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Zaal Andronikashvili is a literary scholar and a research associate at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) Berlin, where he is working on the project Literature in Georgia. Between Small Literature and World Literature. We have a chat with Zaal about his recent publication, Landna(h)me Georgien: Studien zur kulturellen Semantik (Naming and Claiming Georgia: Studies on Cultural Semantics), which he edited together with Emzar Jgerenaia and Franziska Thun-Hohenstein. The interview was conducted by Ewa Dabrowska.How did you come upwith the idea for the book “Landnahme Georgien”?In 2006, the Leibniz Center for Literaryand Cultural Research (ZfL) launched a project entitled “Topography of thePlural Cultures of Europe, Regarding the ‘Shift of Europe to the East’”. Asub-project of this project was “Georgia as a Border Region and Cultural Palimpsest”.The idea of the overall project was to narrate Europe from its borders, thusquestioning the Eurocentric, or rather, the Western European, narratives ofEurope. My sub-project dealt with Georgia's ambivalent position between Eastand West. This question of geographical, cultural, political, social, andeconomic belonging to larger entities like Europe and Asia, First, Second, orThird World, Global North and Global South, has played and will continue toplay an important role in domestic and foreign policy for the countries of theformer Eastern Bloc and the former USSR. In addition to their politicalrelevance, the political, economic, and cultural histories of these countriesplay an important role in debates on Orientalism, as well as in postcolonialand decolonial theories, and theories of nation-building. Our guiding questions were: Where arethese countries – with Georgia among them – located? How can we tell the storyof their extremely traumatic and emotionally-charged recent history, whichpreviously could only be explained within a very narrow ideological framework?In which theoretical framework do we place it? Which methodological instrumentsdo we use for the purpose? From this perspective, Georgia has been one of theleast-studied case studies. Research on Georgia is not systematically conductedanywhere outside of the country. At the Leibniz Center for Literary andCultural Research, however, Georgia has been a research topic for 13 years.Georgia is also being studied in Frankfurt and Jena, but there is a clear lackof systematic connection and institutionalization. Georgia isnot a white spot that could easily be colored in by closing empirical gaps in knowledge,but,as a case study, it has potential for theorisation, be it by testingcurrent theories or by contributing to a theory that helps to reflect on theexperiences and location of Eastern Europe and the former USSR. [caption id="attachment_23565" align="alignleft" width="278"] Zaal Andronikashvili, Emzar Jgerenaia, Franziska Thun-Hohenstein (eds.) Landna(h)me Georgien: Studien zur kulturellen Semantik. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2018.[/caption]One of the aims of our book, which emerged from the cooperation project between the ZfL and the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, financed by the Volkswagen Foundation, was to put different perspectives into relation: for example, it was not intended to oppose a hegemonic perspective by taking a subaltern perspective, but to show the multidimensionality of the struggles for hegemony and the shifts in power relations and discourses of power. In our case, these were, on one hand, more visible in the literary discourses – the hegemonic struggles were fought in the medium of literature – on the other hand, we also read the political discourses like literature, i.e. we examined their sujets and narratives. The ambiguous title "Landna(h)me" holds a double meaning. Land-nahme (meaning conquest, colonisation, claiming) stood for the struggles for political and, above all, cultural, hegemony over Georgia and indeed (partly) over the Caucasus. Land-name (naming), stood for the cultural dimension. The names of countries or geographical areas, such as the Caucasus or the Black Sea, have a mythogenic poetic quality; they generate myths, sujets and narratives that are highly affectively charged. This affective dimension is usually lost in political, social or economic analyses. It is however very important.Thequestion of spatial location appears only to be straightforwardly answered. Ifwe take the simplest localizations that are assumed in general knowledge andexamine them more closely, we realize, firstly, that they are highly politicaland, secondly, that they are far from being self-evident. The border betweenEurope and Asia as we know it today was drawn in the course of Russia'stransformation into an empire in the early 18th century. Location isnot just a cultural construct, but also an instrument of imperial powerpolitics. Despite its heterogeneity of over 100 spoken languages, 4 differentlanguage groups, and several religions, the Caucasus – to which Georgia