Escape to Postcolonialism. Traps of the East European Dscourse of Postcolonial Theory
The paper discusses the circulation of the concept of postcoloniality from Western Academia to Eastern European context of research. On the one hand, the proliferation of meanings of postcoloniality results from the heterogeneity of the postcolonial theory that combines various components of postmodern, feminist and emancipatory discourses. On the other hand, the notions of “postcoloniality” and “postcolonial society” become vaguely comprehensive and too easily identified with post-communism or post-socialism. At the turn of the century many researchers decided to incorporate the concept of a historical European domination over the Orient and people from the Middle East to analyse the relics of communist regimes in Eastern Europe: a colonialized man has been transformed into a homo sovieticus. The paper focuses on the concepts borrowed from the postcolonial theory which used in the Eastern European context might change into an ideological voice trapped in the specific discourse of modernization and otherness.
