KharkivPride2024

Action of commemoration of the fallen LGBTQ+ soldiers’ KharkivPride 2024. Photo: Christina Pashkina.

Essays Who gets to speak about the past?

This essay reflects on the issues of the past, memory practices, decolonisation, and reconciliation, as discussed during the 2024 CBEES Summer School. The author applies these reflections to think of her own research on LGBTQ+ Ukrainians’ wartime embodied relationalities, and how the discussed issues might manifest for her studied group. She further reflects on importance of positionality in discussions on postwar memory.

Published on balticworlds.com on October 7, 2024

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Reflections on the CBEES Summer School “The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the ‘Post’”

Abstract: This essay reflects on the issues of the past, memory practices, decolonisation, and reconciliation, as discussed during the 2024 CBEES Summer School. The author applies these reflections to think of her own research on LGBTQ+ Ukrainians’ wartime embodied relationalities, and how the discussed issues might manifest for her studied group. She further reflects on importance of positionality in discussions on postwar memory.

Key words: Russo-Ukrainian war, positionality, memory practices, LGBTQ+, Eastern European coloniality

Introduction

In this essay, I am offering some reflections and insights from my participation in this year’s CBEES Summer School “The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the ‘Post’”. The prism of my reflections is informed by the doctoral research project I am currently working on, tentatively called “LGBTQ+ Ukrainians’ Wartime Embodied Relationalities: Negotiating and Navigating the Time and Space of Injustice”, and my personal experience as a Ukrainian woman who had to flee the Russian war in 2022. My research aims to explore how LGBTQ+ Ukrainians negotiate and navigate their embodied relationalities[1] amidst re-established wartime normativities of gendered Ukrainian nationhood and citizenship, and multiple spatio-temporal injustices these normativities produce — such as, for example, gay Ukrainian men being drafted to the military for an indefinite term while marriage equality remains non-existent in Ukraine. The topic of the School is indeed relevant to my research, as both are dealing with the issues of the historical memory and problematic contested past, as well as, entering the perspective of future memorialization, with the question of “what’s next?”. To reflect on the readings and study sessions offered during the schools, I have organised them around three main topics: facing the past and “post”; challenging and being challenged by the present entangled with the past and memories; reconciling — through bodies and landscapes.

Facing the past and “post”

We started with the key topic of “facing the past” — or rather, various pasts, and “post-s” they bring around. For the Eastern European region, which was at focus of the school, it is the pasts of the Soviet regime and World War II that are at stake.[2] The ways these pasts can be “operated” and talked about are, indeed, very different.

Professor Irina Sandomirskaja’s initial lecture, The End of the “Post,” or What Comes After the After?, addressed the “return of the past”[3] and preparing for the “afterness” of a catastrophe, the Russo-Ukrainian war taken as an example of such catastrophe. In the next paragraphs, I will outline some of the key takeaway points I have taken from the lecture.

The first keypoint is that we start thinking of “what is going to happen after This” as soon as what we characterise as a “catastrophe” happens, and even while it is still happening. Doing so allows us to find the words — and, probably, senses, — for what is going on. A part of this process is looking for analogies in other stories we’ve already lived through. For instance, Russia’s attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022 prompted comparisons to the unannounced early morning attack on the USSR by the Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941. These analogies, however, are considered harmful by historians, as they erase completely different contexts and presuppositions of seemingly “similar” historical events and drive us into an illusion that the history “repeats itself”. Imagined analogies bring to life anachronisms which are considered alien to historical science.[4]

The second takeaway point from Sandomirskaja’s lecture is that in order to continue political existence, the post-war cities have to “bury” the memories of a catastrophe — by sorting the “bad memories” and putting them “in a box”, an Erynia, ancient Greek deity of revenge, to be placed on the top of each box.[5] A difference between “forgetting as amnesia” and “forgetting as amnesty” should be made.[6] Also, the prefix “post” has little meaning on its own; its task is to organize and structure our world with the meanings and temporalities it provides us with.[7] We should thus be very attentive to the ways we are using this “post” in order not to confuse ourselves in the temporal structures we are building with our language.

