Paper short abstract:

Drawing on linguistics and phenomenology, this paper argues that decolonization is impossible without involving language. Introducing a comparative perspective, this claim is illustrated on case studies from Africa (Zimbabwe, Rwanda) and Eastern Europe (Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus).

Paper long abstract:

This paper suggests that the decolonization process has several distinct phases. First, the Fanonian counter-violence, which is a violent conflict that decisively reconfigures a colonized entity's identity. This conflict may not be directed against the erstwhile colonizers and it may be separated by a span of time from the achievement of political indepenedence.

This period of raw physical violence is followed by what can be called epistemic decolonization. Epistemic decolonization is built upon two pillars. One is a recentring of history: a new way of telling the history ensues on the basis of the memory of the violent conflict. In a successful decolonization, this means rewriting the history from the perspective of the now decolonized, free nation (or other collective entity). Recentring the history involves also a shift in how this entity perceives the content of its culture and this culture's relationships and entanglements with other cultures.

The second pillar is language. This paper makes the strong claim that epistemic decolonization is impossible without involving language. The impact of language is developed theoretically drawing on linguistics and phenomenology. Then this impact is illustrated by means of several case studies. Regions in Africa (Zimbabwe and Rwanda) are studied in detail and compared to regions undergoing, or having recently undergone, decolonizing processes in Eastern Europe, in particular Ukraine, the Baltics (Lithuania, Estonia), and the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia). The case studies draw on corpuses of texts articulating decolonization in the languages of the regions, both the languages of the empires and local languages.