Occupation versus colonization

post-Soviet Latvia and the provincialization of Europe

pp. 125-145

in: Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, Julie Fedor (eds), Memory and theory in Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

In September 2008 I was strolling in central Riga with a Latvian colleague at the close of a day spent at a conference on regional history, memory, and politics. Deep in discussion, in English, of this complex field, we came to an elegant building in the late-nineteenth-century "Latvian national" architectural style. Seizing on this convenient example, my colleague informed me that the building we were facing had recently become the object of heated public debates. Although it had originally been constructed by a wealthy patron in the decades prior to the First World War in order to house an ethnic Latvian school, during the period of Latvian independence following the war it had been converted into a Russian school.