The next lecture, by Professor Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, addressed populism in memory discourses in contemporary Central, Eastern, and South-eastern Europe, with focus on Poland and Hungary. Upon an overview of populism as a political phenomenon and its signs, Törnquist-Plewa introduced her core argument: that Eastern European populist regimes “securitize”[8] memories of communist terror, making them an instrument of power and governing. This results in “nationalization,” as a part of decolonization agenda, and “re-nationalization” of memories — fortifying collective identity of the nation around the memories of past “heroism and sacrifice”,[9] and rejecting the “cosmopolitan approach” to history.[10] Thus, it is ensured that memories serve to “strengthen the national community and contribute to its cohesion”.[11] Further on, the memories of communist terror in Eastern Europe are used to create discourses of victimization — “we have suffered, too,” mythologize “heroes and their sacrifices”, and “suppress” the nation’s memories of acting as perpetrators themselves[12]. In the case of Eastern European populist regimes, Törnquist-Plewa argued, what comes next is “victimhood competition,” the nations arguing that the communist terror was not acknowledged as strongly as Holocaust was. These nations lean to building their “social capital” upon victimization.

Both lectures provided a very strong argument and an incredibly valuable theoretical overview of related scholarship. Törnquist-Plewa’s insights on Eastern European states building their memory politics around national victimization and the past suffering not acknowledged enough by “the West” are particularly relevant to my research on LGBTQ+ Ukrainians’ relationalities, as Ukraine is a part of the “Eastern Europe as a memory region”,[13] too, with our particular history of communist repressions and Holodomor. Moreover, Ukraine goes through an active process of memory-making now, as we are gaining new memories of suffering with every next day of the war — and I would not say this suffering and its roots, the Russian aggression, are always sufficiently acknowledged outside of Ukraine. So, it is important to inquiry on how this can affect Ukrainian memory politics in the future, and how it might impact LGBTQ+ Ukrainians’ lives, this group being a subject to intersectional[14] victimization.

However, I have found some important questions still unanswered after the two initial lectures of the School. When one says that “we start thinking of our life after the catastrophe already as soon as it happens”[15] — who are these “we”, and whose catastrophe are “we” thinking of? We have been talking in detail about harmfulness of anachronisms, so “out-of-timeness”, but I would say anatopism, “out-of-spaceness”, or, rather, “out-of-positionality” is no less dangerous. Different “we” have different possibilities to speak and think about “the after”: the way, for instance, the “possible after” of the Russo-Ukrainian war can be projected by established Western scholars and by Ukrainians themselves varies a lot. Neutrality, objectivity, taking multiple perspectives into account — all of that is rather inaccessible to those directly impacted by the catastrophe, whose losses and risks can be nothing but statistics and “sad facts” for an outsider. But does it make the account of those impacted less important? While my answer is “no, and should not, at any point”, those trying to speak from the eye of the storm are too often gently dismissed as “too subjective, too emotionally invested, not seeing a bigger picture” — and this indeed does not only happen to Ukrainians.[16] So, my main takeaway point from Sandomirskaja’s lecture is to be even more attentive to defining precise positionalities from which “the afters” are being thought of, and paying attention to immediate experiences and standpoints of those most affected by the catastrophes, for their temporal subjectivity is already under the risk of erasure with other kinds of subjectivities they might have had.

For the same positionality reasons, I have found myself having more questions than answers following Törnquist-Plewa’s lecture. There’s little doubt that Eastern European populist regimes use “ontological insecurities”[17] in building their memory politics and instrumentalizing them to a certain extent. Yet were the terror and crimes of the communist regime(s) in Eastern Europe actually acknowledged enough, and isn’t the current damage brought by this under-acknowledgement real as it helps masking Russia’s colonialism and expansionist ambitions? And doesn’t it make it harder for Eastern Europeans to explain to everyone else a very sensible insecurity pervading the regional IR, starting, at the very least, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? What I am trying to point at is that although I have no doubt Eastern European populist regimes do nationalize and securitize memories the way Törnquist-Plewa outlined, the roots for “memory securitization” in the region lie deeper and should not be taken simply as political tools of those hungry for power. The fact that these memories get instrumentalized by the politicians we (feminists, queers, scholars) do not want to see in power, does not mean that we ourselves should stop talking about what happened and how it affects our present and future. My stance is that decolonization of Eastern Europe should continue, and talking about atrocities of the communist regime is an inseparable part of it — even if these discussions do not sound very pleasant to a Western spectator, ridden by their own historical guilts.[18]

Cha(lle)nging the present

Our second group of topics addressed dealing with “complicated pasts” in the present. This includes decolonization issues as presented by Professor Yuliya Yurchuk; “transnationalist translingual” literature by female migrant writers as presented by Professor Eneken Laanes, and dealing with the “unburied dead” from the past and “remembering as a social practice”[19] as presented by Professor Florence Fröhlig.