isattributed – exists as as single region only because it became anadministrative unit of the Russian empire in the 19th and 20thcenturies. We also noted that, although geographical units appear to us to bevery stable in terms of physical geography, they are very movable in terms ofcultural semantics. [caption id="attachment_23566" align="alignright" width="250"] Alexandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky[/caption]The mountains of the Caucasus, originally a periphery, shifted to a central position during the course of the 19th century. In Russia, for example, in the mystical renderings of Russian romantic poet, Alexandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, the Caucasus is styled as the birthplace of the Russian empire. The semantics of the Caucasus continues to shift: If, in the 20th century, the Caucasus remained the central spatial reference for Abkhazia, for Georgia, the centre of gravity shifted from the Caucasus to the Black Sea. For Russia, the Caucasus is divided into its own and foreign parts: the Northern and Southern Caucasus, with the Southern Caucasus transformed into a nostalgic space.Our book aims to contribute to both theoretical and political questions. It has become clear to us thatGeorgia's culture and history could hardly be told from one perspective. Therewere too many voices in the room, apparently telling the same story indifferent ways, which was sometimes contradictory. After the collapse of theUSSR and the end of the Eastern Bloc, the political transition has led tonumerous conflicts, especially in the Caucasus. In 2008, there was a war betweenRussia and Georgia. Shortly after this war, Russia single-handedly recognizedAbkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgian secessionist autonomies, as independentstates. From the Georgian perspective, these are territories occupied byRussia. The international community recognizes the territorial integrity ofGeorgia. If we take the Abkhazia conflict as an example, it has lived throughhot and cold phases since the end of the 1980s and escalated in the civil warof 1992-1993. The conflicts in the Southern Caucasus did not, however, beginwith the collapse of the USSR, but reach far back into the past. For example,the political conflict between Georgians and Abkhazians in 1920s was carriedout in the Soviet period (1921-1989) as a polemic among historians about differentreadings of ethnogenesis and medieval history. This “Historikerstreit” wasrepoliticized and was carried out during the civil war of 1992-1993.With ourbook “Landna(h)me Georgien. Studien zur kulturellen Semantik” (Namingand Claiming Georgia: Studies on Cultural Semantics) we wanted to explore the deepcultural dimensions of these conflicts and contribute to a greater understandingof these extremely complicated situations.[caption id="attachment_23567" align="alignnone" width="1084"] Franz Roubaud, Major-General Lazarev's 17th Jagger Regiment entering Tiflis on November 26, 1799.[/caption]We have assumed that the conflicts in theSouthern Caucasus originated from the expansion of the Russian Empire in theCaucasus at the end of the 18th century, the subsequentnation-building process in the Russian Empire and the struggle for politicaland cultural hegemony in the Southern Caucasus. We also assumed that theseconflicts were not only political and that their cultural dimension had aparticular significance. Themethodological problem was how to tell a story when different, sometimescontradictory, versions of it had been in circulation.Up until now, the story of the conflictsin the Southern Caucasus has been told from one (usually one’s own)perspective. Russian historian Viktor Schnirelman has called thesecontradictory narratives “wars of memory” (vojny pamjati). In his book,however, different perspectives were not put in relation to each other, butwere rather placed next to each other. We did not want to lapse into amono-perspective narrative, nor did we want to take sides or to reconstruct a “warof narratives”. We were aware that the polyphony of voices in the Caucasuscould not be reconstructed within the framework of a three-year project. Wetherefore focused on three perspectives: the Russian imperial perspective, theGeorgian national perspective, and the Abkhazian minority perspective (the perspectiveof a minority nation without its own sovereign state), and took them togetheras an example. In our reconstruction, we found that individual discursivepositions, historical narratives, sujets, figures of space, formulas of pathosdo not exist in isolation, but refer to each other: Georgian positions respondto Russian semanticizations of space, Abkhazian positions refer to Russian andGeorgian ones, and vice versa. What usedto look like three monologues was in fact a complicated dialogue, or rather, atrialogue. When, for example, the Russian romanticist AlexandrBestuzhev-Marlinsky imagines and describes the peoples of the Caucasus asautochthones, he wants to place them on a historical timeline. They stand fororigin and lack of