Transit Culture and Postcolonical Trauma - by Tamara Hundorova (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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).

About the Author

Tamara Hundorova is Principal Researcher at Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the NAS of Ukraine and Associate of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. She is the author of several books, including the acclaimed The Post-Chornobyl Library. The Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (2019). She taught at Princeton and Harvard University and had fellowships in the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan and Germany. Currently, she is a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany).