topic of nationalism and how it relates to wild music. There are two primary reasons that I de-emphasize nationalism. First, because I am committed to the project of decolonizing ethnomusicology, and because I believe that this entails a reassessment of the traditional theoretical investments that mark our discipline, this extends, in the present study, to the inherited assumption that modern musical cultures relate primarily to the nation—and, by extension, to nationalism. Music’s relationship to nationalism has been a foundational concern of music studies, since the very notion of “folk music” was core to Johann Gottfried Herder’s understanding of national spirit, identity, and history, as I have already mentioned (Herder 2017; see also Bohlman 2004; Taruskin 2001). Benjamin Teitelbaum’s (2017) vital work on the relationship of music to radical white nationalism in Sweden pursues this theme into the contemporary era. Yet, despite the numerous studies that deepen our understanding of music and its ability to “perform the nation” (Askew 2002; see also Olson 2004; Sugarman 1999; Bohlman 2010), music’s relationship to the state remains under-examined. Moreover, ethnographers of music have yet to engage with sovereignty, having prioritized instead questions of how music is governed through various “micropractices” (Guilbault 2007) or “administered” through state policies and (mutable) ideological mandates (Tochka 2016); how musicians adapt through transitional political-economic orders (Buchanan 2006); or how cosmopolitanism operates within the space of the nation (Turino 2000).39 I am deeply indebted to all of this work. In this project, however, I attempt to invert the flow of power that is usually presupposed in these studies by prioritizing how the musical practices of citizens that comprise cultural “ways of life” contribute to emergent political sovereignties.40
The second reason I do not center discussions of nationalism in Wild Music has to do with the fact that Ukrainian nationalism has been overdetermined by the narratives of others—Russia, Europe, the United States—while Ukraine’s emergent twenty-first-century patriotism—exemplified in episodes such as the night at ArtPóle—has been largely overlooked. Therefore, I largely sidestep the nation and the problems of nationalism (which I define here as an ideology of superiority and exceptionalism) in favor of examining the operations of patriotism (loyalty and appreciation for one’s ways of life).41 This rationale has particular salience for the perennial underdogs of global geopolitics whose “nationalisms” are depicted as threatening and suspicious rather than the stance of ennobled patriotism bequeathed to the victors of geopolitics (Von Hagen 1995).42 Though nationalism has operated as a pernicious ideology used to justify violence at points in Ukrainian history, the trope of “Ukrainian nationalism” as it is deployed in the current information war waged by Russia demonstrates how the narratives of a regional superpower flatten or distort the actual threat of Ukrainian xenophobia. During the Maidan Revolution, for example, Russian media narratives decried the rise of a threatening ethno-nationalism in Ukraine, labeling the revolution a fascist coup, even as many Ukrainians celebrated the inclusivity of (especially the early) Maidan protests. Though scholars of Ukraine are doing important work to study the role of right-wing nationalists in escalating violence during the Maidan Revolution (Ishchenko 2016) and those who continue to operate in militias in the eastern border conflict with Russia (Risch 2015), nationalist groups in Ukraine continue to hold little electoral power and possess effectively no formal governing authority in Ukraine at the time of this writing (unlike far-right groups in Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and the United States). Nonetheless, the narrative of rabid Ukrainian nationalism is a key weapon deployed in the informational warfare waged by Russia on Ukraine.43
By circumventing these tropes of Ukrainian nationalism, then, Wild Music takes up a challenge set forth by postcolonial and decolonial theorists to provincialize the master narratives of history (Chakrabarty 2000, 41). Alexei Yurchak, in his project to “rehumanize Soviet life,” asserted that “in the case of socialism, especially in Russia, the object of ‘provincializing’ would not just be ‘Europe’ but, more specifically, ‘Western Europe’” (2005, 9).44 In Ukraine, however, where even the premodern myths of Russia and Ukraine are bound together through shared sites and figures such as Saint Volodymyr/Vladimir the Great, the urgent need to de-provincialize Ukraine hinges first on its relationship to Russia.45 By provincializing Russia, then, one can glean something of how Ukrainians deploy wild music to reimagine the layered imperial and neo-imperial histories that inform contemporary discourses of Ukrainian sovereignty (cf. Fowler 2017, 11).
The unexpected outcomes of the Maidan Revolution have led Ukraine into a seemingly perpetual condition of “war without war and occupation without occupation” (Dunn and Bobick 2014, 405). Despite this, the prospect of a better future is being actively and creatively reimagined by an internet-savvy generation of activists, creators, and performers, who are attached to the idea of Ukrainian statehood and are finding new ways to make and amplify political claims through wild music. This generation tends to reject the creeping authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but they also do not fully embrace faltering European models of nation-statehood. They are suspicious of voracious capitalism and understand the dangerous precedents of “actually existing socialism.” These actors take the Ukrainian past and present seriously on its own terms by attempting to decenter master narratives from both European and Russian perspectives, decoupling nation from state, and privileging patriotism over nationalism. This affords the possibility to consider that, while the Ukrainian state may be considered “fragile” or even “failing” (by some outside metrics and by the account of many of its frustrated, alienated citizenry), it nonetheless remains at the center of the sovereign imaginaries that its citizens are conjuring in wild music.46
FIGURE INTRO.4 Graffiti of the word “Revolution” in Independence Square in Kyiv, 2014. Photo by Franz Nicolay.
The six body chapters of Wild Music elaborate on such sovereign imaginaries through examples that reveal the situated knowledges and mediated forms of Wildness that permeate various musical and social contexts of contemporary Ukraine. The following two chapters center on the representation and reception of Western Ukrainian Hutsuls in the Ukrainian mediasphere: first through Ruslana’s “Wild Dances” (Chapter 1) and then through the remediated video of the “freak-cabaret” collective known as the Dakh Daughters (Chapter 2). I then move to analysis of avtentyka singers who compete on the popular reality TV singing competition called Holos Kraïny (Voice of the Nation). Here, I examine how the politics of undisciplined vocal timbre reject logics of success according to the standards of reality TV “democratainment” (Hartley 2004). Their untamed singing remakes failure as an act of refusal of the limited musical forms that dominate Ukrainian media and an assertion of the ungovernability of Ukrainian rural expression. Chapter 4 focuses on the liminal sovereign imaginaries of Crimea as they relate to the “Eastern music” that was branded and broadcast by Radio Meydan, the Crimean Tatar radio station that operated in Simferopol from 2005 until 2015. I demonstrate how the presence of “Eastern music” in the semipublic spaces of microtransit motivated competing sovereign imaginaries among distinct Crimean populations, including the Crimean Tatar Indigenous minority. In Chapter 5, I interpret the sounds of “ethno-chaos” in recordings by the group DakhaBrakha, whose commercial success in the North American and European world music markets positioned its members to speak as “Ambassadors of the Maidan” to the world. In this chapter, I introduce the idea of “soundmarks of sovereignty”—sonic markers of history, territory, and temporality, embodied and subjugated knowledges, and postcolonial reclamation—and examine their relationship to emergent citizenly solidarities. The conclusion develops the idea of acoustic citizenship and explores it as a form of volitional, and therefore limited, citizenship that may have particular salience in imperiled states.
Despite the embattled status of Ukraine and its citizenry during the era that this book examines, I hear many expressions
