Cultural Production and Cultural Resistance in Ukraine’s War Zone

• In Event: State Interventions and Cultural Production/Resistance

Abstract

This paper examines literary production as a site of cultural resistance in contemporary Ukraine, drawing on conflict-zone fieldwork with writers, translators, editors, publishers, and readers between 2023 and 2026. In a war marked by systematic attempts to dismantle language, institutions, and memory, Ukrainian literary actors have become central figures in the defense of national continuity. By studying book culture in the “unmarked” space of the war zone—the everyday infrastructures of printing, editing, translation, distribution, and readership that persist amid bombardment—this project contributes to sociological studies of cultural production, collective agency, and language death.

The empirical core of the paper is based on interviews and participant observation in the cities of Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, and Mykolaiv, alongside documentary research on attacks against Ukraine’s publishing infrastructure. These sites include both major cultural centers and the southern frontline, a linguistically, religiously, and ethnically diverse region often flattened in accounts that divide Europe into a “western” and “eastern” cultural binary. By foregrounding subnational and regional perspectives, particularly from the south, this study challenges homogenizing narratives of “national” culture and demonstrates how cultural production operates as a plural, contested, and generative field under conditions of war.

To focus only on destruction, however, obscures the central sociological puzzle: how literary production continues, adapts, and even flourishes under such conditions. This paper moves beyond frameworks of loss and victimhood to analyze wartime book culture as an active, future-oriented project of cultural production.

Author

• Fiona Greenland, University of Virginia