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One of the oldest and richest themes in literary traditions around the world is that of displacement, both in terms of more or less voluntary travel and involuntary emigration and exile. From such classic figures of exiles as Ovid and Dante to analyses of postmodern heterogeneous mass mobility in our increasingly globalized culture, physical displacement remains one of the key human experiences and frequently functions as a structuring trope in innumerable literary texts.1 East European authors, for example, have penned remarkable explorations of the experience of displacement which has characterized this region for much of the twentieth century, especially in the form of imprisonment and deportation. (Among the most remarkable works of this kind is A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by the late Yugoslav novelist Danilo Kis.2) Contemporary critical theory likewise has presented some fascinating reflections on themes connected with the idea of displacement, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's discussions of the notions of deter-ritorialization and nomadology, and Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia.3
It has been argued, however, that the paradigm of displacement acquires particular relevance in post-colonial contexts, that is, within the cultural condition that arose with the crumbling of modern colonial empires and the emergence of a multitude of newly independent nations in the post-SecondWorld-War era. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the notion of post-coloniality was embraced also by intellectuals in a number of newly independent post-Soviet nations and, perhaps, nowhere more eagerly than in Ukraine. It was first introduced in Ukrainian cultural discourse by Marko Pavlyshyn, one of the leading diasporic Ukrainian intellectuals. His two essays, "Ukrainska kultura z pohliadu postmodernizmu" (Ukrainian Culture from the Point of View of Postmodernism) and "Kozaky v Iamaitsi: Postkoloniialni rysy v suchasnii ukrainskii kulturi" (Cossacks in Jamaica: Post-colonial Features in Contemporary Ukrainian Culture), both first published in 1992,4 established the view of current Ukrainian culture as situated at the postmodern/post-colonial crossroads, a view that has been more or less readily accepted in Ukraine itself (unfortunately, with few additional theorizations).5
Yet within this global discourse on post-coloniality, which has experienced an almost explosive growth over the past twenty years, the notion of displacement occupies a peculiar position. While there exists a widespread consensus about it being crucial for analyses of post-colonial subjectivity,...