22 Linguistic Strategies of Imperial Appropriation

The idea of this chapter emerged from a close reading of the texts written in Ukrainian, Russian, and English that, in their entirety or part, dealt with Ukrainian filmmaking, starting with the late nineteenth century up until today. The process of Ukraine's cultural decolonization that follows its political independence from Russia has been slow and conflicted not least because a long history of imperial appropriation has affected and continues to affect the very way Ukrainians think of themselves but also the way Europe and the rest of the world see Ukraine. Imperial appropriation means such a discursive presentation of the colonized that their culture, history, language, and other identity traits either disappear completely or merge with the respective aspects of the hegemonic imperial identity. The imperial appropriation seeks to deprive a colonized people of a sense of their authenticity and, with it. of the will to exist as a separate self-sustained and self-reproducing culture. Alongside literature, historiography, film, and other domains of human creativity involved in the production of ideologies of domination, language has been a central tool of the imperial appropriation of the colonized. This study is an attempt to understand some of the linguistic strategies used to cause the "dissolution" of Ukraine as a culture and its cinema in particular within the Russian discourse, and as a result make Ukraine hard to spot today on the cultural map of Europe. First. I propose a typology of narratives on Ukraine, which the reader interested in Ukrainian film and culture is bound to encounter. This will be followed by an analysis of some of the most frequent appropriation strategies applied to various identity designators (spelling, lexical semantics, and lexical distribution), whether direct or implicit. Central in this analysis is the "identity seme." the component of the semantic structure that ties the word's referent to a specific culture as its marker. I also discuss how the concept of "homeland" have been redefined to replace the original identity of the colonized with the imperial identity centered on Russian culture and negating Ukrainian distinctiveness.