Can Ukraine Speak? : Imperial Knowledge, Infrastructure, and the Erasure of Ukrainian Historical Subjectivity

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how Ukraine has been positioned within imperial regimes of knowledge, from Enlightenment temporal hierarchies to contemporary Western representations of the country. The study asks how Western teleological conceptions of historical progress became embedded in imperial practices of governance, classification, and territorial transformation, and how these practices shaped the epistemic positioning of Ukraine. The study traces this history from Leibniz’s plans for Peter I’s Academy of Sciences to the development of imperial universities in Dorpat and Kharkiv. Along the way, it draws on James C. Scott’s ideas about simplification by the state and Timothy Mitchell’s work on technical expertise to show how administrative and technocratic power expanded over time. The central case is the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant and the flooding of the Great Meadow. The thesis argues that Soviet hydrotechnocracy transformed the hydrosocial lifeworld of the Dnipro region into an object of state calculation. In this thesis, I reconceptualize Spivak’s notion of subalternity and Stoler’s notion of colonial aphasia for the analysis of Soviet hydrotechnical violence in Ukraine. In Spivak’s terms, this process created conditions of subalternisation: local communities lost the material world in which they could reproduce themselves as historical subjects. In Stoler’s terms, colonial aphasia appears at the level of the communities themselves: a traumatic rupture between lived violence and the available language through which this violence could be articulated. The final part of the thesis turns to Ukrainian intellectual and political traditions, including the Kyiv-Mohyla tradition and the Zaporizhian Sich, to challenge inherited narratives that present Ukrainian history through Russian imperial categories. The thesis argues for reading Ukraine as an autonomous historical and epistemic subject, whose political traditions, archives, and landscapes have long been obscured by Russian mediation and Western models of historical development.