Colonial and Anti-colonial Discourses in South-Ukrainian Historiography of the 19th – 20th Centuries and their Influence on Modern Realities

Abstract

Colonialism is one of the central themes of historical discourse. The modern world, formally parted from thecolonial form of organization of political space, preserves the colonial relationship in the organization of world economy. The problemof studying colonial relationship remain relevant. Postcolonial studies or postcolonial theory are a new direction of the humanitarianknowledge development where interaction of philosophy, history, literature, and policy.Earlier and now, the consciousness of the population was influenced by historians, who often combined scientific activitywith socio-political. The purpose of this article is to define the approaches of historians from southern Ukraine to the nationalquestion, their relationship to the problem of colonialism and anti-colonialism.For representatives of the Russian imperial ideology (A. Skalkovsky, G. Peretyatkovich, I. Linnychenko, E. Trifiliev, A.Florovsky, M. Rodzevich, G. Ge, A. Markevich and A. Berthier-Delagard, etc.) the most important were the Russian-centric view ofSlavic unity, conservatism, sometimes monarchism, the unity of the community of Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians.Ukrainian historians (in particular, L. Smolensky, O. Markevich, O. Andrievsky, P. Klepatsky, I. Bondarenko, M., O.Hrushevsky, V. Goshkevych, M. Arkas, D. Yavornytsky) contrasted the colonial, Russian, discourse, democracy, relaxed versions ofpan-Slavism in the case of Ukrainian and Poles. The greatest resonance among the historical books caused M. Arkas work.Historians actively turned to art and poetry, a publicistic genre for the dissemination of their ideas. There was also a reverse process.So, the Kherson poet Mykola Chernyavsky wrote many poems on the historical subject of the Cossacks of the history of Ukraine.Jewish historians Sh. Dubnov, I. Klausner, Georgians S. Avaliani and bishop Kirion, Poles A. Myodushevsky had a greatinfluence on the formation of the national identity of their compatriots. Liberation, anti-colonial motives, the activities of a number ofBulgarian, Serbian and Greek historians were permeated, they lived in Odesa. Today, South Ukraine is a place of keen struggle forUkrainian-centric historical identity. Authoritative sociological studies confirm this.Being in the process of establishment and development of postcolonial studies, the author submits his own point of view onthe problem of learning and teaching the history of Southern Ukraine. This article is addressed first of all to those, who strive to findnew research topics and methodological approaches in study of postcolonial problems.

Keywords: colony, anti-colonial movement, southern Ukraine, historiography, the national question.