Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma - Instytut Pileckiego

Please join us on 07.05 for another event in our (P)ostcolonialism series, featuring Dr. Tamara Hundorova, Dr. Matthias Schwartz (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, ZfL), and Kateryna Mishchenko, Ukrainian writer, curator, and publisher.

Dear All,

Please join us on 07.05 for another event in our (P)ostcolonialism series, featuring Dr. Tamara Hundorova, Dr. Matthias Schwartz (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, ZfL), and Kateryna Mishchenko, Ukrainian writer, curator, and publisher. The discussion “Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma” will focus on Tamara Hundorova’s book of the same name and will be moderated by Eva Yakubovska, curator at the Pilecki Institute.

07.05, 18.30 | Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin 

Registration: https://forms.gle/oFz9h2Y3LNMeW3dL8

Tamara Hundorova is a Ukrainian literary critic, culturologist, and member of PEN Ukraine. She is a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Professor and Dean at the Ukrainian Free University, and an Associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Together we will explore how contemporary Ukrainian literature reflects post-Soviet transformations, focusing on themes of memory, trauma, and identity in works by Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan, and Lina Kostenko.

This book explores transitional post-Soviet cultural consciousness in Ukraine at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The main themes in the book are postcolonial traumas in relation to past empires and old historiographical narratives; post-totalitarian consciousness, which is characterized by sociocultural ruptures, postcolonial resentment, and intergenerational crises; and post-memory as a means of overcoming historical and familial traumas. 

Against the backdrop of the Chornobyl catastrophe, the book examines the meeting of different generations and views the clown Verka Serduchka as a mediator between the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet world. The book focuses on three significant Ukrainian novels written between the two Maidans: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko (2009), Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan (2010), and Notes of a Ukrainian Madman by Lina Kostenko (2010).