immanence

My Gund Institute research talk from a few months ago, on “Navigating Earth’s ‘Zone of Alienation’: Chernobyl and the Search for Adequate Images of the Anthropocene,” can now be viewed online (see link below). It consists mostly of out-takes from my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, forthcoming later this year from Punctum Books.

The Chernobyl material comes out of a much longer talk on that topic, titled “30 Years (or 30,000): Seven Spectral Stories In and Around Chernobyl,” which I wrote for the 30th anniversary of the accident. Here it is, as given at the University of Kansas in 2016. I was getting over pneumonia at the time, and the images and text often don’t align well (at a few points the images run well ahead of the spoken text), but the overall drift is there.

* Note on the spelling of Chernobyl/Chornobyl:

For those who pay attention to such things (as some of my Ukrainian friends do), I should note that in my academic writings, I have generally tended to use the (more common) spelling of “Chernobyl” for the nuclear power plant and its 1986 accident, but “Chornobyl” (or “Chornobyl'” with an apostrophe to soften the final consonant) for the town itself. The first is traditionally transliterated that way from the Russian “Чернобыль,” while the second comes from the Ukrainian “Чорнобиль”; the meanings are the same, but the original spellings (albeit in Cyrillic) and the pronunciations are slightly different. As the nuclear plant is now within the boundaries of an independent Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian transliteration may seem more appropriate. With the capital, Kyiv (formerly “Kiev”), that makes sense, although habits are hard to break. (That’s why English speakers refer to “Rome” rather than “Roma,” “Prague” rather than “Praha,” “Moscow” rather than “Moskva,” and for the most part still “Kiev” rather than “Kyiv.” But “Peking” and “Peiping” have mostly died out in favor of “Beijing,” so habits can and do change, eventually.)

The first spelling, “Chernobyl,” remains much more common in English, so it is more easily searchable, findable, and cross-referenceable. That is changing, with Canadian media leading the way to Ukrainian-preferred transliterations (as with “Kyiv” instead of “Kiev”) and I will happily change with it, but as of this posting it is still not the norm. 

A complicating factor, however, is that the nuclear power plant’s origins — as well as its 1986 accident — occurred during the Soviet era, in which Russian was not only the state language but the culturally enforced high-status language. In this sense, it really was the Chernobyl nuclear plant that exploded, since that’s what it was called at the time by the state that was responsible for it. Revising history by changing the power plant’s name might in this sense be wiping the (Soviet) state’s hands cleaner than the current (Ukrainian) state might wish. Independent Ukraine took it upon itself to address the failures of the former (Soviet) state, but the primary failure, emblematized by the accident, preceded its existence. (On the other hand, some of the power plant’s blocks continued functioning well into the era of independence, so even that gets complicated.)

The town, however — which is not where the nuclear power plant is located, but some distance away — predates both the Soviet era and the Russian imperial era, going back to the days of Rus’ (not Russia), well before the Ukrainian and Russian languages diverged/evolved into their modern variants. In that case, a historical perspective doesn’t definitively require either choice, so deferring to contemporary realities — with Chornobyl being a town in contemporary Ukraine (albeit a ghost town) — makes more sense.