New Year's updates

Happy new year one and all – may 2012 bring each of a us a bit closer to understanding the things we seek to understand.

Two very brief updates:

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1. Some of my thoughts on contemporary Slavonic studies and memory can be found on the new Historians.in.UA website: О памяти в Кембридже, и не только.

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2. Video feed of the "Dynamics of memory: Borderlands" panel at the Genealogies of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe conference in Warsaw (November 2011) is now available online: in English and in Polish. Below is that paper's abstract:

Tanya Zaharchenko
Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge

Genealogies of Memory in Central and Eastern Europe Conference
Warsaw, Poland (November 23-25, 2011)

How memory becomes identity: The curious case of East Ukraine [abstract]

Today’s conventional wisdom on Ukraine as a deeply divided country, trapped in a post-Soviet cultural crisis of East versus West, maintains a firm hold not only on popular imagination, but on many scholars as well. In a political take on contemporary Ukrainian multiculturalism, supporters of this approach argue for a need for the homogenizing process of nationalization in order to cleanse the country of undesirable external influences. The given paper challenges this binary formula, arguing instead for a historical approach to multiculturalism. When history forms memory, which in turn forms identity, all resulting formations are equivalent in their right to exist and to be perceived as Ukrainian. Application of the frameworks of regionalism and memory theory to fluid identities in Ukraine shows that nation-building in a country this big and diverse should not be a homogenizing process, and that all of its existent national identities, including hybrid ones, should have a firm and recognized place in society – equal to, and along with, some more rigid and established self-perceptions of the country’s diverse population.

Keywords: Ukraine; regionalism; multiculturalism; nationalism; memory; identity

Original date Jan 13, 2012 3:25 PM
Links updated Mar 9, 2012