history, are associated more with nature than with culture,and are contrasted with the Russian Empire being on the side of history andprogress. Georgian national discourse takes up the idea of autochthony, butreinterprets it. There, autochthony becomes a pathos formula for the eminentlyaffective reference to one's own territory. This results in a homeland-centeredphilosophy of space that has dominated in Georgia for 150 years. If, forexample, the imperial philosophy of space follows a logic of tendentiallyendless expansion, then according to the autochthonous philosophy of space – toput it very simply – happiness exists only in the homeland, and emigration is ametaphor for death. This idea underlies many literary sujets up until the lateSoviet period and is only questioned after the collapse of the SovietUnion.&#160; The autochthonous discourseplayed a role in Soviet national politics (in the idea of “korenizatsija”) andin Soviet science (in the highly politically-charged questions of ethnogenesis),and then later in the Abkhazia conflict. There, the idea of autochthons is usedby both Georgians and Abkhazians as an argument for nationalist politics and isused to legitimize the ethnic cleansing of Georgians.To describe this complicated polylogue, we have developed a methodcalled cultural semantics. The fundamental difference between culturalsemantics and other models of cultural memory derives from the fact thatcultural semantics does not deal with meaning as a “connective structure”(Assmann) in a culture or society, nor is it concerned with cultural memory asa mechanism for the preservation of identity or a group, nor with “realms ofmemory” (lieux de mémoire), as PierreNora understands it.Instead,cultural semantics focuses on meanings as they emerge in the interface betweenmultiple societies and cultures, as a result of negotiations, polemicalexchanges, and mutual relationships. Whereas other approaches are primarilyinterested in groups and cultures that create specific meanings and pass themon to others, cultural semantics studies meanings foremost as they inhere inplaces, things, and objects, and how, over time, they get sedimented there tothe point that it is no longer possible to definitively expunge them from theseplaces, things, and objects. By taking these elements, rather than groups andcultures, as the point of departure, a different set of relationships becomesapparent within the field of meaning: namely, a palimpsest of multi-vocal andmulti-perspectival configurations. When one speaks of the cultural semantics of places and spaces, themultiplicity of interactions between meanings are more important than just theinterpretive prerogatives of a single group. Cultural meaning cannot simply beconflated with the ability to locate and demark a place geographically. Bystudying cultural semantics, one must take for granted the impossibility ofever answering the question of “cultural localization” and thus must be open toa plurality of answers. These answers are not isolated from one another, butrather they relate to each other in different ways, sometimes affirmatively,sometimes polemically, sometimes providing fuel for other answers, sometimesprompting revisions of them. The answer to the question of what the culturalsemantics of places – e.g. Georgia, the Black Sea, the Caucasus – is, isdetermined by how various answers relate to one another, not by merely lookingat the sum of all answers or their “history”, but by examining them as being indialogue with each other – and it is for this very reason that the answer isnot unequivocal but rather itself a palimpsest.What is the structureof your new book and what did the writing process look like?Our book has three authors. Roughly speaking, I was responsible for theGeorgian perspective, Emzar Jgerenaia for the Abkhazian, and FranziskaThun-Hohenstein for the Russian perspective (even if the “national” divisiononly roughly corresponded to the actual writing process). However, due to themethodological structure of the book, we have decided not to mark theauthorship of individual parts (this is only mentioned in the preface). Our threeperspectives are not performed in an isolated way, but rather, are montaged andintegrated so that we can tell our story as a trialogue of perspectives. We move in chronological order between the beginning of Russianexpansion south of the Caucasus at the end of the 18th century andthe collapse of the Soviet Union. This is how we describe the “Russian Age” inthe southern Caucasus and Georgia. There are four chapters in the book inaddition to the theoretical introduction written by me. The first chapter, “TheInvention of the Caucasus”, tells us how the Russian and, later, the Georgianand Abkhazian, Caucasus myths and Caucasian romanticism were born, how theCaucasus, as a geopolitical and cultural unit that did not previously exist, wascreated by the Russian administration, and how the Georgian nation was createdin the Russian empire and geographically imagined as the successor of theGeorgian kingdom. In the second