Fröhlig gave us an overview, based on Ricoeur’s theory of “memory as an exercise” and active social practice of constructing a narrative,[20] of her own research on memory practices in former Soviet Union, including “forced memorialization” of the “Great Patriotic War” and “recasting of imposed memorial narratives” following dissolution of the USSR.[21] Fröhlig warned that such manipulations with memory, aiming to instrumentalize it as a tool of power, produce what she called “the unburied dead” — hidden, suppressed memories of the events and sufferings that didn’t “make it to the final cut” of an official historical narrative, yet tend to “return” in “uncanny ways”, disturbing those living with demands for justice.[22] As an example of such memories, we discussed the histories of those who were mobilized to the Nazi troops during the WWII and later were captured and imprisoned in the Soviet Union. It is usually the third generation that has to deal with the “unburied dead”, as for the second generation the wound is still “too fresh”.[23] In my research, problematics of repressed memories matter in a sense that LGBTQ+ Ukrainians have to deal with memories of their own conflicts and oppression by right-wing forces, particularly, in the years following the Euromaidan revolution;[24] under current circumstances, discussing and even processing these memories might contradict wartime societal norms. The memories of coming of age in the pre-Euromaidan Ukraine, where most of queer culture was imported from Russia, might become another problem for queer Ukrainians. It is not clear how generational work on “burying the dead” might manifest in LGBTQ+ Ukrainians, who mostly do not have access to reproduction under Ukrainian laws. So, a lot of complexities can be predicted in this particular sphere of societal life and dealing with the war memories currently accumulating — not even mentioning the cases of those living under the Russian occupation and collaborating with the occupants, whether voluntarily or not.

Yurchuk gave us a broad and theoretically dense overview of the current decolonial and postcolonial scholarship, presenting a wide range of theorists including Annibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Madina Tlostanova, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Jade McGlynn, Maria Sonevitsky, Lisa Lowe, and Laura Doyle. Yurchuk addressed the struggles Ukrainian scholars have had trying to connect Ukraine’s case with Russia to the wider decolonial scholarship — indeed, a complicated task given the difference between Russian colonialism in Ukraine and transatlantic colonialism’s historical contexts, as well as Ukrainians’ and Russians’ phenotypical proximity which makes theorizing on Ukrainians’ racialization even more complicated.[25] Further on, the lecture focused on multiple processes supporting “decolonization of memory” in Ukrainian context — de- and recanonization of certain memories, for instance, that of the UPA fighters; remediation of “problematic figures” and the “cult of the new martyrs” developing in the wartime Ukraine; relabeling of art — for instance, of Ukrainian-born artists widely labelled as “Russian/Soviet”, Malevich being the most prominent example. My main takeaway point from this lecture was the impossibility of “buying” existing decolonial theory “in a package” to serve the Ukrainian case:[26] it always needs to be re-adjusted to our realities. Another key point was on Ukraine’s “interimperiality”:[27] the condition of Ukraine being subjected simultaneously to the Russian and Western colonialisms. It is especially relevant to my research on LGBTQ+ Ukrainians’ relationalities, as questions of gender and sexuality had been long used as “markers” to define geopolitical and geotemporal belonging, “LGBT-tolerance” being perceived as a sign of “Europeanness” whereas homophobia being drawn as a sign of specific “Eastern European backwardness”[28] It also gave me an impulse to think about how the “cult of the new martyrs” intersects with the LGBTQ+ soldiers’ community and issues, and how the practices of remembering fallen queer Ukrainian soldiers might develop. As of now, testimonies are that while closeted LGBTQ+ Ukrainian soldiers who were killed on the war are being praised as Ukrainians, their queerness appears to be “ungrievable”,[29] those mourning from the queer community fearing to posthumously out them to family and colleagues[30].

