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Posts Tagged ‘Ukraine’

My recent E-Flux article, “Russia, Decolonization, and the Capitalism-Democracy Muddle,” raised the question of Russia’s potential “decolonization” — what it means (and doesn’t), and how the debate over it, and over decolonization in general, needs some political updating. The article seems no less relevant after the abortive mutiny led last week by the Wagner Group’s […]

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My reflections on a year of full-scale war in Ukraine can be read here. Among them: Like Ukrainians in general, whose resistance to the Russian onslaught has been remarkable, President Volodymyr Zelensky has done wonders in so many ways. But one thing neither he nor his western supporters have succeeded at — as this New York Times analysis […]

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I was interviewed last week by UC Santa Barbara music professor and KCSB DJ David Novak on his show Selectric Davyland. The hour-long interview offers a highly personal take on Ukrainian music since the 1980s; David called it a “Personal and Political History (and a Playlist) of Ukrainian Experimental Music.” It features an adventurous mix […]

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The invasion of Ukraine has shifted media attention away from many other things, Covid and climate among them. But the climate implications of the war have not gone unnoticed. To start with the obvious: Russia is a petrostate. As Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta writes, More than a third […]

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Here are some thoughts on the humanitarian, historical, moral, and environmental implications of the crisis of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They were prompted by questions asked of me by a public radio interviewer. I’m still working on the answers (and the interview has not aired, as far as I can tell). Comments […]

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This is being cross-posted (in modified form) from UKR-TAZ, where it is part of a series examining the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The invasion of Ukraine continues to horrify, with casualties mounting and humanitarian corridors failing to materialize. But one of its more interesting dimensions, from the perspective of media and cultural theory, is the […]

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Readers of this blog may know that I have longstanding research as well as personal/family connections in Ukraine and that I have sometimes run a parallel blog on issues related to that country. (Called “UKR-TAZ: A Ukrainian Temporary Autonomous Zone,” the blog is found here.) I recently began posting to that blog more regularly with […]

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My recent 2022 Mohyla Lecture at the University of Saskatchewan, “The Chɵrnobyl Event: Ecology, Media, and the Anthropocene,” is now available to be watched online. (That “ɵ” in “Chɵrnobyl” is intentional; I discuss it in the talk.) In addition to updating some of my work on the Chɵrnobyl “hyper-event” and its multiple impacts, the talk […]

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My thinking about the Anthropocenic predicament continues to be informed, even haunted, by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker, along with their literary predecessor novels by (Lviv-born) Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. Two keynote talks I’ve been invited to give this October — one for Ukraine’s Congress of Culture, to take place in […]

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A casual comment on a minor article in a provincial newspaper in a faraway country (Ukraine) got me going on a response to what is, essentially, the white world’s default position on all things racial. (Social media comments, as a rule, aren’t indicative of anything, but this one is so symptomatic it’s worth examining.) The […]

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I dreamt that Leonard Cohen appeared by my bedside. He smiled and reassured me that things will be alright: “They will all have been beautiful in the end.” I wanted to ask him something, but wasn’t sure what. Then he was gone. The radio (it was Radio Moskva, from back when I spent a fall […]

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Or, Why Ukraine- and Russia- literacy should now be mandatory studies for every voting American One could start with another question: Why are both the politics of climate change and politics in general so polarized these days? Political polarization, after all, remains the main complaint of Americans, and it has made it impossible to make […]

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