ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to rearticulate the paradigms of the colonizer and the colonized. Working from case studies from the Soviet-era Baltic borderlands, I discuss the relevance of the Baltic Soviet-era experience for rethinking the terminology of postcolonial studies. I especially focus on the tension between colonial discourses, distributed by colonial power structures through official media channels and further spread through different social networks, and local cultural imaginaries, which both internalize and at the same time also resist the interpretive patterns offered by colonial discourses. Based on Baltic examples, I show why categories of colonizer or colonized should be regarded as structural positions that refer to the subject’s location within the colonial matrix of power. Structural positions are situated within discursive frameworks and are activated in certain situations but do not necessarily encompass the whole human subjectivity.
