Cyber-hybridity and the New Kind of War in Akhtem Seitablaiev’s Cyborgs

• In Event: Crisis, Subjectivity, and Mythmaking in Recent Ukrainian Cinema

Abstract

This paper examines Akhtem Seitablaiev’s blockbuster Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die (2017) to argue that the film merits critical attention as both an astute record of conspicuous social transformations in today’s Ukraine and a valuable cultural document that presents an original perspective on the hybrid nature of modern war and its mediatization, a relatively new theme in war films broadly defined. In its analysis, the paper relies on postcolonial and cyborg theories of hybridity to illustrate how post-Soviet, postcolonial, and post-truth aspects of war-torn Ukraine conflate in Seitablaev’s film to bring to the fore the recent shift in the nature of warfare itself, now defined not so much by high-tech armed operations and direct annihilation of the opponent as by contactless warfare, as well as its consequences for those directly influenced by it.

Author

• Yuliya V. Ladygina, Pennsylvania State U