Laanes’s lecture on “transnationalist translingual” literature was perhaps the least applicable for my research as her scholarship operates within the literary studies field, and I am developing an anthropological project. However, the concept of the “memories born translated” outlined in Laanes’s reading for this School[31] might appear useful for analyzing artistic practices of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians abroad, aiming to connect to their new communities and make their experiences “intelligible”.[32] And just as Laanes argues, these attempts might end up in problematic ways, prompting “dehistoricization” of queer Ukrainians’ experiences and erasure of important contextual details, such as racialization dynamics between Ukrainians, Russians, and “the West.”

Thinking of the “after”: reconciliation, reconstruction, inheritance

The final thematic strand we have discussed was that of post-war reconciliation and reconstruction practices, presented by Professor Mannergren Selimovic and Dr Bădescu. Both topics can be connected to Sandomirskaja’s concluding lecture on the concepts of “heritage”, returns and repetitions, and (im)possibilities to actually “do” anything with the past.

The lecture on reconciliation, peace, and politics of memory by Mannergren Selimovic was drawing on her research of memory politics in the Balkans, and has tackled the issues of power, performativity, continuing violence, and strategic silences in the reconciliation process. We discussed how reconciliation can be perceived within two models, “thick” and “thin”, “thick reconciliation” implying that the post-war societies return completely to the pre-war coexisting modes, “as if the war never happened”, which usually is not the case. The “thin reconciliation” means a much more subtle process, where the societies learn to coexist again with respect to what they have been through — and “thin” reconciliation, still, is often not successful.[33] We have also discussed that reconciliation can happen on different scales, from individual to global; that it can be “imported” by the outsider actors (as, for instance, the Dayton Agreement in the case of the Balkans); that some communities choose “strategic” silences and forgetting in order to navigate post-war realities, and that these silences, depending on circumstances, can be either enabling or disabling. My main takeaway point from Mannergren Selimovic’s lecture and assigned paper was, however, that reconciliation is a rather problematic concept, and is seldom successful at all: the most “successful” cases emerge when for some reasons conflicting communities are simply forced to continue coexisting, and they choose to not speak of the past in order to be able to somehow bear with the present.[34] Such an outcome had already been predicted for Ukrainians and Russians by Ukrainian writer Kateryna Babkina in the initial stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion; back then, it had met a fierce backlash from Ukrainian society.[35] However, as the time passes, I am myself growing concerned that this might become a case for Ukrainians at some point — especially for those who were driven abroad by the war, and who already often have to coexist with Russian diaspora in various ways, even though the war is going on. Mannergren Selimovic’s lecture and paper have provided me with a great theoretical base to think about this complicated issue.

Bădescu’s lecture on the post-war architectural reconstruction and memorialization practices gave us an overview on different frames of urban destruction, reconstruction, and work of memory done around destroyed and reconstructed buildings. While not directly addressing the issues I will be dealing with in my research, this lecture has provided me with valuable theoretical insights on emotional attachments to the places — particularly, of “ruins as traces” testifying of the war and presenting embodied memory.[36] These insights might come in hand for my analysis of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians’ relating to their hometowns, particularly to the sites of destruction. The lecture also hinted me to closely watch the ongoing development of spatial memorialization practices in Ukraine, and how they will be dealing with memorializing queer fallen fighters and victims of Russian attacks — in connection with previous insights from Yurchuk’s lecture, on decolonization and the “cult of new martyrs.”

Finally, the concluding lecture by Sandomirskaja brought us back to the questions of “the past as heritage” addressed in the initial lecture and some of the assigned readings.[37] The main offering of the lecture was to think of “heritage,” including the heritage of historical events, not as of “a capital and property of the past,” but as of “responsibility to the future,” the inheritance that is “never a given, but is always a task”.[38] Another critical point was that of impossibility to somehow manipulate the past, and “bring it back” in any form — even though we are surrounded by manifold phenomena creating an illusion of such possibility, for instance, art restoration practices. Thinking of how these theses could be applied to my research, I am circling back to the issue of Ukrainian scholars being “in the eye of the storm” regardless of their physical whereabouts: indeed, we will have to process the war at some point and turn it into a “heritage” tasking us with responsibility. But in the current moment of war and destruction, we are so immersed in our “violently expanded present”[39] that it is hardly really an option. Does it mean that someone else will be, once again, processing the “heritage” of our war for us, instead of us? Would it be “parachuted” on us together with some forms of “compulsory” “reconciliation”? Will we be mentored by some Western scholars and politicians on how we should present our carriages of pain and loss so that they sound “decent”? I wish these questions did not feel rhetorical to me.

