraine to the centre of academic and public attention. The fact that Ukraine did not immediately collapse surprised the global community and forced many to ask an important question: what is Ukraine? Although Ukraine received media attention worldwide during the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, for many in “the West,” Ukraine has remained an “unexpected nation” that seems to exist only during brief periods of international media coverage. The paper argues that thinking about Ukrainian studies not as a threat to the fields of “European” and “Slavic” studies, but as an analytical category, can open up a vantage point from which scholars can critically examine epistemological hierarchies of power and inequalities in the fields.

RÉSUMÉ

L’invasion totale de l’Ukraine par la Russie a placé l’Ukraine au centre de l’attention des universitaires et du public. Le fait que l’Ukraine ne se soit pas immédiatement effondrée a surpris la communauté internationale et a forcé de nombreuses personnes à se poser une question importante : qu’est-ce que l’Ukraine? Bien que le pays ait suscité l’intérêt des médias du monde entier pendant la Révolution orange et la Révolution de la dignité, pour beaucoup d’Occidentaux, l’Ukraine est restée une « nation inattendue » qui semble n’exister que pendant de brèves périodes de couverture médiatique internationale. L’article soutient que le fait de considérer les études ukrainiennes non pas comme une menace pour les études « européennes » et « slaves », mais comme une catégorie analytique, peut ouvrir un point de vue à partir duquel les chercheurs peuvent examiner de manière critique les hiérarchies épistémologiques de pouvoir et les inégalités dans ces domaines de recherche.

KEYWORDS:

• Ukraine
• Ukrainian studies
• decolonization
• European studies
• Slavic studies

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the journal editors, James Krapfl and Guillaume Sauvé, the anonymous reviewers, and Larysa Bilous, Taras Dudko, Mayhill Fowler, Orysia Kulick, Maryana Mazurak, Frank Sysyn, Yulia Yurchuk, and Andriy Zayarnyuk for their insightful comments and suggestions that helped me to think about the topics of this paper further.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Wilson, Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation. This book’s first edition appeared in 2000. The newest (fifth) edition of the book, which was published after the full-scale invasion and strong Ukrainian resistance to it, appeared as The Ukrainians: The Story of How a People Became a Nation. As the change in title shows, the war has been altering the framework within which Ukrainian history is presented.

2. Khromeychuk, “Where Is Ukraine?”

3. On how the subfield of “Eastern European” studies has been defined, see Todorova, “Spacing Europe,” 63.

4. Although discussion of the colonial nature of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union has not been at the centre of current debates, this topic has been increasingly represented in scholarship. However, some scholars question its impact on the field. Alison Smith, for example, is “frankly disheartened that 20+ years of the imperial turn in Russian history has managed to have so little impact that an awful lot of people are just now realizing that Russia is/was/has been an empire.” Smith (@profaks), “War and the State,” Twitter post, 25 February 2022, https://twitter.com/profaks/status/1497194359464218627. On Russian imperialism and colonialism, see Becker, “Russia and the Concept”; Hirsch, Empire of Nations; Kaplunovskii et al., “Imperial Turn in Russian”; Khalid, “Introduction: Locating the (Post-)Colonial”; Khodarkovsky, “Colonial Empire without Colonies”; Schorkowitz, “Was Russia a Colonial?”; and Sunderland, “Empire without Imperialism?”

5. See, for instance, 3Z Studio, MOCA NGO, The Naked Room, Perevorot, and Pavlo Makov, “Cancel Russia”; and Sheiko, “‘Cancel Russian Culture’.”

6. Von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have?” 658.

7. Thompson, “Slavic but Not Russian,” 12.

8. Stasiuk, “Decolonizing Eastern European.”

9. Von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have?” 658.

10. Kappeler, “Ukrainian History,” 697–98.

11. Finnin, “How the West Gets.”

12. Engels, “Der magyarische Kampf.”

13. Von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have?” 660.

14. Finnin, “Ukraine as an Object.”

15. For discussions about the “crisis in the humanities,” see: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Heart of the Matter; Fish, “Crisis of the Humanities”; and Reitter and Wellmon, Permanent Crisis.

16. John-Paul Himka retired from the University of Alberta in 2014, and York University’s Orest Subtelny passed away in 2016. Coleman, “Department of History and Classics”; Kravchenko, “Orest Subtelny (1941–2016).”

17. Thus the position of Professor Myroslav Shkandrij at the University of Manitoba was replaced.

18. See, for instance, Timothy Snyder’s highly popular course about Ukraine at Yale University: https://online.yale.edu/courses/making-modern-ukraine.

