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Accepted Paper:
Epochal closures and openings amidst the contingent revolution in the Northwest of Belarus and beyond
Roman Urbanowicz
(University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
The presentation examines the experience of political crisis of August 2020 in Belarus, as it was lived through by the particular Polish community, engaging with social life of grievances and temporal hopes and historical trajectories of marginalization and quests for dignity
Paper long abstract:
Against the background of reflection of their 'civilisational misplacement' and structural injustice, Polish communities approached the political crisis of 2020 with mindfulness towards vastly uneven infrastructural promises of the two countries, different belongings to whose geo-political projects (the 'European' one of Poland and the quasi-Soviet one of Belarus) they shared. In this context, I analyse the interjections of communal reflexion of changing times and openings for the nation-wide meaning-making of civic participation, framed as hopes for the abolishment of generational injuries against human dignity, with everyday teleologies of educated hopelessness.
I engage critically with literature on state formation, citizenship, ethical life and temporality. Hope informed by both vague images of the past (cf. Jansen 2014), the early 1990s marked by the collapse of seeming congruous dispensation (the Soviet one) and similar release of the pressure valve, and by the idioms of belonging to the alternatively framed structure of [Polish] statehood (cf. Greenberg 2016 on workings of comparison) - all somewhat surprisingly resulting in unexpected emotional investment in the idioms of nation-wide civic participation in the Belarusian 'revolutionary' project.