This article seeks to explore how Enlightenment narratives and categories framed the perception and image of the Zaporozhian Cossacks both in the imperial center and in the south-western periphery of ...the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century. It demonstrates that Catherine II deployed the discourse of civilizational mission to justify the disbandment of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host and the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich. The historical works of Voltaire became an important source of inspiration for Catherine's orientalist image of the Ukrainian Cossacks, which gained wide currency in the Russian Empire and was accepted by some representatives of the Ukrainian Cossack elite. On the other hand, the Enlightenment allowed some Ukrainians to challenge imperial hegemony by going beyond traditional estate and regional particularism and by rethinking the Cossack tradition as a democratic republican one and setting it against the supposed despotism of Imperial Russia.
This article uses a postcolonial approach and the concept of Orientalization to uncover hierarchies in Estonian national identity construction. We examine the change in the articulation of the ...'other' in the context of identity discourses of Estonians and Estonian Russian-speakers using literature by women authors in Estonia. We show how the interest of Estonian writers in the Russian community changed over time and then practically disappeared. We also demonstrate how, reflecting on their new post-imperial status, Estonian Russian-language literature eventually came to see Russians from Russia, rather than Estonians, as the key significant 'other.'
Applied to institute a distinct category of violence, the testimonial format of battered migrant women who escape their families is a recurrent narrative pattern in public discourses on honor-based ...violence. Through interviews with women categorized as victims of honor-based violence, this essay problematizes the presuppositions marking the narrated violence a distinguishable category including the testimonial format on which it derives. The critique is empirically based on resident-interviews and participant observation in a Danish refuge set to relieve honor-based violence and on resituating the analysis to include the socially, institutionally, nationally, and historically embedded setting of such interviews.
Early twentieth-century China, as with other post-imperial states, faced the challenge of creating a nation encompassing different social groups and cultures. How to identify ethnic groups living in ...the borderlands and generate nationwide social cohesion became a fundamental question that concerned multiple intellectual communities. This article traces the formation of two approaches to ethnicity—ethnology and sociology—at that time. These two approaches, configuring “ethnic differences” in dissimilar ways, were received differently by the public. In the end, the ethnological approach prevailed and the sociological approach was marginalized. This outcome exemplifies a possible hierarchy of knowledge, but also involves the politics of knowledge. This article shows that the disparate visions of “ethnic others” were produced by intellectuals differently positioned within the social context of post-imperial China. The positionalities of these disciplines explain much of their intellectual alignment.
The article deals with the creative interpretations of Central Europe by means of cinematography in the context of discussions about whether modernization means Westernization. The position is ...asserted that within Europe the ideal type of modernization is persistently associated with the West. The constructed in horror films images of Central European capitals are analyzed, with the example of such films as Short Night of Glass Dolls (La Corta notte delle bambole di vetro, 1971), The Spider Labyrinth (Il nido del ragno, 1988) and Hostel (2005). Prague (Chech Republic), Budapest (Hungary) and Bratislava (Slovakia), represented in these films, are marked with features of pseudo-modernity, which destroys the representatives of Western civilization or forces them to degenerate into monsters.
This article seeks: i) to describe the antagonistic strategies through which contemporary travel books on Romania by contemporary British and American authors were culturally and linguistically ...translated for the Romanian readers; ii) to highlight a series of distorsions operated by the translators, and their consequences for the translation reception, particularly when ideological projects are associated with the whole enterprise; iii) to analyse how the “cultural translations” of Romania operated by the Anglo-American authors for their own cultures – the most obvious of which are Orientalization and de-Europeanization – tend to be reinforced and even exaggerated by the Romanian translators themselves; iv) to show how translators resort to strategies of domestication in order to flatten and annihilate what the foreign authors perceive as new and strange in the Romanian culture, thus eliminating the “exotic” element from the equation; v) to ultimately plead for the coherent use of a strategy of (further)foreignization through which translators will be able to preserve the defamiliarization convention while approaching problems of cultural identity in a more detached manner, and playing a more active part in mediating between the foreign authors and their domestic readers.
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