Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine
Book discussion with Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk
We kindly invite you to a book discussion with Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk "Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine". The meeting will be chaired by Zuzanna Bogumił.
The seminar will take place online, 1 April at 9:30am CET.
Please register in order to participate: https://shorturl.at/tCITs
Abstract:
From the very first days of their large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian invaders have made exceptional efforts to interact with the war memorial landscape of the newly occupied territories. They have destroyed some of these memorials, renovated others, and built new monuments amid continued fighting. They also used war memorials in countless propaganda photos and videos aimed for a domestic audience and largely escaping Western attention. Mykola Homanyuk spent several months in occupied Kherson conducting wartime on-site ethnography and collected sources on the change of the monumentscape. The book shows how Russian invaders believed their own propaganda about Soviet war memorials being mistreated in Ukraine, and what they did when they discovered well-maintained monuments on the ground. More broadly, it explores the connection between monuments and territorial claims by irredentist empires, as well as the enduring role of monuments in sustaining imperial conquest or, in other cases, colonization.
We recommend you to read the introduction and first chapter beforehand (pp.1-38). Book is available online here: https://ceupress.com/book/monuments-and-territory
Mischa Gabowitsch, historian and sociologist, is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and thematic journal issues in various languages on protest and social movements as well as memory and commemoration. These include, in English, The Russian Field: Views from Abroad (2011), Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016), Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017), The Sociology of Belarusian Protest (2021), Beyond Representation: The Visual Analysis of History Textbooks and Other Educational Media (2023), and Protest and Authoritarian Reaction in Belarus (2023).
Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group at Forum Transregionale Studien and a member of the Contested Ukraine: Military Patriotism, Russian Influence, and Implications for European Security research group. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on mental mapping and toponomy, ethnic studies, as well as memory and commemoration. As a theatermaker he runs the Kherson Theatre Lab and directs documentary theater productions. In 2018 he was awarded the ADAMI Media Prize for Cultural Diversity in Eastern Europe.
About the seminar series:
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial RussianFar East”,no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and SocialMemory and the Post-ImperialRussianHeritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.