19. I have taught Ukrainian history as a sessional instructor and visiting fellow at York University (2022–23) and the University of Saskatchewan (2022–23), respectively. However, this trend is not limited to my personal experience. At the University of Manitoba, “Introduction to Ukraine” (Fall 2020) and “Making of Modern Ukraine” (Fall 2021) were taught by the adjunct instructor Aleks Pomiećko.

20. Gerasimov et al., “War and the State of the Field,” 9.

21. See, for example, Ballinger, “Whatever Happened?”; Dale, Miklóssy, and Segert, Politics of East European Area Studies; Metzo and Cash, “Whither the Area?”; and Sušová-Salminen, “Rethinking the Idea.”

22. For an exception, see Halecki, Limits and Divisions, 136–37.

23. Von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have?” 661. Ukraine is of course not the only case of such distorted representations. Scholars have long pointed out that the Balkans are often represented in popular culture and scholarly works as a “heart of darkness,” a place of never-ending cycles of violence and ethnic hatred. See, for example, Longinović, Vampire Nation; and Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.

24. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, 134 (emphasis added).

25. See, for instance, Golinkin, “Neo-Nazis and the Far”; Hillis, “Intimacy and Antipathy”; Miller, “‘Ukrainian Crisis’”; and Rossolinski-Liebe, Stepan Bandera.

26. See, for instance, Marcetic, “Whitewashing Nazis Doesn’t Help”; McCallum, “Much Azov about Nothing”; and Ritzmann, “Myth Far-Right Zealots.”

27. Colborne, From the Fires, 10.

28. See, for example, such fine-grained studies as Bilous, “Re-thinking the Revolution”; Havryshko, “Illegitimate Sexual Practices”; Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists; Petrenko, Unter Männern; Radchenko, “Accomplices to Extermination”; Radchenko, “New Prospects”; and Zaitsev, “Fascism or Ustashism?”

29. Gomza, “Too Much Ado.”

30. Shekhovtsov, “How the West Enabled.”

31. Zayarnyuk, “Historians as Enablers?” 192–93.

32. Portnov, “Full Historiographical Legitimacy”; Ilnytzkyj, “Look for the Helpers.”

33. Annus et al., “Decolonization.”

34. Von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have?” 658–59. See also Kravchenko, Ukrainian Historical Writing.

35. Hill, reply to “Periodization,” 5 January 2023.

36. Hill, reply to “Periodization,” 7 January 2023.

37. In his February 2022 commentaries, Amar assured readers that Russia had no plans to invade and that Ukraine was beholden to neo-Nazis: “No, 2022 Isn’t 1938” and “Nothing to See Here.”

38. Gerasimov et al., “Future of SEEES Expertise”; Smith-Peter, “How the Field”; Richardson and Tsymbalyuk, “Environmental Humanities, Ukrainian Studies.”

39. Byford, “Russia as an Epistemic,” 75.

40. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, “2023 ASEEES Convention Theme.”

41. Smith-Peter, “What Do Scholars?”

42. Kassymbekova, “On Decentering Soviet Studies,” 116–17.

43. Mignolo and Nanibush, “Thinking and Engaging,” 26.

44. Mignolo, “Foreword: On Pluriversality.”

45. Putin, “On the Historical Unity.”

46. Slipchenko and Perevoshchykov, “On the Historical Unity.”

47. Von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have?” 659.

48. Ibid., 670.

49. Kuzio, “How Western Experts.”

50. Kassymbekova, for instance, draws attention to the importance of revisiting conceptualizations of Central Asia in Soviet studies by incorporating stories that are important for the peoples of the region. Kassymbekova, “On Decentering Soviet Studies.”

51. Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge.”

52. Dirks, “Annals of the Archive,” 48, 58.

53. Ibid., 48.

54. Stasiuk, “Decolonizing Eastern European”; Smith-Peter, “Rethinking ‘The Russian Archives’,” 65.

55. Dyak and Fowler, “Working between Categories,” 5. After the full-scale invasion, Lviv’s Center for Urban History, which Dyak manages, brought together scholars and archivists to create a multilingual archive of primary sources and visual materials from Ukraine that can be used in research and teaching.

56. Allusion is made here to Bartov and Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires.

Additional information

Funding

I am grateful to the Petro Jacyk Education Foundation for a fellowship in Ukrainian Studies at the Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage at the University of Saskatchewan, which enabled me to write this article.

Notes on contributors

Oksana Dudko

Oksana Dudko is a historian and curator. She is the Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Saskatchewan and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Oksana holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in history from Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. Her research explores twentieth-century Europe with a special focus on violence, gender, and the cultural history of Ukraine, eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. In addition, for more than 10 years, Oksana has been curating theatre and exhibition projects in Europe. She has been a founding director and artistic curator of the international theatre and drama festivals “Drabyna” and “Drama.UA,” and of the First Stage of Contemporary Drama “Drama.UA” in Lviv.