Politics of Collective Memory: Insight from the Nordic Historiography on the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33
Politics of Collective Memory: Insight from the Nordic Historiography on the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33
The article analyses the intellectual origins of integrating the study of memory within the humanities. The author highlights the intertextuality (de Saussure, J. Kristeva) and socially embedded character (J. Olick, R. Joyce, D. Levy) of memory studies. Inspired by a theory of securitization (B. Buzan, O. Wæver, J. de Wilde and other scholars from Copenhagen school), a somewhat new term of “genocidation” is introduced by the author in order to describe a re-invention of the Ukrainian post-Soviet identity narrative. Apart from theoretical approaches to interdisciplinary studies of memory politics in the post-globalized world, the article presents an attempt to investigate the status of the Ukrainian famine in Nordic historiography, pointing at the existing gap in academic research on this topic in the Nordic countries. A suggestion for further research is being made, conditioned upon the access to Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish archives. The article is a part of the joint project on the Soviet famine, carried out with the support from the ReNEW Excellency Hub of research at Copenhagen Business School and Bańska Bystrica University, Slovakia.