chapter, “Re-interpretations of the Caucasus”,we talk about the scientific Caucasus discourse, which later became functionalizedfor political purposes, about the emergence of the Abkhazian nation in themodern sense, about the debates on political and cultural belonging in Abkhazia,about political and state concepts in the Caucasus around 1900, and about theSoviet re-interpretation of the 19th century Caucasus myth. Thethird chapter is devoted to the other spatial discourse: that of the Black Seaand its cultural semantics. It looks at the rediscovery of antiquity and itsreinterpretation in the Soviet context and different semantics of the sea as aspace of freedom, integration and death. Finally, the fourth chapter, “Outlook”,looks at cultural reactions shortly before and after the collapse of the USSR,the resulting cultural and spatial demarcations, as well as Georgia'sgeopolitical and geocultural turn from the Caucasus to the Black Sea.What is specific aboutthe history and cultural narratives of Abkhazia?The Abkhazian example is interesting in several aspects. For one thing,it is an example of how the linguistically different but culturally, if notidentical, then extremely similar, population with a centuries-old peacefulcoexistence (although not free from political feudal conflicts) is radicallyalienated by the drawing of confessional and, later, national borders. On theother hand, this example is significant because it shows us very clearly howtwo opposing and mutually exclusive concepts of the nation can arise in thesame geographical space and later generate conflicts. We are in alaboratory where we can see how the shift from the confessional to the nationalparadigm works; how this shift fundamentally changes the understanding ofspacial orientation, values and hierarchies; how the concepts of the nation areelaborated and which parts of heritage they refer to; how the concept ofethnicity was non-existent before emerges in the late 19th century&#160; and how it later becomes decisive for Sovietnational policy; how, in the Soviet Union, the unsolved political conflicts,which swell under the cloak of international friendship, are carried out inscientific discourses to break out with new power after the collapse of theSoviet Union; and how ethnic nationalisms, which emerged out of the Sovietnational policy with its idea of territorialized ethnolinguistic entities, had conceivednations.I give two examples here: the difference between ideas about what anation is and the afterlife of Soviet power structures.1. Sakartvelo, as Georgia is referred to in Georgian, is a medieval namethat reflects the dynastic union of the West Georgian kingdom of Abkhazia, theEast Georgian kingdom of Kartli and the South Georgian kingdom of Tao under therule of the (Georgian) Bagratids in the 10th century. Even though atthe time of the dynastic union, Abkhazia was politically and militarily muchstronger than the kingdom of Kartli, and despite Abkhazia's first place in thetitle of the king (the title of medieval Georgian kings – who were refered notas kings of the land(s) but as kings of people(s) –&#160; was “King of Abkhazians, Kartvels etc.” ),the Georgian language (kartuli)prevailed as the common language of the union. Georgian (kartuli) had alreadybeen a written language since the 5th century and a common churchlanguage even beyond the kingdom of Kartli.However, this educational and church language was not the commonlanguage for the entire population of the kingdom, which was very heterogeneousin West Georgia. Apart from Georgian (kartuli),four other languages were spoken there, which were not written down until the19th or 20th centuries: Megrelian, Swanian and Laz(linguistically related to Georgian), and Abkhazian (a language not related toGeorgian, but rather to Adygean and Circassian). This is important to know inorder to understand the fundamental difference between the Abkhazian and theGeorgian understanding of the nation. [caption id="attachment_23569" align="alignleft" width="300"] Ilia Chavchavadze (Source: Europeana Collections).[/caption]Georgian national discourse developed between 1830 and 1870 as a consequence of the abolition of the Georgian monarchy. However, the nation replaced the monarch not as a result of revolution, as in France, but as a result of the Russian conquest. The nation was therefore seen as the heir to the monarchical state. However, the latter was not ethnically organized, even though it was denominationally Christian. In Ilia Chavchavadze's (1837-1907) version, the nation was neither a linguistic, nor ethnic, nor a religious, but a historical community. The nation lived from its historical past, which was to be renewed in the present. Therefore, the nation was inclusive of different peoples, languages and religions.Abkhaziannational discourse developed around 1900 out of two competing ideas of thenation. The Abkhazian nobility, which was strongly linked to the Georgiannobility and the predominantly Christian population of Samurzakano province(todays Gali district), opted towards