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The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 produced not only military and humanitarian responses but also scholarly and artistic ones from Ukrainians looking to the future of their country.
Terra Invicta is a series of critical and creative articulations of pasts, presents, and possible futures involving humans and the more-than-human world. The authors suggest that Ukraine is caught in an environmental war, waged by a fossil-fuel superpower against people who are prepared to lay down their lives to protect their land. This volume explores the relationship between Ukrainians – a multiethnic and multireligious people with a complicated history – and the Ukrainian land, the zemlia to which they belong. Themes include decoloniality, ecocultural identity, the politics of reconstruction, and artistic responsibility amid a war for national survival. Contributors emphasize the value of reviving multispecies relations with the land, positively transforming multicultural relations with history, and reinvigorating grassroots engagements with the state and society.
Terra Invicta grapples with the role of artistic expression in the face of war and collective loss and what it means to commit to a place, a land, a territory, in a world set in constant motion.
"We in Ukraine have been breathing war for more than two years. War is part of the air, just like oxygen. And this is not a metaphor. The war in Ukraine affects the ecology of nature and the ecology of consciousness throughout the world. This book is the best way to understand Ukraine today and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in." Andrey Kurkov, author of The Silver Bone
“Long perceived as a 'non-place'—while simultaneously being the epicenter of 20th-century mass violence—Ukraine emerges here as an outpost of the challenges of the Anthropocene. The volume brings together researchers, essayists, artists, biologists, curators, filmmakers, musicologists, and historians, almost all Ukrainian, almost all writing from exile or from within a seemingly endless war... Terra Invicta achieves several things that few edited volumes manage to accomplish simultaneously. First, it treats Ukraine as a site of intellectual development, not as an object of pity or scholarly condescension. The contributors, almost all Ukrainian, do not speak of the war itself but from within it, with an epistemic authority and analytical precision that disarms the condescending temptations of academic Westernization; and at the same time, these authors express themselves in English in order to address the world. Second, it holds together radically heterogeneous registers of experience and analysis. The newts of Odessa coexist with the electronic music of Kyiv, the history of Soviet food with the philosophy of ecological democracy. This heterogeneity is the very condition of thought in a situation of catastrophe, where disciplinary specialization must give way to a more porous form of collective intelligence.” Terrestres