Alison Rice  (University of Notre Dame)
Francophone Postcolonialism from Eastern Europe

The Soviet Union occupied a number of Eastern European countries for varying periods of time prior to the dissolution of the Communist bloc in 1989. After years of domination, these countries are now coming to the attention of postcolonial studies. An example of this rather recent classification of Central and Eastern European literature as "postcolonial" appears in a special issue of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature: the final section of this 1995 issue of the bilingual publication is devoted to "East Central European Postcolonialities" (volume 22: 3, 4). In her introduction to the publication, Sneja Gunew writes that "the break-up of the Soviet empire might suggest a fertile field for post-colonial questions" (405). Steven Tötösy's complementary introduction develops this suggestion through a "centre/periphery" approach to illustrate the way the former Soviet Union exerted power.¹

In a PMLA article devoted exclusively to this question, David Chioni Moore seeks to prove "how extraordinarily postcolonial the societies of the former Soviet regions are" and makes a convincing case for the study of "the post-Soviet sphere" under the rubric of postcolonial theory.² I would like to underscore the potential danger of Moore's subtitle, "Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique." It is dubious to extend the definition of an already ambiguous field of study to include nearly the entire planet, since at some point in time every culture was dominated by another and could therefore be considered "postcolonial."³ But conceiving of countries formerly under Soviet communist rule as having some characteristics in common with countries under French colonial rule can yield productive results.⁴ It is quite possible that the concentration in literary studies on relations between the First and Third Worlds has left a void with respect to the Second World. I believe we can begin to fill this void by studying texts in French by writers from places formerly under Soviet domination, and I propose to examine the fictional and theoretical works of Julia Kristeva, Agota Kristof, Milan Kundera, Andreï Makine, Brina Svit, and Tzvetan Todorov. I would like to draw from their insights to explore the extent to which intellectuals from small Central and Eastern European countries find themselves in a "postcolonial" position—politically and linguistically—similar to that of Francophone scholars and writers from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Antilles.

¹Tötösy justifies this approach in the following manner: "Based on the assumption that the former USSR may be understood as centre by its political, military, economic, and ideological parameters in its relationships with its satellite countries, East Central European literatures are understood as the periphery in relation to the Soviet centre and consequently, as post-colonial situations" (400-401).
² Moore's title, an obvious send-up to Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" (Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 336-57) bears a subtitle that reveals his leanings: "Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 116:1 (January 2001): 111-128. His characterization of the situation in Central Europe echoes Tötösy's argument: "I speak here principally of the post-World War II Soviet expansion to the independent Baltics and into nations such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. By most classic measures—lack of sovereign power, restrictions on travel, military occupation, lack of convertible specie, a domestic economy ruled by the dominating state, and forced education in the colonizer's tongue—Central Europe's nations were indeed under Russo-Soviet control from roughly 1948 to 1989 or 1991" (121).
³In this point, I would agree with Russell Jacoby's somewhat humorous contention with the widely inclusive nature of postcolonial studies in his article "Marginal Returns: The Trouble With Post-Colonial Theory." Jacoby takes issue with the expansive definition of "post-colonialism" in the following quotation: "What's left out? Very little. In their 1989 study The Empire Writes Back (Routledge), a founding text for post-colonial theorists, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin estimate that three quarters of the globe suffered from colonialism. Here is a new field that claims four centuries and most of the planet as its domain. Not bad" (30).
⁴It is important to distinguish among different degrees of domination in the countries under Soviet control (just as in those under French control), as Roumiana Deltcheva maintains in her analysis of the literary process in Bulgaria: "Not all countries of the Eastern block were externally 'colonized' to the same degree. One should qualitatively distinguish between Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, on the one hand, since they were physically occupied by Soviet troops throughout their Socialist stage of development, and Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria, on the other, which were not in a state of Soviet occupation" (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 855).