Imperial domination can take not only the form of brute military force. No less important is the imperial cultural discourse, including literary discourse, with its symbols and narratives, which the empire relies on in its efforts to conquer and seduce the colonized.
On the one hand, the empire breaks the will to resist of the colonized culture by imposing an image of weakness and backwardness on it. On the other hand, it seduces the colonized with its supposed greatness, encouraging them to assimilate and, so to speak, enjoy their own enslavement with it. It is not surprising that today Ukrainians are fighting Russia's neo-imperial encroachments not only on the battlefield but also in the cultural sphere. The Russian imperial discourse on Ukraine has a history of several hundred years, and it is this discourse that, in a sense, has developed the thought models, templates, and stereotypes that have formed the basis of the current war.
The book by Canadian scholar with Ukrainian roots Myroslav Shkandriy, "In the Embrace of Empire. Literature and Imperial Discourse from the Napoleonic to the Postcolonial Era" is perhaps the first attempt to take a broad look at Ukrainian-russian cultural relations through the prism of postcolonial theories. The author offers modern tools necessary to make us more sensitive to imperial cultural violence, and thus more capable of inventing and implementing effective strategies to overcome it.
