“Subalterns” of Colonization in the Scholarly, Journalistic and Literary Heritage of Nikolai Yadrintsev

Abstract

Modern postcolonial studies have developed the definition of internal colonization as a system of regular practices of colonial government and knowledge within the political boundaries of the state. On this scale, relations are formed between the state and its subjects, in which the state treats its subjects as subdued in the course of the conquest, and its own territory as conquered, mysterious, and requiring settlement and “inculturation” from the center. At the same time, the main elements of imperial domination, implemented through coercion, are cultural expansion, hegemony of power, ethnic assimilation within the state borders. The Russian culture of the 19th century formed the plot of internal colonization. It was built around the conflict between the “Man of Power and Culture” and the “Man from the People”. The latter is positioned in the article as a “colonial subaltern” – a disadvantaged, marginalized individual (group) with limited subjectivity. The concept of the subaltern, which is based on A. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony as a variant of voluntary acceptance of relations of domination, suggests that the dominance of the “Man of Power and Culture” is based on the consent of the governed rather than on the methods of violence and genocide. The assertion of the fact that Russia is created through self-colonization and self-sacrifice, and Russian identity is both that of the sovereign and of the subaltern, requires adequate argumentation through rereading and interpreting the plots of internal colonization. In the center of internal colonization are the well-known events of Siberian history: exile and katorga, resettlement, non-Russian question, social life of the borderland, etc. The literary heritage of Nikolai Yadrintsev (articles, poems, feuilletons) provides an opportunity not only to reconstruct the images of “colonial subalternity”, to reconstruct significant episodes of the collective biography of subalterns or to rank them as the indigenous population, old-timers of the region, resettlers from European Russia, but also to hear the voices of the “subalterns” themselves. The postcolonial perspective of the study of the literary works of Yadrintsev, a representative of the liberal segment of the Russian sociopolitical discourse, opens up prospects for identifying the practices and forms of resistance of the voiceless subalterns, the mechanisms of their oppression by both the colonialists and the traditional patriarchal power. When formulating the key findings of the study, the author takes into account that “subalterns”, as a category of the internal colonization process, are initially in double exclusion: their “invisibility” and “inaudibility” is replaced by the right of competing political actors to represent the interests of the subaltern. This invariably creates the danger of perceiving subalterns as coherent political subjects.