Contemporary Ukrainian Culture: The European and Global Context
24-26 November 2005Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Melbourne
A Conference of The Mykola Zerov Centre for Ukrainian Studies, Monash University Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia Shevchenko Scientific Society in Australia
Major sponsors:
Ukrainian
Studies Foundation in Australia Ltd
Vice-Chancellor,
Monash University
Faculty of Arts, Monash University
Mr Wasyl Holoyda
Dnister Ukrainian Credit Co-operative
Ltd
The conference program can be viewed from here.
For several weeks at the end of 2004, the Orange Revolution focussed the world's attention on a transformation in Ukrainian politics that unfolded as a grandiose mediagenic spectacle. Charismatic politicians alternated with rock groups on the central stage of Independence Square. A new folklore of street chants and songs and jokes erupted overnight. Television beamed to its audience at home and abroad the individual faces that comprised the collective portrait of an altered nation. The Orange Revolution may come to be viewed as a watershed in the evolution of Ukrainian national identity as a civic identity. What is already clear is that the Orange Revolution was a cultural event of the first magnitude.
There exist long traditions of scholarship that study the connections between the phenomena of Ukrainian culture and the social and political realities to which they appear to respond. In recent years researchers, especially those working within the frame of post-colonial studies, have given attention to ways in which the dominance of Marxist-Leninist ideology and Russian culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet space receded or persisted after 1991. The time is now ripe for a multi-dimensional consideration of Ukrainian culture in its relationship to cultural developments in the world at large.
Ukrainian high and popular culture, Ukrainian youth culture and "official" culture, Ukrainian literature, cinema, music and film, and Ukrainian cultural institutions are in the process of redefining themselves within several contexts. They are positioning themselves relative to the political, social and economic realities of today's Ukraine. They are negotiating their positions relative to Ukraine's de-facto asymmetrical multiculturalism, in which Russian-language culture plays a major and perhaps still dominant role. They are exploring their relationships vis--vis the cultures with which, traditionally, they have been most profoundly in contact: the Russian and the Polish. They are seeking to define the ways in which they may claim to be "European." And they are learning to live with the facts of a global media and entertainment industry that asserts its values and priorities in Ukraine no less than elsewhere.