Another important question is: to whom shall we have this future responsibility? Would it be the responsibility to (and of) the future generations of Ukrainians, so that they do not forget about the war and resist Russia’s further attempts to merge Ukraine should it fail to defeat us in the current war? Or would it be the responsibility to acknowledge our own faults during this war the rest of the world might demand from us, likely disproportionately harsh compared to the accountability urges addressed to Russia? Or should we rather talk about separate, “smaller”, personal responsibilities of the individuals who are currently making decisions likely impacting several further generations of their lineage — to stay, to leave, to join the army, to give birth during the war, to cancel plans of having a child, etc. As we can see, there is no one homogenous “us” when we are talking about who is made responsible by the “heritage” we are bearing, and this responsibility is by no means singular.

Conclusion

As I am on the initial stages of my research, and do not yet have much data to analyze through the prism of the School discussions, I would say I have gained from them more questions than answers on how memory and “haunting”[40] pasts are and will be working in the case of Ukraine, and what could be the specificities of this work for those identifying as LGBTQ+ Ukrainians. I am happy to be equipped with these questions now that I am about to embark on my research. I also find the insight from the School on the importance of positionality and standpoints when talking about the past to be extremely valuable. As a researcher, I am looking forward to applying these insights together with literature discussed during the School to my project. As a Ukrainian, however, I am concerned more than ever before about what shapes and implications might our practices of memory[41] take under the pressure of war, Russian aggression, and interimperiality[42] Ukrainians are subjected to.

Note: On the photo from KharkivPride2024 one could add that the action featured 12 portraits of fallen LGBTQ+ soldiers, but since only two of them came out in their lifetime, the rest of the faces were anonymised through pixelisation, and their full names were omitted.

References

[1] Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 2 (September 1997): 281–317, https://doi.org/10.1086/231209.

[2] Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Eastern and Central Europe as a Region of Memory. Some Common Traits,” in Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past : A Comparative Study on Memory Management in the Region, ed. Ninna Mörner (Stockholm: Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, CBEES, Södertörn University, 2020), 15–23.

[3] Jacques Derrida, “Spectres of Marx,” New Left Review 205, no. May-June 1994 (1994): 31–58.

[4] Irina Sandomirskaja, “The End of the ‘Post’, or What Comes after the After?” (CBEES Summer School 2024 “The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the ‘Post,’” August 13, 2024).

[5] Nicole Loraux, The Divided City (Princeton University Press, 2002).

[6] Ibid.

[7] Sandomirskaja, 2024, drawing from Emile Benveniste.

[8] Maria Mälksoo, “‘Memory Must Be Defended’: Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security,” Security Dialogue 46, no. 3 (February 26, 2015): 221–37, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010614552549.

[9] Törnquist-Plewa, “Eastern and Central Europe as a Region of Memory,” 17.

[10] Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Populism in Memory Discourses in Contemporary Central. Eastern and Southeastern Europe.” (CBEES Summer School 2024 “The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the ‘Post,’” August 13, 2024).

[11] Törnquist-Plewa, “Eastern and Central Europe as a Region of Memory,” 17.

[12] Törnquist-Plewa, “Populism in Memory Discourses in Contemporary Central. Eastern and Southeastern Europe”.

[13] Törnquist-Plewa, “Eastern and Central Europe as a Region of Memory”.

[14] Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.

[15] Sandomirskaja, 2024, drawing from Hobsbawm.

[16] Vitaly Chernetsky, “Centering Ukraine in the Paradigm Shift in East European Studies,” in A World Order in Transformation? A Comparative Study of Consequences of the War and Reactions to These Changes in the Region, ed. Ninna Mörner (Stockholm: Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, CBEES, Södertörn University, 2024), 23–30.

[17] Mälksoo, “‘Memory Must Be Defended’: Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security.”

[18] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984): 333–58, https://www.jstor.org/stable/302821; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Die Philosophin 14, no. 27 (1988): 42–58.

[19] Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2004).

[20] ibid.

[21] Florence Fröhlig, “Victimhood and Building Identities on Past Suffering,” in Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past : A Comparative Study on Memory Management in the Region, ed. Ninna Mörner (Stockholm: Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, CBEES, Södertörn University, 2020), 23–28.

[22] ibid.

[23] ibid.

