Memories of the Future: A Dream of America in Ukrainian Cultural Production of the 1990s

• In Event: Imagined Memories of Liquid Transitions: Manifestations in (Post-)Soviet / Post-Socialist Popular Cultures and Visual Arts

Abstract

Registering a recurrent encounter of America in the 1990s Ukrainian cultural production, this paper addresses the song “Ameryka,” by anarcho-punk band Braty Hadiukiny, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, a groundbreaking novel by Oksana Zabuzhko, and such important part of Ukrainian popular culture as American TV series (Beverly Hills 90210, Friends, Melrose Place, Models Inc., Sex and the City) dubbed into Ukrainian and aired on 1+1 Channel, founded and produced by Oleksandr Rodnianskyi. This critique explores a (self-)validation performed through and by the presence of America, and posits that, throughout the first decade of Ukraine’s independence, a dreamlike memory of America appeared as a premise of thinking Ukraine’s past and present, as well as Ukraine’s becoming—a thinking that invites a productive reading as the memory of the future.

Author

• Iuliana Matasova, New Europe College Romania