On The Subjects and Objects of Decolonization

This response to Dace Dzenovska's article "Emptiness Against Decolonization" engages with her account of the social and political experience of the residents of "Lielciems" in eastern Latvia, describing it as a form of inter-imperiality, which has been defined by Laura Doyle as the "fraught condition" shaped by "multiple vectored relations among empires and among those who endure and maneuver among empires."1 In the case of Lielciems, the contradictory implications of life on the "imperial fault line" bring to light pitfalls of discourse concerning decolonization in eastern Europe more broadly. Attention to the voices of Lielciems and other places like it-the voices of people who are the object of the decolonial aspirations of others-may allow us to make necessary corrections in our use of this term and of processes of decolonization in our disciplines. First and foremost, we must remain cognizant of the multiple uses to which the term has been put across the region, not all of which are beneficent, and of the failings of western empire in the past decades, even as we condemn the neoimperial violence of the Russian Federation

Decolonization · Political science · Politics · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies