| A Very Short Introduction |
| Part I. Post-Soviet Intellectuals between the Devil
of the State and the Deep Blue Sea of the Market |
| 1. | The Imperial-Colonial Difference in Russia and the
Disease of Eurocentrism |
| 2. | The Adherents of the West and the Slavophiles in
the Past and Today |
| 3. | The Intellectual and the State and the Addition of the
Market Component in "Risk" in the 1990-s |
| 4. | Between Harem and Brothel |
| 5. | The Merging of Different Intellectual Positions
in Russia |
| 6. | The Vanishing Ethical Dimension: A Case Study |
| 7. | Nationalism and Neo-Imperial Sentiment in
Putin's Russia |
| 8. | Denied Subjectivity and Other Defects of Post-Soviet
Thinking |
| 9. | Two Books: Either Aggressive Liberalism or
Socialism with Nationalist Face |
| 10. | Is There a Border Intellectual in Russia ? |
| 11. | Taking a Risk ? |
| 12. | Re-defining a Risk |
| 13. | Conclusion |
| Part II. Literature and Globalization |
| 1. | From Textuality to Contextuality |
| 2. | Globalization and (Re)definition of National
Canon/Tradition |
| 3. | Rethinking the World/National Literature
Dichotomy |
| 4. | Difference instead of Similarity |
| 5. | Globalization and Language |
| 6. | Literature as Consumer Goods |
| 7. | The Sweat-Shop Sublime as the Aesthetics of
Globalization |
| 8. | Transcultural Aesthetics as an Other Globalization
Sublime |
| 9. | The Poetics of Allegory |
| 10. | Conclusion |
| Part III. Transcultural Aesthetics in Action |
| 1. | Subjectivity |
| | 1.1. | A ricochet of Returned Gazes |
| | 1.2. | The Colonizer and the Colonized Relating to Each other |
| | 1.3. | Metamorphosis |
| | 1.4 | The ex-Colonizer as an Other: "Farukh Sits High on
the Back of a Sheep":or, "Recite the Alphabet !" |
| 2. | Meta-Chronotope of In-between-ness in transcultural
Fiction |
| | 2.1. | "Deception of Space" |
| | 2.2. | "Everything that is not Loved, will Disappear":
Peter Carey's Cartography |
| | 2.3. | Time in the Chronotope of In-between-ness |
| | 2.4.The Chronotope of the City |
| | | 2.4.1. | The Defeated Capital. Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul |
| | | 2.4.2. | Afanasy Mamedov's "Bascow" |
| | | 2.4.3. | The City of Happiness and Joy. Andrey
Volos's Khurramabad |
| | 2.5. | Empire as a Non-Existent Space ? |
| Conclusion |
| Bibilography |
A Very Short Introduction
This book was born out of several articles and lectures that I
have written after my last monograph on post-soviet fiction and
the aesthetics of transculturation was published in early 2004
in Russian. The publication of the book demonstrated once again
that in Russia there is yet no language, no discourse and hence
no ears for the problematic I am interested in -- the massive
and many-faceted influence of globalization on the sphere of
cultural imaginary, the complex interrelations of objectively
existing, though highly mythologized globalization processes,
that multiply cut across the contemporary cultural space, and
particularly literary process in all its many-sided
manifestations -- from the creation and consuming of books to
the institute of literary awards, criticism and mechanisms of
canonization.
Although many of my Russian colleagues reacted to the book in a
quite positive and constructive way, in general I had an
impression that a lot of them did not know what to do with it
because the set of issues raised in the book, its genre and
style remained generally outside the scope of traditional
disciplinarity and commonly accepted terminological apparatus,
automatically excluding it from the stable fields of traditional
philology, political science, philosophy, sociology, etc. On my
part it was a conscious position of a person who -- due to
objective reasons and specifically, to my part of an internal
and multiply colonized other of the Russian/Soviet Empire, and
also due to the willingly chosen position -- practices border
thinking and border epistemology. What I mean here is the
thinking from the fringes of epistemic positions that have been
denied by the universalizing perspectives of Western modernity
in their imperial anxiety to account, describe and explain the
world from a detached, objective position of the experts. The
border position is not claiming at complete objectivity or
finality, and in my case is the mediating position of an
internal other -- in ethnic, cultural, linguistic and
religious sense. It is a position based on decentration of the
canonical Western epistemic model and its Russian mimicking
variants. The degree of assimilation of the internal others in
Russian culture has always remained incomplete and controlled by
the dominant Slavic-Orthodox or communist element. The
linguistic difference is illusory enough in post-soviet space,
but it is accompanied by insurmountable cultural differences,
that invariably turn Russian internal others into complete and
absolute ones. In Albert Memmi's words, such doubly colonial
others are the "half-breeds of colonization, understanding
everyone because they belonged completely to no one" (Memmi
1991: xvi). This is not just Memmi's position, but also that of
other border intellectuals from different locales, marked with
a specific identity, based on mediation and constant
questioning of both the mainstream culture and their own status
as its internal others. A paradigmatic case would be Gloria
Anzaldъa with her fictional and poetic theorizing of the border,
which would not be possible either within the eurocentric
paradigm or in nationalist, religious or any other forms of
fundamentalism.