the Georgian understanding of the nation.The other Abkhazians, predominantly Muslim, however, felt a stronger affinityto the Circassians, to whom they were linguistically and confessionally related.For them,the linguistic and ethnical kinship with Circassians was a more importantpolitical factor than the historical connection with Georgia. They, therefore,saw themselves more as part of northern Caucasian political units (there was ashort-lived entity after the collapse of the Russian Empire and later alsoafter the collapse of the Soviet Union) than as a part of Georgia. Of these twopossible orientations in Abkhazia, the ethno-linguistic one has prevailed.After the Bolshevik occupation of Georgia, the Abkhazian nobility lost itsposition. The Abkhazian Bolsheviks tended to champion the ethno-linguisticversion of the nation, which was more compatible with the Soviet, alsoethno-linguistic, view of the nation that goes back to Stalin. In thisconception of the nation, the connection with Georgia played no role. Today wemust understand that the two, Georgian and Abkhazian, versions of the nationare mutually exclusive. If we do not understand these profound differences, wewill not be able to find a political solution to the conflict.2. On 31 July 1989, an interview with Nobel Prize winner and famous Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was published in the leading Soviet magazine, Ogonek. In this interview, which was to cause a scandal, Sakharov spoke about the necessary reorganization of the Soviet Union in order to learn a lesson from the insights of the USSR's imperial past: All Soviet and autonomous republics of the Soviet Union were to be given maximum sovereignty within their (administrative) borders in order to later develop towards or away from each other in a free way. Until then, they were to be held together only by the superior structures of the confederation. According to Sakharov, maximum sovereignty is required to overcome theimperial past, which consists in a "forcible union":"We must begin, I repeat, with the complete dismantling of the imperial structure. This is the only way to resolve the national question in the small empires which are, by their very nature, the Union republics. For example, Georgia, which includes Abkhazia, South Ossetia and other national entities. If you start in Georgia and do not do the same in the Russian Soviet Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, you will get into big trouble."The last sentence from this interview implying all Soviet republics was quickly forgotten. The public, both in Russia and Georgia, interpreted it to mean that only Georgia was a small empire. In Georgia, the positions taken by Sakharov in this interview still provoke indignation. [caption id="attachment_23584" align="alignright" width="401"] Andrei Sakharov[/caption]Sakharov himself probably did not realize that he was repeating thethesis of the politician whom he probably least wanted to quote, namely theBolshevik expert on nationality policy, Iosif Stalin, who understood nationsmostly as ethnical or ethno-linguistical, but sometimes also as confessionalterritorialized units. Sakharov also apparently ignored the power relationsbetween Russia (which also claimed to be the successor to the USSR in terms ofpower politics) and the other Soviet republics. But Sakharov was right on atleast one point: the hierarchical territorial power structure in the USSR hadbecome an instrument (among other things) of national and nationalist powerstruggles that could very quickly turn into oppression.In the Georgian-Abkhazian case, this was particularly true of the periodbetween 1936 and 1953, when Lavrenti Beria, a Georgian from Abkhazia, who hadbeen the long-time First Secretary of the Communist Party of the TranscaucasianSocialist Federative Republic and the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, aswell as the organizer of the Great Terror in Georgia in the 1930s and People'sCommissar for Internal Affairs as of 1938 (later Minister of the Interior) ofthe USSR, pursued an aggressive Georgianization policy in Abkhazia. Althoughthis policy was fundamentally revised after Stalin's death in favour of ethnicAbkhazians in multinational Abkhazia, the deep trauma could not be healed.Sakharov saw a way out of this power structure in the revaluation of theautonomous republics and territories and their equality with the Unionrepublics. Both Georgia and Russia have chosen a different military path in theconflict over the self-determination of their autonomous republics. In the twobloody wars in Chechnya, Russia managed to prevail militarily, unlike Georgiain Russia-backed Abkhazia. As a result of this conflict, more than 200,000ethnic Georgians were expelled from Abkhazia.To what degree aredebates on post-colonialism and contact zones from literary and culturalstudies helpful to frame the Georgian case?Georgia waspart of the Russian Empire for over 100 years and part of the Soviet Union for70 years. How can we describe this situation? Was the imperial rule of