FIGURE INTRO.1 Following the finals of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, Ruslana waves the Ukrainian flag at the Abdi Ipekci Arena in Istanbul, Turkey. Ukraine won the 49th Eurovision Song Contest with 280 points. AP Photo/Osman Orsal.
We can begin to understand the political utility of Wildness as a representational tool by observing its historical resonance in modern Ukraine. In a global context, Ukraine is not likely to leap to mind as an extreme space of otherness. The historian Larry Wolff, for example, documents how Ukraine (along with the rest of Eastern Europe) was “invented” during the Enlightenment as “an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization” (1994, 7). Indeed, for centuries, travelers, diplomats, and writers framed Ukraine as a space of liminality, tantalizingly close to the spaces of civilization. To Johann Gottfried Herder, the original theorist of musical nationalism, its inhabitants were the nearby “little wild peoples” (2011, 57) who—from their practices of sounding, and Herder’s practices of listening—inspired his rhapsodies about the essence of the national spirit expressed through folk music.3 For many nineteenth-century Polish and Austro-Hungarian ethnographers gazing eastward, Ukraine became a site of pilgrimage in pursuit of such völkisch authenticity. For such observers, Ukraine was a zone of un-civilization, one that they aspired to make intelligible through ethnographic inscription.4
Meanwhile, from the north, Catherinian narratives of imperial domination turned on the taming of the “wild field” (дикое поле) that flowed into the Crimean peninsula.5 From the Russian imperial perspective, Ukraine was frequently depicted as an eternal “little” (мала) province of Russia, its unruly younger sibling. Such metaphors of kinship that subordinated Ukraine to Russia flourished in the Soviet twentieth century and have been revived again in the twenty-first.
Ukraine has been, in other words, a quintessential borderland, a buffer, a threshold, the closest “elsewhere” to a European or Russian “here.” Its “wild” peoples and territories, observed by so many outsiders, have been tempered by its proximity to those “civilized” observers. Historically, then, Ukrainian Wildness has not been construed as the inscrutable Other of Orientalism, but instead as the proximate unruliness, the quaint immaturity, of the border. Like Orientalism, however, this discursive formation of Wildness is formed in “the ensemble of relationships between works, audiences and some particular aspects of the Orient [or the Wild that] … constitut[e] an analyzable formation” (Said 1979, 28).
Today, this discursive Wildness thrums through daily life not only as a current of history, but also as a pulse of the present. In a precarious Ukrainian state, Wildness manifests in everyday instabilities, in economic insecurity, in the untrustworthiness of authority, in the churning violence on the country’s borders, in the rise of restive militias, and—key to my project—in the creative expressive practices of citizens who survive and innovate under conditions of precarity. Wildness manifests in the political and aesthetic concepts, techniques, and shared assumptions through which Ukrainians contest their liminal position in contemporary global politics. Contemporary Ukrainian Wildness, then, can be understood as a “border epistemology” in Tlostanova and Mignolo’s terms: a response “to the violence of the imperial territorial epistemology and the rhetoric of modernity with its familiar defects, from forced universal salvation to taking difference to sameness, from subject-object split to naturalization of Western epistemic privilege” (2012, 7). Ukrainian Wildness, therefore, also anticipates new modes of governance; scholars such as Jack Halberstam have also turned to “thinking about ‘wildness’ as a space/name/critical term for what lies beyond current logics of rule” (2014, 138).6
In the twenty-first century, the discursive force of Wildness has been harnessed by many Ukrainian musicians who remediate burdensome histories of exoticism in order to foster unexpected citizenly solidarities across the fault lines of ethnic, linguistic, and religious identity. From their borderland vantage, Ukrainians use Wildness as a source of knowledge, which rankles binaries of nature and culture, undermines geopolitical taxonomies of “West” and “East,” and—instead—motivates strategies of self-representation that defiantly re-center local ways of knowing and sounding (cf. Ochoa Gautier 2016). Let me clarify here that I am aware of the dangers of reproducing damaging stereotypes of exoticism in my examination of Wildness. In my approach, I reject the notion of any a priori wildness (which might suggest an equivalence between the wild and an absolute or primordial state of nature), despite the fact that some Ukrainians hear such “real” wildness contained in specific acts of sounding. I am not interested in arbitrating the relative truth of such claims here, but rather in investigating how discursive Wildness has been circulated through aestheticized sonic expressive practices that enable contemporary actors to make a diversity of claims to political status.
This book asserts that Wildness structures much of how Ukrainians today envision their horizons of possibility, and that wild music is a key vector through which citizens debate what Ukraine has been, what it is today, and, even more urgently, what it ought to be. It considers the ways that wild music—and the potential of Wildness expressed in sound and performance—fosters affective alliances among the diverse citizens of an imperiled state. While Wildness suggests riotousness, the refusal to be rationalized, tamed, or domesticated, wild music should be understood as a container that traps Wildness, because the music I analyze is always recognizable as a rationalized form of sounding.7 In other words, musical form, along with its contexts of performance, circulation, and commercial exchange, naturalizes and domesticates those sounds that are construed to be “wild”—those ungovernable, uncategorizable, unexpected sounds of Ukraine’s internal others that become intelligible—and thus commodifiable—as “music” when framed by specific acts of performance, audition, or circulation.
As a sonic representational resource, Wildness is expressed musically in many different ways: as outward-facing strategic auto-exoticism (as in the Eurovision example given); as nested and internal otherness (witnessed in the urban fetish of “village authenticity”); as ecological activism, totemic “folklore,” anarchic hedonism; or as a reflection of Ukrainian experience that refracts the gazes of external viewers. It functions, at times, as a “weapon of the weak” (Scott 1985), though it can be coopted by the powerful. The Wildness of wild music seeks to surprise, to call attention to itself—and, at times, to refuse. Wild music can present as campy ironic distance (wildness as “wildness”), as utter sincerity (wildness as “nature” or “pristine wilderness”), or as an ambiguous blur of these two extremes. In any of its guises, the Wildness of wild music is disruptive in the present. Wildness rattles the cage of musical culture; it seeks to unsettle conventional sense, even as it is framed within colonial and postcolonial logics of sense-making (cf. Taussig 1987). Still, Wildness affords new modes of expression that musicians artfully link to the ways of life that they seek to bring into being.
Wildness is also a matter of perception. Many listeners—especially those alienated by, excluded from, or not conversant in internal Ukrainian discourse—will not hear the same Wildness that I identify in this music. Musical sound is, perhaps, an inherently unstable index of cultural territory.8 But this book traverses the edges of this interpretive