ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the question of Polish engagement in modern colonial projects and how contemporary Polish political discourse denies this uncomfortable legacy. Poland’s colonial aspirations first arose in the aftermath of World War I. Even though colonialism was never directly supported by the interwar Polish government, the influence of the Maritime and Colonial League – an organization advocating colonial expansion – grew gradually until 1939, when it had around a million members. The author argues that colonialism in interwar Poland functioned as a marker of modernity, and that the failure to acquire colonies overseas defined the state as insufficiently modern. The author claims that, in political discourse today, the Polish–Haitian connection – a curious legacy of Napoleonic times – is often used as a smokescreen to cover the fact that Poland once actively sought opportunities to acquire colonies overseas. The myth of heroic Polish participation in the Haitian Revolution now serves to rebut accusations of racist prejudice in Poland or to resist political recognition of social diversity persistent in Polish politics. Additionally, the article discusses how contemporary media and art represent Haiti and Haitian Poles and how some works set an example of ethical engagement with postcolonial studies in the Polish context.

ABSTRACT Russia’s war on Ukraine has cast a pall on Russian studies. At North American universities and colleges, faculty have conducted forums to help students understand how this senseless war came about. Enrolment in Russian language courses is down, while interest in Polish and Ukrainian is on the rise. Russian literature and cultural history are imbued with an imperial and colonial tradition that the author seeks to decolonize in his teaching. Aleksandr Pushkin was in favour of conquering the Caucasus, while Nikolai Gogol′, a colonial outsider, negotiated his place in the empire. Russian and Western histories pay little attention to Ukraine, and that needs correction. Kyivan Rus needs to be treated as a state in its own right. Reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine will have to be based on Russia’s recognition of Ukraine as a separate and independent state. Russian studies need to be decolonized, and, following Canada’s lead, US institutions should develop Ukrainian studies.

ABSTRACT Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine has brought Ukraine to the centre of academic and public attention. The fact that Ukraine did not immediately collapse surprised the global community and forced many to ask an important question: what is Ukraine? Although Ukraine received media attention worldwide during the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, for many in “the West,” Ukraine has remained an “unexpected nation” that seems to exist only during brief periods of international media coverage. The paper argues that thinking about Ukrainian studies not as a threat to the fields of “European” and “Slavic” studies, but as an analytical category, can open up a vantage point from which scholars can critically examine epistemological hierarchies of power and inequalities in the fields.

ABSTRACT This paper discusses Soviet Marxist historical narratives of the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to reframe Russian history as a process driven by commercial capital and analyzed Russian territorial expansion and its historical scholarship in terms such as settler colonialism and indigenous erasure. As of now, the corpus of works by early Soviet Marxist historians still represents the most massive and sustained effort to challenge imperial narratives of Russian history from within the Russian academic community. Resonating with current conversations about Russian imperialism and colonialism, this intellectual tradition represents a major contribution to the postcolonial turn in studies of Russian history.

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the problem of the decolonization of Crimea within the context of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. Both authors agree that the decolonization of Crimea involves a complex intellectual challenge for Ukrainian society and for the rest of the world. For centuries Crimea was a settler colony of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In 2014, Russia resumed its settler-colonial project by means of discrimination against the indigenous Crimean Tatar people, persecution of political prisoners, and mass resettlement of Russian citizens to the occupied territory. Since 2014, Ukraine has rediscovered Crimea and Crimean Tatars. While the general perception of Crimean Tatars has become more positive within Ukrainian society, there is still no agreement on the future of the de-occupied peninsula. While Ukrainian society generally agrees that Crimea should be an integral part of Ukraine, some of the views about Crimea’s future are rooted in the narratives produced by colonizers for the purposes of colonization. This essay shows that military de-occupation does not equal decolonization and that some complicated questions remain unanswered.

ABSTRACT This article discusses sociolinguistic aspects of belonging through the phenomenon of Russophone Ukrainian authors who have either switched to Ukrainian or continued using Russian during the Russo-Ukrainian War. It draws on a survey that the author has conducted over the past several months of 30 such authors. Fifteen respondents, who during the war have opted to withdraw from their main language of creativity in favour of another, are compared to a second group of 15 respondents, who continue using Russian as their language of creativity. The article engages with these authors’ reflections and reasoning as to why they have given up (or not given up) the Russian language in favour of Ukrainian, and it offers some considerations on the sociopolitical implications of making (or declining to make) such a switch, as well as questions of self-decolonization, linguistic affiliation, and sociocultural peripheries and marginality.

ABSTRACT This article engages Asia Bazdyrieva’s idea of the “resourcification” of Ukraine – that is, the reduction of Ukraine in Soviet and Western geopolitical imaginations to a mere extraction resource – to develop and criticize the idea of “academic resourcification.” The author argues that Western researchers have often treated Ukrainian (and other non-Western) subjects as extraction resources, mining their expertise and knowledge, without acknowledging their agency or contributions in their work. The article argues for the decolonization of Western academic practice in the form of “delinking” from such exploitative and extractivist paradigms of knowledge production and instead aspiring, in the words of the decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo, to “thinking and doing otherwise.” Asking what it means to decolonize academia, the article turns for inspiration to Ukrainian decolonial researcher-artist-activists, considering the ways in which these individuals are modelling more equitable and ethical forms of knowledge production. The article ends by advocating collaborative methods – that is, the co-production of knowledge with local thinkers, rather than about them – as a productive model for Western scholars in their efforts to decolonize their research.

"Ingredients of change: the history and culture of food in modern Bulgaria." Canadian Slavonic Papers, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

"Catherine the Great and the culture of celebrity in the eighteenth century." Canadian Slavonic Papers, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2