Russiacomparable, for example, to the rule of the British Empire? Can we describeRussian imperialism as colonial rule? Can the Soviet Union be described as anempire? These questions can only be answered if we can describe our empiricalmaterial with precision. Existing theories help to understand these questions,but they must also be corrected on the basis of new case studies. There werecertainly Eastern European reactions to Edward Said's Orientalism, for example,Larry Wolff and Maria Todorova have addressed the question of Orientalism,showing that Western Europe claims cultural hegemony over Eastern Europe, butin a different way to the case of "the Orient": Eastern Europe is notseen as "different" but rather as "same" albeit inferior. &#160;Georgia shared with the Balkansand with Eastern Europe the characteristic of being simultaneously excludedfrom (Western) European discourse (because of its supposed inferiority in termsof civilization) and at the same time being a part of it (because ofChristianity, which did not allow for an imagination as "other", butalso due to the ancient and biblical topography, which was declared thecultural heritage of Western Europe). With it, Georgia became the object of the(Western) European border discourse rather than (to take up Todorova'sjudgement) the object of Orientalist discourse, which is similar but at thesame time not identical to it. Said, as well as Todorova and Wolff, wereconcerned with Western European discourses, but the "local" voiceswere missing. For us it was important to show the interplay between differentdiscourses and sujets and to play off the imperial perspective against nationaland minority perspectives and vice versa. But there were more differences thansimilarities. For example, when the Georgian kingdoms became part of Russia,the Georgian nobility were granted the same rights as the Russian nobility.Russian officials had more power on the spot than the entire Georgian nobility,but, legally, they were on an equal footing and were able to make successfulcareers in the Russian empire. This was not exactly the case for many otherforms of imperialism and colonialism. For example, Russia did not succeed inbreeding a colonial elite in Georgia. The youngGeorgians who went to Russia on Russian scholarships to study became thefounding fathers of the modern nation and opposed Russia with a successfulstruggle for cultural hegemony. Although, politically, Georgia had absolutelyno chance against Russia, the Georgian intellectuals of the 1860 generationsucceeded in winning the battle for cultural hegemony. Such factors must betaken into account and also play a role in the modification of theories emergingfrom postcolonial studies. Besides the differences, there are alsosimilarities, for example, in the findings of Indian Subaltern Studies, whichrightly point to the (over)evaluation of the role of capitalism in the Indianexample. This is also true for Georgia.Another theoretical input came from the concept of the contact zone,which was coined in 1992 by the US literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt. Herconcept of the contact zone largely coincides with the concept of the colonialfrontier, but the contact zone also allows for the "spatial and temporalco-presence of the formerly geographically and historically separate subjectswhose paths have now crossed". Pratt described the contact zone as"social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,often in contexts of highly assymetrical relations of power, such ascolonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many partsof the world today”.&#160; The contact zonewas about language as "autoethnography, transculturation, critique,collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginarydialogue, vernacular expression" and thus about a pole of colonialencounter.&#160; On the other side wasgenocidal violence: the heart of darkness and the place of speechlessness,which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak described in her famous essay “Can theSubaltern Speak?”&#160; The US literaryscholar Harsha Ram made the concept of the contact zone fruitful using theGeorgian-Russian example. We also take up the concept of the contact zone, butmodify it methodically.If we consider Georgia as a border region in our book, this should not be understood in an essentialist way. The talk of Georgia as a border region (leaving aside the ancient location of Colchis on the border of the known world) has appeared again and again since the 18th century, first as a foreign attribution (for example among Western European travellers) and later as a topos of Russian imperial romanticism in the Caucasus. Around 1920, during Georgia's brief independence as well as shortly thereafter, Georgia's role as a border region was taken up by Georgian writers, who attempted to ascribe to Georgia a mediating role between the (supposedly) geographically- and culturally-separate worlds of the Orient and Occident. This border location was seen as a connection: Georgia had its origin in