Transit Culture and Postcolonical Trauma - by Tamara Hundorova

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).

Review Quotes

"As anyone who has studied Ukrainian history will know, Russia's brutal full-scale invasion of 2022 did not come out of nowhere. It is the latest phase in a centuries-old imperialist campaign to eradicate Ukraine as a political subject and a cultural entity. That campaign has left deep scars on Ukrainian culture, yet it has also created a culture of resistance and resilience, of ingenuity and irreverence. To help us understand how Ukraine not only survived but also thrived culturally after it won its independence, there is no better guide than Tamara Hundorova, one of Ukraine's most influential cultural critics. From colonial traumas to imagined geographies, from raucous hybridity to biopolitics, Hundorova leads us down the myriad roads that Ukrainian culture has taken through the challenges of recent decades to emerge bruised but unbowed. The book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand Ukraine, a country on whose reserves of cultural strength the future global order, to a large degree, depends."

--Uilleam Blacker, Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Co-host of the podcast The Ukraine Shelf.

"Tamara Hundorova's nuanced, in-depth analysis shows how the novels and short stories of the last few decades can help us to see and understand the patterns and contradictions of the historical situation in which we find ourselves. Ukrainian writing always reflects and comments on the complex and painful moments that history leaves behind. Literature always asks uncomfortable questions--about our fragmentation and our trauma, but also about our rootedness and continuity. Don't be afraid to talk about trauma. How else are we going to get rid of it?"

--Serhiy Zhadan, Ukrainian poet and novelist

"In this new edition, the book has been expanded and reinterpreted in the context of colonial war. Transit Culture embodies Hundorova's original perspective on seemingly familiar things and her insightful analysis, utilizing appropriate theoretical models--all presented with elegance and clarity."

--Marko Pavlyshyn, Monash University, Australia

"Transit Culture or Postcolonial Trauma is a unique book. It is an attempt to look at the underlying layers of traumatic experiences that Ukraine has not yet processed since becoming independent in 1991--experiences that include the Euromaidan, intergenerational trauma and conflicts, post-Chornobyl syndrome, and Soviet nostalgia. Yet the significance of Hundorova's Transit Culture is far greater. It is a rethinking of some of the 'old ideas' that were articulated prior to February 23, 2022, and a reflection on the radical homelessness of millions of Ukrainians trying to understand what is happening to them 'in the world after transit and after Bucha.'"

--Oleksandr Pronkevych, Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukraine

About the Author

Tamara Hundorova is Principal Researcher at Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Science 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).