From the Editors

10 From the Editors From the EDITORS The present issue of Ab Imperio is focused on practices and discourses of “nurturing” the political, cultural, and social subject of the empire. It has proven to be one of the most difficult for the editors in all the years of AI’s existence. We invited scholars who work on de- or reconstruction of individual and collective codes of subjectivation as well as those who study practices of production and description of the modern subject in heterogeneous imperial space to participate in this discussion. One of our tasks was not just to consider Russian imperial history in light of the main tenets of postcolonial theory, but also to conduct a critical analysis of postcolonial approaches in the context of Russian history. Here one recognizes the need to overcome binary oppositions like “colonizer vs. colonized,” “metropole vs. colony,” “Orientalism vs. Euro-centrism,” and “Self vs. the Other” in which the latter part of each opposition was proclaimed by postcolonial theorists to be an outcome of false representation by the hegemonic discourse of the former. The editors are grateful to all the authors of the present issue – both to those who submitted their materials independently and to those invited by the editors – for their willingness to take part in this collective experiment. We hope the results will contribute to a fruitful discussion on the prospects for a postcolonial reading of Russian and Soviet history at the present historiographic stage. As the authors of the articles in this issue and, above all, the participants in the round table on the applicability of postcolonial approaches to the legacy of the Russian Empire demonstrate, Russian history “naturally” resists 11 Ab Imperio, 2/2008 the Manichean interpretations of early postcolonial theory. Russia and the USSR were contiguous states and the boundaries between the metropole and the colony were flexible, dynamic, and porous. At different times in their histories, these states described themselves both in imperial and in national terms; they practiced segregation and cultivated major and minor differences and various sorts of “fusions,” “approximations,” etc. This is why we believe that the present stage of postcolonial discourse, which is increasingly blurring the boundaries between the metropole and the colony and focusing more and more on the practices of domination in pan-imperial contexts, is capable of inspiring scholars of the Russian empire and the USSR. Unlike representatives of “subaltern” historiography, for whom the postcolonial turn was inseparable from intellectual and political emancipation , scholars of Russia and the USSR do not need to leave behind the achievements of politics of identity when reconsidering old methodological approaches. Rather, in the conditions of post-Soviet historiography, one can speak of the need to overcome nation- and ethno-centric approaches, both those of the dominant and the dominated. Our discipline also does not face the problems encountered by historians of the British Empire, who had traditionally viewed British colonies as a sphere of the colonial “Other” with no access, either historically or in academic discourse, to the interior of British society so as to have any possibility of influencing or ordering the life and political structure of the metropole. This view has recently been revised within the framework of a new imperial history of Great Britain. Its adherents are interested in how the bourgeois culture of the metropole attempted to structure social relations in the colony and inside the metropole itself by means of intervention into the intimate sphere of human life including regulation of the family, child-rearing practices, education, politics of the body, and medical and hygienic knowledge. In this sense, it is in some ways advantageous that Russian and post-Soviet historiography needs to “catch up” with British imperial historiography. It is very important that rejection of binary models by postcolonial theory occurs simultaneously with increased attention to the problems of cultural contacts, heterogeneity, contextuality of historical experience and narratives produced by it, liminal situations and identities, and multi-vectored interactions between the “colonizers” and the “colonized.” These very categories lose their earlier monolithic nature and break down along social, economic, gender, cultural and regional criteria. Such a revision cannot but attract specialists in the history of continental empires and...