International Journal of Slavic Studies (Oct 2022)
(Ре)конструюючи минуле: популярна культура як ідеологічна зброя
Abstract
The article explores the peculiarities of the correlation between popular culture and society in the space of ideologies: both on the level of social daily occurrence and on the level of the dynamic of reflecting these ideologies in narratives and genre clichés of popular culture. In particular, the paper deals with how popular culture utilizes historical material. For instance, history gains specific significance for the speculative fiction genre. The real history transformation becomes a foundation for critical analytics of the current state of affairs, while history itself mirrors modernity. Exploring Ukrainian texts, the author of the article argues that alternative history (for the 1990s-2000s) was a platform for constructing metaphors of the sense of cultural incoherence after going beyond the unified cultural and ideological Soviet space. Further, the development of the alternative history genre in Ukraine has been connected with the formation of historical memory. At the same time, texts about “popadancy” have been dominating in Russian-language science fiction in the last two decades. The transformation of this area developed from dealing with psychological issues of “a small person in the atomized society” to transforming this genre into a propaganda machine that exploits revanchist sentiment in modern-day Russia. The important element of the process of mutual influence between popular culture and society becomes fandom – socially active consumers of popular culture content. Fandom grows in the shadow of popular culture but becomes a channel that connects ideologies actualized in this culture, and society. The article considers general changes in post-Soviet fandom as well as attempts to identify the connection between these changes and the transformation of the ideologies in Ukraine and Russia. In particular, the paper concludes that Ukrainian fandom gains autonomy and cultural gap with the unified cultural space in the post-Soviet area in the background of the beginning of the Russo- Ukrainian war in 2014.
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