Postcolonial criticism appears today as the sole champion of the study of colonialism and its aftermath. However, viewed from post-Soviet Europe, it displays a number of flaws and lacunae: an amputated atlas of modern colonialism which ignores the experience of Eastern Europe under Soviet colonial occupation, a binarism that fails to explain the more complicated mechanisms of cultural colonization, and an in-built ideological bent that blinds it to the trans-ideological nature of colonialism whereby mutually incompatible ideologies have functioned as both the hegemonic and the counter-discourses of colonialism. While it has found the general framework of postcolonialism useful, postcommunist cultural studies has worked inside these theoretical interstices to supplement the orthodoxy of postcolonialism with equally sophisticated analytical tools that seem more adapted to deal with trans-colonialism in the global age. This article explains the added value of the cultural critique of (post)communist coloniality: how it has complemented the routine charts of colonialism during and after the Cold War by more accurately mapping the complex colonial relationships between all “Three Worlds”; how it by-passed the simple binary imagination of radical postcolonialism in order to address the political ambivalence and the ethical dilemmas of global (post)coloniality where there are no fixed hero/villain positions; and how it replaced Manichean anti-capitalist discourses with a more flexible and open perspective on the convoluted ideological rapports during the Cold-War and after the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The paper argues that twentieth-century (post)coloniality was a multi-centric and poly-peripheral space and as such calls for a different, more complex geo-cultural and historical portrayal than the one provided by mainstream postcolonialism. Conventional postcolonialist critiques are ill equipped to address the historical interactions and the conceptual migrations between the discourses of the Second and Third Worlds, or with their “dual dependencies” because, with notable exceptions, postcolonialist studies only focus on the relations between the West and its (former) colonies. I argue that Eastern Europe and the (post)colonies of the West are alternative peripheries in the convoluted field of global (post)colonialism and that there were protracted two-way exchanges between these subaltern discourses in their interconnected experiences of (post)colonialism. This interplay, together with their vacillation between the two power centres during the Cold War, complicated not only the global power games, but also the processes of (post)colonial identity formation, and the ideological genealogies of repression and resistance
This article illustrates a relatively less charted form of exilic dislocation which I have dubbed paraexile. Unlike Claudio Guillén, who claims that exiled writers can triumph over their native attachments and create a literature of "counter-exile," I propose, alongside critics like Lamming, Rushdie, or Said, that the trauma of displacement can never be entirely left behind and is constantly part of exilic writing. In addition, I make the claim that paraexilic literature is a peculiar form of internalizing exile by means of irony and contradiction. I am illustrating this attitude with the work of Constantin Noica, one of the most popular and respected philosophers in post-war Romania, who rejected emigration and, instead, adopted the paradoxical solution of triumphing over internal and internalized exile by embracing it as a form of liberation. I am proposing the rhetorical category of contra-discourse-a dialogic structure of argument and narrative in which the homely and the foreign are spoken of in the ironically mingled voices of the oppressor and of the victim. I am concluding with the suggestion that, while the work of Noica is in many ways idiosyncratic, it may also be viewed as a typical form of coping with exilic traumas in Central and East European cultures during communism.
The author of the article focuses on showing that resistance through culture is part of a social and political dynamic that is complicated and paradoxical. He claims that a discursive analysis of power relationships and of the rapport between the private and official idioms in the political context of communist totalitarian societies can evince the daunting complexity of some forms of resistance-through-culture discourse. The author argues that with the appropriate critical instruments, cultural discourse analysis can broach the intricacies and paradoxes of power relationships in oppressive environments and can ground a more accurate and unprejudiced moral evaluation of resistance through culture as a phenomenon typical of totalitarian cultural politics.
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