The border positions are expressed almost always in
trans-disciplinary and trans-genre forms, which find no place in
traditional scholarship, grounded in Eurocentric rational and
post-rational principles. The next logical step in this sense is
a de-linking from the scholarly discourse in its Western
understanding and turning to experiments with the bordering
forms and models, e.g. -- in between fiction and intellectual
reflections, within the categories that yet have not been
introduced into the wider scholarly or artistic context. For me
this is the next step that I am rapidly moving toward now. This
is one of the reasons why the English version of the book that
you are now holding in your hands is defined generically as
"sketches". It is to point out a deliberate falling out of
the hierarchical and linear logic of positivist scholarly
discourse that the book is marked with, and consequently, its
possible inconsistencies and rhizomic links between various
parts and chapters.
This principle exercised already in the Russian version is also
preserved in the English variant which includes in the revised
form only certain and most important -- in my understanding --
parts of the Russian original. The accents in these parts are
necessarily shifted because they are addressed largely to the
new global reader shaping up in the world today, the reader, who
is not associated with a particular national culture and does
not buy at face value the neoliberal version of globalization,
moreover, the reader who ideally is a border individual himself
or herself, for only such a reader most likely would be able to
adequately and with all necessary nuances interpret and
understand the transcultural model presented in the book as a
new way of life and of thinking. It is to this reader, who is
also more familiar than his Russian equivalent with many
categories, concepts and names connected with cultural
globalization, border, unhomeleness, hybridity, etc. that I
address this text -- paradoxically in the language of
globalization, i.e. English. Although in this case its dictate
in the contemporary world manifests unexpectedly its positive
sides -- writing in English gives a chance to communicate with
a much wider number of interlocutors, while an establishment of
epistemic coalitions with other marginalized inhabitants of the
global village who experience and see the world in a similar
way, is yet another inherent goal of my project.
The gap of incomprehension that emerged several years ago and
has been constantly growing since then between me and the
majority of my Russian colleagues is connected not only with the
above mentioned lack of discourse to discuss this problematic or
with a general positivist tendency of humanities and social
sciences, but also with a quite concrete economic, political,
epistemic and spiritual situation of defeat and apathy, which
has been keeping Russia and the Post-Soviet space in its grip
for almost two decades at this point. In this situation any
critical intellectual projects are doomed to neglect and never
find approval even in the so called intellectual environment
itself, while scholarship mostly comes to compilation and
applied studies. Thus, the main problem here, in my opinion,
always was and remains to be the problem of the missing link
between the subjectivity of a scholar/intellectual and what he
or she studies. For this reason it was crucial for me not to
lose this link, to always keep it in mind, because it is
precisely from my own existential transcultural identification
that my position as a scholar is being born.
Consequently, the English variant of the book includes a large
part which in the Russian version was just dotted. It is an
attempt to reflect from inside, on the global and local reasons
and conditions of today's obviously deplorable situation in the
post-soviet intellectual space. These reflection grew out of
revised and enlarged article, which I prepared for the special
issue of South Atlantic Quarterly titled Double
Critique: Scholars and Knowledges at Risk in the Post-Socialist
Space (Tlostanova: forthcoming). Working on this article, I
had once again to constantly keep in mind the same problem of
communication and the possible gap of incomprehension, but
this time -- with the Western audience, for which the
post-soviet space today has only the temporal dimension -- it
is a time after the collapse of Soviet Union, but it is a
time, still measured by the West and in the Western system of
coordinates.
The second part of this book was also born out of transcultural
dialogue which took place in early 2005 in University of
Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where I was lecturing on the
influence of globalization on world literature. Here the focus
of my attention was put on the efforts to define the aesthetic
sphere of globalization, its beautiful and sublime, as well as
accentuate and define the transcultural dimension as its most
promising side.
The third part of the book is comprised of reflections on
various aspects of transcultural aesthetics and poetics, as they
are manifested in the real contemporary world literature. This
refers to the problem of subjectivity (this time -- in relation
to literary categories and not the positioning of a scholar),
the problematic of chronotope, as well as some minor linguistic
and discursive aspects. A specific difficulty of this task was
that the postsoviet fiction which the Russian variant of the
book was mainly based on, for the non-Russian reader, even if
a global and cosmopolitan one, remains a completely unknown
and mostly uninteresting subject, if not an exotic other. For
this reason in the English version it was important for me to
stress the internal connections between the post-soviet local
configuration and those cultural products that it generates, and
the general logic of western modernity that no one can avoid
today, although of course the post-soviet cultural imaginary is
unique and cannot be reduced to postcolonial, postmodern or
other models.
The third part of the book deliberately departs from the well
known to the global reader names and works, while the
post-soviet material -- the unknown sphere -- is presented
more modestly than in the Russian version. That is why I
selected only those authors and books that more precisely
answer the model of transcultural aesthetics, while the parts
devoted to the postsoviet literary postmodernism -- a peculiar
form of canonical counter-discourse in relation to both Western
and Russian literature, or to Ukrainian nationalist post-soviet
literature -- were taken out of the book, as those based on a
different, not transcultural subjectivity.
This juxtaposition of post-soviet writers and their
transcultural counterparts from all over the world does not
imply at all that my book is based on traditional comparative
principles, where the point of reference is invariably the
Western European aesthetics, while the comparison itself is
based on the principle of similarity and not difference. The
parallels, echoes and possible connections between the authors
from various locales, particularly marked with a complex
configuration of imperial and colonial differences, are
generated not by influences, affinities and borrowings and not
by a telepathic connection that Vladimir Nabokov was making fun
of several decades ago, but by the fact that all of them -- an
Australian, a South African, a Turkish, an Azeri, a West
Indian or Russian writer -- have to share a common lot --
living and being in the logic of Western modernity, which
determined several centuries ago their specific roles and
hierarchical positions. These roles were proclaimed stable and
given once and for all and hence the people who were assigned
these positions by Western modernity, were presented with
particular subjectivities, with the painful attention to
specific themes, artistic devises and optics. Today all of
them are united as well by the new role of the post-national
individuals who have to exist in and adapt to the logic of
globalization. It is this global community of fate that creates
unexpected parallels in their works and is responsible for the
birth of a specific border aesthetics and sensibility.
A champion of such sensibility is marked with a negotiating
position, he or she must be himself a deviant migratory voice in
the dialogue, which the authority -- in the form of the state
or the market -- is trying to discipline, make silent, negate.
Living out in reality and in the cultural memory the local
features of several various positions, the border intellectual
lives in the world rather than in a certain culture or country.
For him or her it is not enough to just define the abstract
tendencies of deterritorialization and nomadology, as it was
done by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, or time lag, as it was
interpreted by J. Lacan and J. Kristeva. He or she feels
constrained in the limits of national and ethnocentric
discourses and tries to go further, altering the
poststructuralist and deconstructive models as well --
destabilizing them, applying them to many historical locales,
satiating them with multiple points of view. Although of course
the effort to take the route of the double-faced Janus does not
save automatically by itself from the dualism of generally
accepted oppositions of Western metaphysics, in the boundaries
of which still any philosophy has to be formulated if it wants
to be called so. In this situation it is difficult for an other to leave the restricted boundaries of Levinasian model
of passive reception or an object, which is used by the Western
modernity's sameness as a Ginny pig to exercise the
highly moral "responsibility for an other" (Levinas 1969), and
instead of that -- to shape his or her own idea of sameness and
otherness or even reject this binary opposition altogether,
building an alternative model of social communication instead.
This difficult mediative positioning is what I am aspiring at in
this book. It is particularly difficult in the sense of
representation, because rejection of binary identification
leads automatically to the stereotype of native
informant, so common in mainstream discourse, or a subaltern in Spivak's sense (Spivak, 1985), or a political
activist who is using his otherness in his favor. These
unattractive roles have nothing to do with my position which is
based instead on the crisscrossing of contradictory elements --
the largely Western-centric official education that I received,
and my interest in and relative acquaintance with non-Western
or not quite Western cultural and epistemic traditions. The
latter is connected with personal ethnic-cultural self
identification and self-education, springing from the
satisfaction of the deeper existential needs of an internal
other, conceptualizing this situation and finding possible
parallels in other traditions, but at the same time -- never
losing the double border vision giving additional angles and
perspectives of seeing the world. For this reason the book you
are now holding in your hands can be considered in a sense an
intellectual autobiography of its author.
Madina Tlostanova is
a professor at Peoples Friendship
University of Russia (Moscow),
a member of ICLA and MLA,
publishing extensively in
different countries (USA,
Poland, Estonia, Uruguay,
Rumania, Brazil and others).
Her interest focuses on the
multifaceted problematic of
globalization and culture.
She is the author of The
Multicultural Debate and the
US Fiction of the Late 20th
Century (2000), Post-Soviet
Fiction and the Trans-cultural
Aesthetics (2004), The Janus-
faced Empire (2003).
