1 The Liminal: Colonial Identity on the Margins of an Empire Nutsa Batiashvili Table of Contents 1. Introduction: The Liminal .................................................................................................... 1 2. Derailed Path of Development ........................................................................................... 5 3. Between the Frontiers ........................................................................................................ 7 4. Backward or Not ............................................................................................................... 11 5. Hierarchy of Nationalities ................................................................................................. 14 6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 16 References ................................................................................................................................ 17 1. Introduction: The Liminal For many centuries this small country …has endured many wars. Every conflict, war or bloodshed took place to preserve Georgia as a distinguished country in the world and to protect its distinguished ‘language, homeland and faith’ ... Our cultural heritage, traditions and national spirit have saved us from evaporating from the surface of the earth. There were in Georgia those years of misery that have left us lagging behind any western- European state. It was exactly in those Soviet years that our traditional progress was halted and all the exits to freedom were locked. Georgia is and will remain one of the most important countries in the Caucasus, on the edge of Europe and Asia. It frequently attracts attention from not only Asian countries, but more frequently from Europe. Because of all these reasons and facts, it is necessary that we bring changes to our country, for our own good. While it may take Georgia many decades to develop to the level of a European country, we may never manage this. In all of this the only thing to be “blamed” is our culture. (Tekle, 18 years old, excerpt from an 2011 essay on „tradition and modernity“) I want to take this excerpt from an essay written by an 18-year-old Georgian girl, as a point of departure to talk about representations and identities in the colonial and postcolonial Georgia. In particular, I want to use this somewhat infantile and yet complex iteration of the Georgian collective selfhood as a suture that holds together political anxieties of modern