Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society - by Julie Fedor & Andreas Umland & Yuliya Yurchuk (Paperback)

About the Book

This special issue proposes to approach Ukrainian resistance from the cultural studies perspective. It brings together scholars from different disciplines who address different aspects of resilience and resistance focusing on gender, humor, literature, visual representations, and memes.

Book Synopsis

Contents

Yuliya Yurchuk: Introduction. Understanding the Ukrainian Spirit: Symbols and Narratives of Ukrainian Resistance and Resilience II

Olha Voznyuk: Symbols of Resistance and Resilience through the Prism of Contemporary Ukrainian Anthologies of War Writing.

Svitlana Kot, Alina Mozolevska, Olha Polishchuk and Yuliya Stodolinska: United for Ukraine: Representations of Civilian Resistance in Ukrainian Digital Popular Culture

Ada Krasenko, Tamara Martsenyuk, and Kateryna Dysa: "Girls, Let's Close the Sky*: Gendered Images of Witches in Ukrainian Media and Culture during the Russo-Ukrainian War

This special issue searches for the deeper roots of Ukrainian resistance as they are expressed in culture and folklore. During the first days of the invasion, one could witness the proliferation of both visual and narrative expressions of people's emotions and feelings. Images, memes, poetry, songs portraying Ukrainians at war came in their hundreds in the very first days of the invasion. The scale of creativity seemed proportional to the scale of the shock and the horror that the war brought. With three years of atrocities, visuality became more focused on the documentary genre. The articles in this special issue both document and analyze the meanings that stand behind the symbols and narratives of Ukrainian resistance. As products of culture, these symbols and narratives reveal the key traits of the renegotiated identities of the Ukrainian society in the ongoing war.

About the Author

Yuliya Yurchuk is Associate Professor of History of Ideas at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She specializes in memory studies, history of religion, and the study of nationalism in East European countries. She is the author of the book Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Acta 2014) and one of the editors of Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective (Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Zuzanna Bogumil). Together with Julie Fedor and Andreas Umland she was a co-editor of the series of special issues of Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society dedicated to the memory and history of the OUN and UPA. Currently she is working on two research projects: one in the field of the transnational intellectual women's history (funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies) and another in the field of cultural heritage in the context of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war (funded by the Jean Monnet EU Program). Her interests continue to be memory, knowledge production, imperialism, decolonization, and securitization of the past.