Empire,
Colonialism, and Famine in Comparative Historical Perspective
Toronto,
October 28, 2016
*Travel
stipends available (August 16 deadline)
The Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) announces
its conference Empire, Colonialism, and Famine in Comparative Historical
Perspective, to be held at the University of Toronto on October 28, 2016.
Travel grants are available
(up to $800.00 Canadian) to support scholars in deepening their understanding
of colonialism and famine through engagement with leading scholars in the
field. Priority will be given to graduate students. Please see the application
procedure below and on the HREC website:
www.holodomor.ca
Note that awardees will be eligible
for funding to attend a larger conference on the same topic to be held in Kyiv,
Ukraine, in the spring of 2017.
Presenters will include Peter Gray (Queen’s
University, Belfast), on the Irish famine; Janam Mukherjee (Ryerson University,
Toronto), on the Bengal famine; and Liudmyla Hrynevych (Institute of History,
Academy of Sciences, Ukraine), on the Holodomor in Ukraine. Mark von Hagen
(Arizona State University) and Andrea Graziosi (Universitร di Napoli Federico
II, Naples) will provide comparative perspectives. The final program is to be
determined. HREC is a project of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies
(University of Alberta).
CONFERENCE CONCEPT:
The Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, known
as the Holodomor, has been compared productively with the nearly simultaneous
famine in Soviet Kazakhstan as well as with the later Chinese famine and other
famines that occurred in communist states.
Following the “imperial turn” in Russian and East European histories,
scholars have considered the USSR as an empire (Terry Martin, Yuri Slezkine,
Ron Suny, Joerg Baberowski) and raised the prospect of comparing the Soviet
with late imperial famines (Mark von Hagen, Liudmyla Hrynevych) and other
twentieth-century state forms referred to increasingly as colonial, notably
Nazi Germany and its hunger policies in Eastern Europe (e.g., the siege of
Leningrad and the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war) (Mark Mazower, Timothy
Snyder, Wendy Lower).
While comparison of the Holodomor
with the Irish Gorta Mor has given rise to conferences and publications
(Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen, Vincent Comerford),[1] the approach has yet
to be framed within new narratives of colonialism or imperialism. The
path-breaking study by Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts,[2] focuses on how
the British Empire employed famine to extend the liberal market to its colonies
by destroying “basic institutions of the victims.” Building on insights from
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation,[3] Davis addresses famines in India,
China and Africa and sees early parallels in the Irish famine of 1846-48,
placing it in the context of Malthusian theories invoked to support constraints
to famine relief in India.[4] Stalinist collectivization policies can be
understood as a version of the colonial view that segments of humanity are
expendable in the building of a greater, imperial civilization.
Collectivization was a war waged against the peasantry, resembling a military
occupation conducted by Red Army soldiers and veterans, NKVD troops, and
militarized party members. [5]
The decision of Winston Churchill’s
wartime British government not to send famine relief to India on “strategic
grounds” consigned 1.5 to 4 million Indians to death in 1943. The first book to
depict the tragedy, Hungry Bengal, was banned in 1944 (5,000 copies were seized
and destroyed),[6] bringing to mind the Stalin regime’s taboo against
mentioning its man-made famine, in place until the late 1980s. Amartya Sen, a
survivor of the British famine, has asserted that while famines are most often
triggered by meteorological or ecological events, the decisive factors nearly
always involve political decisions about the distribution of scarce food
supplies during wartime or peacetime shortages.
Famine, then, is a drawn-out form of political violence that deprives
humans of the fundamental human right to survival.
Empires at times have shown
little will to prevent famine, sometimes manipulating food provision as a
weapon to control and/or exterminate social classes and “disloyal groups” in
order to achieve political goals. The imperial famines have horrifying similarities,
including roots in imperialistic governance, the vertical hierarchy of
metropolis and colony, and the sacrifice of lives at the “periphery” in the
name of the greater good of the empire. The conference series Empire,
Colonialism and Famine in Comparative Historical Perspective will explore these
issues and ways imperial governments have understated or hidden the results of
faminogenic policies and the reactions of victims, first and foremost in the
anti-colonial, anti-imperial movements in which the experience of man-made
famine has served as a powerful awakening factor and motivation for achieving
political transformation.
[1] Holodomor and
Gorta Mor: Histories, Memories, and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and
Ireland (London: Anthem Press, 2012).
[2] Late
Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
(London/New York: Verso, 2002), p. 280.
[3] The Great
Transformation (New York/ Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), p. 10.
[4] Davis, Late
Victorian Holocausts, pp. 32, 46, 306.
[5] Nonna
Tarkhova, Krasnaia Armiia i stalinskaia kollektivizatsiia, 1928-1933 gg.
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010); Andrea Romano and Nonna Tarkhova, L'Armata Rossa e la
collettivizzazione delle campagne nell'URSS, 1928-1933: raccolta di documenti
dai Fondi dell'Archivio militare di Stato Russo (Napoli : Istituto
universitario orientale, 1996).
[6] Lizzie
Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York:
Penguin Press, 2012), pp. 141-54.
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Travel Grant Application Procedure:
1. Submit a statement (500-750 words) answering
the questions
· How will your
attendance enrich or support you in your research, teaching and/or career?
· What impact
will the study of the Holodomor, empire and famine likely have on your work or
career in the short and long term (in terms of publications and teaching, for
example)?
2. Submit a current curriculum vitae/resume.
3. Submit a letter of support from a professor
(if a graduate student) or colleague.
Please submit application by
August 16, 2016, via email to hrec@ualberta.ca with subject line, Conference
Travel Grant. Applicants will receive notification of award status by August
23, 2016.
For more information, contact
Marta Baziuk, Executive Director
Holodomor
Research and Education Consortium (HREC)
Canadian
Institute of Ukrainian Studies
416 923-4732
www.holodomor.ca
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