Decolonial Vertigo: Greatness, Universalism, and Musical Imperialism in the Russo-Ukrainian War
Date and Time
A Sochor Parry Memorial Lecture by Maria Sonevytsky, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music, Bard College.
Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
About the Lecture
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. 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 applied and appropriated by opposing camps, the effects can be dizzying. Since 2022, the so-called “musical front” has been a prime site of wartime spectacle and contestation. From the Kremlin Orchestra’s staging of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (known by its programmatic title, “Fate”) on the ruins of the Mariupol Drama Theater, to the debates over the potential renaming of the “Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music” in Kyiv, the mythical figure of Tchaikovsky appears centrally in debates today about musical colonization and decolonization.
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 discourses of musical “greatness,” I question how “greatness” operates as a form of universalism familiar to postcolonial critics. I further observe how the deployment of revanchist Russian imperial greatness operates as justification for the ongoing 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.
About the Speaker
Maria Sonevytsky is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard College. She is author of the award-winning book Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019), and Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi (2023), part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series. Professor Sonevytsky has published articles on folklore and nuclear experience after Chornobyl, epistemic imperialism after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Crimean Tatar Indigenous politics and expressive culture, and the circulation of post-Soviet Ukrainian folklorized kitsch, or sharovarshchyna, among other subjects. She is currently at work on her third book, tentatively titled Singing for Lenin in Ukraine: Children, Music, and the Communist Future. In addition to her scholarly writing, Prof. Sonevytsky is a singer and accordionist.
This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.
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