The Right to Landscape: Narratives from the «Great Meadow of Zaporizhzhia» in the Context of Postcolonial Heritage

Author

Боса Любов

a Ph.D. in History, a senior research fellow of the Ukrainian Ethnological Centre Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5381-8151

The Right to Landscape: Narratives from the «Great Meadow of Zaporizhzhia» in the Context of Postcolonial Heritage

Abstract

This eco-anthropological study is devoted to the analysis of the processes of interaction between landscape and collective memory in the lens of fundamental narratives about the Great Meadow – a territory of deep historical, cultural and ecological significance for Ukraine, as well as for the European community as a whole. A historical and eco-anthropological approaches combining theoretical principles with the analysis of a wide range of sources: historical and ethnographic documents, oral testimonies and scientific observations, are applied in the study.

The presentation is developed around three key narrative networks identified by the authoress. Various aspects of interaction with the landscape are described in each of them. One reveals the Meadow as the personification of a “living landscape” endowed with its own agency in interaction with the human community. The landscape as a field of power practices is presented in the second narrative network.  Such activity has led to its destructive flooding and the erasure of identity between 1950 and 1956 during the construction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station. The third network covers contemporary aspects of Russian imperial policy and ecocide through the dam explosion in June 2023, which has provoked a new public discourse. Numerous narratives are intersected in this discourse: from testimonies of “living” historical memory to expert forecasts of ecological revival and the possible reconstruction of the Kakhovka Reservoir, actualizing a broad discussion of the future of this space in the conditions of constant threats.

The material submitted in the article argues that the defense of the Great Meadow is an aspiration to realize the right of Ukrainians to memory: to comprehend the traumas of the colonial heritage and to restore the connection with the landscape as a carrier of identity in the era of decolonization and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. Thus, it is argued that the narratives and public discourse serve as the tools for conceptualizing and asserting the “right to landscape”, which is also interpreted as the sovereign right of the landscape itself to existence, integrity, and its own dynamics.

Keywords

Great Meadow, landscape agency, right to memory, narratives, colonial heritage, Russian-Ukrainian war.

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