Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience
Etkind  expands studies of Russia's entangled colonial experience to areas few have reached before, taking us from Leskov's Ladoga to DuBois's Mississipi, from Conrad's Congo to Macaulay's Tweed, from Gandhi's Ganges to Curzon's line. As an example of how to 'conquer foreign territories and domesticate its own heartlands', it remains for us to hope that this book might colonize many people. Russians included.Cambridge Anthropology in this clever, wide-ranging book, Alexander Etkind sets out to argue that postcolonial critique is entirely apposite, not just to the Russian empire, but to Russia itself. The insights from postcolonial critique allow us, Etkind argues, to see many familiar issues in a new light and to untangle numerous issues of Russian history and culture. Showing the relevance of Russia to postcolonial theory also provides a way of provincializing western Europe within postcolonial studies.