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This course aims at the problematization of selected key topics of modern Ukrainian history and at critical reflection on the notion of an Eastern European borderland as contested, polycentric and culturally diverse space. The conceptual repertoire of cultural and social history and case studies on the regions that constitute Ukraine shall help to go beyond either teleological nation-state-centered paradigm or reduction of borderlands to the peripheries shaped by imperial centers. Instead, the local agency and responses to the imperial policies, national inventions of tradition, both emancipatory and conservative intellectual agendas of Ukrainian educated elites will be in the focus of the course. We will analyze how competing national projects attempted to dominate public sphere that emerged in the nineteenth century and survived under various regimes through the twentieth century, and how the new cultural markers of identity were received and articulated with societal transformations and under changing political conditions. The course will also provide a perspective on the current debates about the mass violence launched by Soviet and Nazi regimes and also employed by competing radical nationalist groups, on conflicting consequences of Soviet modernization, and on the applicability of post-colonial approaches to the contemporary Ukrainian society and culture.
Literatur: Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe. A History of Ukraine (New York 2015); Andriy Zayarnyuk and Ostap Sereda, The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Ukraine. The Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2023). |
