Masha Shpolberg
Film and media scholar specializing in global documentary, Russian, Central, and Eastern European cinema, ecocinema, and women’s cinema. Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard Collеge, USA. Author of the book Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest.
Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has prompted many to reconsider Ukraine’s relationship to the question of what it means to “decolonize.” This present-day revaluation of Ukraine’s complex imperial inheritances has centered primarily on Ukraine’s historical relationship to the Russian Empire (and the Russocentric Soviet Union), often to the exclusion of Ukraine’s Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and other imperial inheritances. This tragic moment of reflection raises a number of bedeviling questions. How do we narrate a decolonial history of Ukraine? Is it possible, or desirable, to disentangle Ukrainian culture from empires of the past and present? Can we imagine a future political and economic order for Ukraine that is not wholly dependent upon more powerful...