Universality and conflict as a decolonial and culturological problem

Abstract

Authors and ideas from the post-Soviet world witnessed a prosperous encounter with post-colonial studies for some time now. At the same time, contact with the so-call “decoloniality” – a body of thinking that emerged from the Latin American context – is still in its infancy. Some dialogues, however, have already been initiated in the belief that a decolonial framework could help to clarify the political, social, cultural history and dynamics of the post-Soviet space. Such an encounter could also contribute in retrospectively interpreting the intellectual tradition of the Soviet Union, and its tensions between imperialist policies and discourses of freedom and equality. This hypothesis has been strengthened by recent studies that highlighted the cultural entanglement that bonded the USSR and the Third World, with Latin America playing a key role, as well as the Soviet Orientalism’s precocious awareness about “coloniality”, which would anticipate the very birth of a (anti/post/de)colonial theory. The work is divided into four parts. After a general introduction of postcolonialism and decoloniality in relation to the Soviet and post-Soviet intellectual tradition (Section 1), we will address “universalism” and “conflict” from the decolonial (Section 2) and Lotmanian (Section 3) perspectives. Finally, we will pinpoint the contributions that Lotman’s theory could offer to decoloniality, in order for the latter to contribute more effectively to an analysis of the post-Soviet.