Not as a statement, but you can force it with importlib.import_module:

$ python3 -c "import pkg; pkg.submodule = 1; import importlib; importlib.import_module('.submodule', 'pkg'); print(pkg.submodule)"
pkg
pkg.submodule
<module 'pkg.submodule' from '/home/ncoghlan/devel/misc/_play/pkg/submodule.py'>

We're getting off-topic for the issue tracker now, though - it's more a Stack Overflow type usage question (and the preferred answer would be to eliminate whatever's causing the shadowing problem in the originating module).