Contemporary Ukrainian Literature: The Frontiers of Freedom

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel seeks to address the complexity and contentiousness of liberation in the context of contemporary Ukrainian literature. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of independent Ukraine, and Ukraine’s current resistance against Russia’s military aggression further triggered and amplified the necessity to remove patriarchal hierarchies, reevaluate the center-periphery relations, work through the experience of the colonized and the oppressed, and reckon with the traumatic past. Enrique Dussell describes the philosophy of liberation as postmodern and profeminine, and explains that it sets out from the periphery but uses the language of the center (The Philosophy of Liberation). While there is a shift in power roles and dynamics that involves the undermining of the dominators, liberation also entails the empowering of the oppressed. Building on Michel Foucault’s understanding of power, this panel will address liberation from power and liberation toward power. Contemporary Ukrainian literature explores anxieties and contestations that increase the instabilities and precarities accompanying the upending of the relations that triggered the contestation. The panel speakers highlight liberation as an event and a process that seeks to process traumatic pasts, reconcile with the experience of the oppressed, and engage in the (re)creation of a livable present while incorporating an unlivable past.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Halyna Hryn, Harvard U

Papers

• Looking to the Past to Forge a Future: Lyuba Yakimchuk and the Legacy of the Executed Renaissance - Jemma Paek, Harvard U

• Liberation from Fear as a Сross-Cutting Plot of Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fiction - Tetiana Grebeniuk, Zaporizhzhia State Medical and Pharmaceutical U (Ukraine)

• Oles Barlih: Queering Myths for Legitimization - Ali Karakaya, Stanford U

• In Search of Fleeting Freedom: Oksana Lutsyshyna’s 'Ivan and Phoebe' - Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed, Harvard U

Discussant

• Catherine B. O'Neil, US Naval Academy