Emptiness against Decolonization: Reflections from the Imperial Fault Line in Eastern Latvia
Journal: Slavic Review
Year: 2024

Abstract With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become central to scholarship on eastern Europe. Yet, residents of Lielciems in eastern Latvia find it hard to orient in a political field defined by the binary of colonized and the colonizer. They live in a place that is losing its constitutive elements due to a variety of other “de” processes—deindustrialization, depopulation, and devaluation. They live amidst absences rather than unwanted presences. They wish for someon