Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience

Review

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. Slavic ReviewThe extraordinary breadth of this study will frustrate some historians... Most readers,however, will be inspired and delighted by Etkind's innovative return to major episodes abd figures in history and culture and will be informed by his perspective on the importance of the empire in Russia's pastThe American Historical Review

Cambridge Anthropology

Alexander Etkind is Professor of Russian Literature and Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow at King's College. His most recent book is Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (2011).