When on 24 February 2022 the Europeans woke up to the news of a massive military invasion on their continent as Russia attacked Ukraine, writers and poets in many places, including the Netherlands and Belgium, reacted with a poem, an article or an interview. Now, 2,5 years later, they keep commenting on various events of the Russia-Ukraine war, along with numerous amateur writers and poets who post their creations online. This research focuses primarily on a few works by the Dutch Lieke Marsman, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Manon Uphoff, and the Flemish Barbara Claes and Yannick Dangre, as well as a couple of less known amateur poets. The analysis sheds light on the ideas of otherness and identity, resistance and hybridity in their literary work, not accidentally the core concepts of the Postcolonial Studies. Although Ukraine has never been a Dutch or Belgian colony, the works of the contemporary Dutch and Flemish authors seem to expose yet another conflict between the colonizer and the colonized in the European context.
Program
Welcome, Maria Bonaria Urban
Lecture “A New World is Possible. Dutch and Flemish Poetry on the Russian War in Ukraine in Postcolonial Perspective”, Natalia Karpenko
Q&A
About the speaker
Natalia Karpenko is a literary scholar, a teacher of the Dutch language and literature at the Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University in Ukraine, and a literary translator. She contributes frequently to the conferences and congresses where the problems of the Dutch and Flemish literature are discussed. The current shift in the European mental landscape due to the Russia-Ukraine War has prompted her to look at her study object from the perspective of the Postcolonial Studies, a particularly fruitful approach which has already led to revealing research and lectures at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR).