[24] Olga Plakhotnik, “Imaginaries of Sexual Citizenship in Post-Maidan Ukraine: A Queer Feminist Discursive Investigation” (Doctoral Thesis, 2019).

[25] David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/463645; Mykoła Riabczuk, “Inny Kolonializm. O Możliwości Zaaplikowania Metodologii Postkolonialnej Do Studiów Nad Europą Postkomunistyczną [Colonialism in Another Way. On the Applicability of Postcolonial Methodology for the Study of Postcommunist Europe],” Porównania13, no. December (December 2, 2013): 47, https://doi.org/10.14746/p.2013.13.10972; Yuliya Yurchuk, “Discussions on Decolonisation of Memory in CEE. ” (CBEES Summer School 2024 “The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the ‘Post,’” August 15, 2024).

[26] Yurchuk, “Discussions on Decolonisation of Memory in CEE”.

[27] Laura Doyle, Inter-Imperiality (Duke University Press, 2020).

[28] Maria Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005): 140–64, https://doi.org/10.2307/3650070; Francesca Romana Ammaturo, “The ‘Pink Agenda’: Questioning and Challenging European Homonationalist Sexual Citizenship,” Sociology 49, no. 6 (February 3, 2015): 1151–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038514559324; Hadley Z. Renkin, “Homophobia and Queer Belonging in Hungary,” Focaal 2009, no. 53 (March 1, 2009): 20–37, https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2009.530102; Hadley Z. Renkin, “‘Far from the Space of Tolerance’: Hungary and the Biopolitical Geotemporality of Postsocialist Homophobia,” Sexuality & Culture 27, no. 6 (October 11, 2023): 2084–2104, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-023-10155-2.

[29] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009).

[30] Maryna Usmanova, “Ну й до дня пам’яті захисників, що загинули… [So, for the Remembering Day of Our Fallen Defenders…],” Facebook (blog), August 29, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/bdz9sjaz.

[31] Eneken Laanes, “Born Translated Memories: Transcultural Memorial Forms, Domestication and Foreignisation,” Memory Studies 14, no. 1 (February 2021): 41–57, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020976459.

[32] Butler, Frames of War.

[33] Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, “The Politics of Reconciliation and Memory,” in Handbook on the Politics of Memory, ed. Maria Mälksoo (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023), 191–203.

[34] ibid.; Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, “The Politics of Reconciliation and Memory. ” (CBEES Summer School 2024 “The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the ‘Post,’” August 14, 2024).

[35] Lesya Bašić, “Відповідь Катерині Бабкіній. Чи доведеться нам пробачати росіянам за Бучу, або Чому порівнювати Боснію з Україною — велика помилка [Replying to Kateryna Babkina. Whether We’ll Have to Forgive Russians for Bucha, or Why Comparing Bosnia to Ukraine Is a Big Mistake],” Новинарня – новини України, що воює [Novinarnya — News from Ukraine at War], April 24, 2024, https://novynarnia.com/2024/04/24/chy-dovedetsya-nam-probachaty-rosiyanam-za-buchu-abo-chomu-porivnyuvaty-bosniyu-z-ukrayinoyu-velyka-pomylka/.

[36] Gruia Bădescu, “Urban Memory after War: Ruins and Reconstructions in Post-Yugoslav Cities,” Springer EBooks, January 1, 2022, 229–52, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87505-3_12; Gruia Bădescu, “The City and Making Sense of Violent Pasts: Architectural Reconstruction and Memorialization after War. ” (CBEES Summer School 2024 The Return of History: Memory, War and the End of the “Post,” August 16, 2024).

[37] Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, trans. Simon Sparks (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Derrida, “Spectres of Marx”.

[38] ibid, 40.

[39] Nataliia Otrischenko, “The Time That Was Taken from Us: Temporal Experiences after the Full-Scale Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” in Dispossession. Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War against Ukraine, ed. Catherine Wanner (Routledge, 2023), 25–44.

[40] Derrida, “Spectres of Marx”; Fröhlig, “Victimhood and Building Identities on Past Suffering”.

[41] Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting.

[42] Doyle, Inter-Imperiality.

  • by Eugenia Seleznova

    Doctoral Researcher at Central European University, Vienna. Eugenia studies the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on LGBTQ+ Ukrainians, with a focus on the spatiotemporal component of the war-inflicted injustices they are subjected to. Her research interests include queer migration, Eastern European coloniality, and queer (non)belonging.

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