Asia, but culturally belonged to both worlds and could therefore become their synthesis. [caption id="attachment_23572" align="aligncenter" width="570"] 1936 Soviet Tourism Poster "The Caucasus"[/caption]Finally, if one looks at the EU policy of the Eastern Partnership,Georgia, an associate member of the EU (for the time being) without theprospect of accession, is attributed as a European border area in which thefigure of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion still lives on today.If Georgia is not partof the Global South, as you claim, how can we name the larger cultural,political and economic space to which it belongs?I make afundamentally different claim. Among other things, our book ended with therealization that the question of location cannot be answered: it is part of anopen-end debate. This debate has domestic and foreign policy implications; itis conducted primarily politically and is to a much lesser extent a subject ofacademical debate. To say that Georgia belongs either to the Global North or tothe Global South is a political declaration, not an analytical conclusion. Let us try to approach this question from an analytical perspective. TheGlobal South is a concept that has emerged after the end of the bloc system.After WWII, the world was divided into three parts, the First, Second and ThirdWorld. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Second World apparentlydisappeared and we were left with globalization with its winners and losers,the Global North and the Global South. Where can we locate the former SecondWorld in this division? The transformation processes of the 1990s were supposedto transfer the Second World – through painful reforms and so-called shocktherapy – into the First World. The former Eastern Bloc was supposed to builddemocratic states with the rule of law and a liberal (perhaps even social)market economy. Even 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this hasby no means happened in all the former Soviet countries. In some, there haveeven been bitter setbacks and relapses. Now, the questions are point to whetherthe premises of the political decisions of the 1990s were indeed correct. Whereare we (or where do we want to be)? Are we winners or losers of the historicalprocess? If we want to be winners, should we imitate the models of the FirstWorld in order to achieve their standard of living? Is the First World adesirable goal? Or, should there be other goals, such as the fair distributionof wealth throughout the world? If this is our goal, how do we achieve it? Do weneed to ally ourselves with the other "losers" of globalization inorder to enforce our ideas about a just world, be this enforcement peaceful orthrough struggle? Although some approaches have been made, these questions are still yetto be answered. In the former Second World, it was originally assumed that wewere the winners of the historical process. We had moved from politicalunfreedom into political freedom. This view is changing: political freedom isbeing taken back in many places, without former social guarantees. So how canwe describe or explain these processes? Postcolonial theory was born – in verysimplified terms – out of the relationship between the First World and theThird World and described, among other things, the afterlife of asymmetrical (imperialand colonial) power relations. The relationship between the First and Second World and its collapse andtransformation is described almost exclusively with borrowed theories. Thismeans that the theories that originated in a different context and come fromdifferent empirical material and conceptual apparatus are transferred to theformer Second World. However, their transferability to the former Second Worldhas very quickly reached its limits. Today, we have hardly any theories that canadequately capture the relationship between the First and Second World and itscollapse and transformation. Now, in the last 10 years, another theory has been attempting to capturethe conditions of the former Second World: Decolonial Theory. The problem hasnot disappeared, this theory also comes from a different context and itstransferability also approaches its limits and creates irritations. This theorygoes back to the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Quijano consideredglobalization as "the culmination of a process that began with theconstitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a newglobal power". This new power model was based on "the socialclassification of the world's population around the idea of race, a mental constructionthat expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades themore important dimension of global power, including its specific rationality:Eurocentrism". Consequently, "the model of power that is globallyhegemonic today presupposes an element of "coloniality". Quijano'sbrilliant analysis, however, was based on an examination of South Americanmaterial. In an impressive way, Quijano has shown the afterlife of colonialpower structures and their inextricable link to