The Department of Comparative Thought and Literature announces an upcoming lecture by:

Maria Sonevytsky

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music, Bard College

Friday, January 31

4:15 pm

Gilman 208

Download the flyer

Since February 2022, many scholars of Russia and Ukraine have asked how far culturalist explanations can get us in comprehending Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the broader stakes of this war for the global order. Musical culture wars have unfolded in multiple theaters: from the Kremlin Orchestra’s staging of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (with the programmatic title “Fate”) on the ruins of the Mariupol Drama Theater, to the pop-kitsch spectacles of Ukrainian Eurovision contestants. As the Russian state justifies its invasion in culturalist and decolonial terms, as Ukrainians articulate competing visions of how Ukrainian and Russian culture both might be “decolonized,” and as generations of anti-, post- and decolonial thought become appropriated by opposing camps, the effects can be dizzying.

This lecture contends that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine unfolds in an era of decolonial vertigo, and that the arena of musical politics potently exposes some of these disorienting discourses of decoloniality. Teasing apart a few strands of the entangled histories of Ukrainian and Russian musical production alongside the asymmetrical construction of competing nationalisms, this lecture will interrogate rival discourses of greatness and musical supremacy. I observe how the deployment of a revanchist Russian imperial greatness operates as justification for the ongoing stochastic violence conducted by Russia against Ukraine, while questioning the logics of Ukrainian efforts to narrate compensatory histories of greatness under the banner of decolonization. Ultimately, I ask whether there are alternative models by which we might resolve–or at least escape–the escalating “decolonial” culture wars of our time.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, the Program in International Studies, the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, and the Critical Grove collective.

https://compthoughtlit.jhu.edu/event/maria-sonevytsky-decolonial-vertigo/