capital in today's SouthAmerican nation states. In fact, these nation-building processes failed becausethey were “achieved not by means of the fundamental democratization of socialand political relations, but by the exclusion of a significant part of thepopulation, one that since the sixteenth century had been radically classifiedand marginalized from citizenship and democracy”. He concluded that thesestates “could not be considered nations unless it could be admitted that thesmall minority of colonizers in control were genuinely nationallyrepresentative of the entire colonized population”.Quijano's theory was taken up by the Argentinian literary scholar WalterMignolo and the US scholar of culture Catherine E. Walsh , especially in theirfindings that "Global capitalism" is "colonial/modern andEurocentered" and “modernity was colonial from its point of departure”. Intheir book on Decoloniality, they aimed to describe the historical developmentof the colonial matrix of power. For them, decoloniality is not only a theorybut also a practice to “undo, disobey and delink” from this matrix. They claimthat, “if another world is possible”, it cannot be built with the conceptualtools inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It cannot be builtwith the master’s tools, as Audre Lorde reminded us a number of years back, “forthe master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. Because“revolutions and independence struggles in the colonies transformed outwardcoloniality (European direct control over the colonies) into internalcolonialism (local elites managing the building of colonial nation-statesacording to the script of the European idea of modernity), Mignolo and Walshredefined decoloniality as “the task […] after decolonization […] focused onepistemology and knowledge rather then the state”. I cannot discuss this theoryat large here, but its more general fashion compared to Quijano’s case studywas somehow lacking the power of the latter’s concrete analysis. Based onMignolo and Walsh, decolonial theory was applied also to the former EasternBlock countries. This transfer of theory, which might indeed be productive,remains also questionable. Can we compare South America with its unbroken"tradition" of colonial capitalism with the former USSR, which livedfor more than 70 years under a different political and economic regime alternativeto capitalism and whose collapse made globalization possible? If one wants tolook exclusively from an economic perspective, can we justify the assumption thatthe integration of these economies into the global economy has taken place orthat these economies function according to the same rules as in Thailand or theUSA? Should we perhaps not regard the collapse of the USSR as a radical break,but rather look at the continuities, for example with the Soviet shadow economy?The transferability of theories from the First or Third World to the SecondWorld is rather born of a conceptual gap in situating the former Second Worldin the new world order. The oxymoronic concept of the "subalternempire", which is occasionally used in the decolonial theory, refers to theRussian Empire (or the Ottoman and Chinese Empires) and denotes theirsupposedly inferior (epistemic) position vis-à-vis the Western European powers.Now, if you look at former colonies of&#160;“subaltern empires” which suffered (and sometimes still continue) tosuffer from imperial politics and oppression, you (as I argue) realize thelimits of “usability” of such concepts. If you use concepts like “subalternempire”, the perspective&#160; of ‘subalternsof the subalterns’ remains still wiped&#160;out or at least blurred.In his analysis, Quijano concluded that the Eurocentric perspective was useless, even harmful, for thinking about the South American experience and pleaded for the new theory that would be appropriate to this concrete South American experience. I think we need to follow the spirit of Quijano's analysis and develop our theory by studying, describing and theorising our history and our experiences beyond a Eurocentric perspective. This work is still to be done and I hope that our book has made a small contribution to it.Zaal Andronikashvili, Emzar Jgerenaia, Franziska Thun-Hohenstein (eds.)  Landna(h)me Georgien: Studien zur kulturellen Semantik. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2018. Zaal Andronikashvili is a literary scholar and a research associate at the   Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) Berlin, where he   is working with the project Literature in Georgia. Between Small Literature and World Literature. He is also an Assistant Professor at Ilia-State-University, Tbilisi. Zaal studied History, Archeology and German Philology in Tbilisi and Saarbrücken and completed his PhD at the Göttingen-University (2005) on Generation of Drama Text. Towards the Theory of Plot (Berlin, 2008). Citation: Landna(h)me Georgien – Interview with Zaal Andronikashvili, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 25.03.2020,   https://trafo.hypotheses.org/23563.  