What’s Missing From the News on Ukraine

The novel, the work of history, and the internet resource I am turning to now

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I was growing agitated while watching the news. The hosts, pundits, and experts were telling me details regarding the invasion of Ukraine. Some offered sweeping statements, some minutiae, but they all lacked something essential (at least to me): context.

Of course, the televisual structure doesn’t lend itself to the kind of context I hungered for. I was not seeking immediate information, imagery, the “big picture,” or guidance from political leaders. And I certainly didn’t want to find myself sucked into the binaries of the Cold War. They were flat-footed even back then and certainly are now. Empire, colonialism, gender, race, economic ideologies, and national identity all had and have varying formations. There were and are no two—or three or even four—ways about it.

Binaries suffocate complexity and therefore understanding. Relations, ideologies, ethics, practices, and, most of all, the distributions of prosperity and suffering are much more useful ways of understanding how the world works and for arguing for how it ought to be. That’s my opinion, at any rate. I mention it because when it came to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the news hasn’t given me a sense of all of the factors at play, beyond the clear fact that the invasion is objectively a bad thing.

Here’s my point: Books, essays, and long-form journalism matter immensely. No surprise to hear that, I guess, coming from a middle-aged professor. But as seduced as we all are by the information age, the rapid sharing of data points, details, and opinions, it bears repeating: To learn from people who have spent significant periods of time putting together thoughtful, factually based, and analytically compelling accounts is a gift. And it requires time and attention. It demands that we slow down in order to follow complex stories of cultural, historical, and political formations.

I am well aware that our lives are busy, and so we simply cannot read stacks of books or dozens of articles on every political concern. But we ought to have, and ought to cultivate in young people, a disposition that careful inquiry is important especially when it comes to life-and-death matters like war. And to be a good global citizen demands something more of us than slogans or sentences expressing solidarity. We must know better.

As a scholar who is both an “Americanist” and an “African Americanist,” my studies have centered on the United States, and have led me to reading work on the Caribbean, Latin America, and Western Europe to understand how this part of the world came to be and has been sustained. I have absolutely no foundation in the study of Eastern Europe beyond researching the impact of the Soviet Union on Black politics and studying Russian formalism in 20th century literary theory. Even my taste in the literature of the once-Soviet world has been composed largely of Central European authors (Magda Szabó, Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, Sándor Márai). As a result, I immediately knew that it was best for me not to hold forth on the invasion. But I’ve come to understand my responsibility is greater. It’s time for me to read.

Here’s where what will likely be a long learning journey for me will begin:

An online resource: The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine is a project of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the University of Alberta and University of Toronto. A work in progress, it is intended to be the most comprehensive site of information on Ukrainian history, politics, and culture in English and already has a significant store of sources.

A work of history: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, published in 2017, was written by the historian Serhii Plokhy, who runs the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, where he is on the faculty. I chose this book because it covers a long history, from ancient times to the present, and analyzes waves of imperial power from the perspective of a leading scholar of the region.

And a novel: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko. Oksana Zabuzhko is a prolific Ukrainian writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. This novel, which covers the period between the end of World War II and the 2004 Orange Revolution, focuses on the lives of three women whose lives are intertwined with the workings of politics and power. Zabuzhko is considered by some critics to be the most influential contemporary writer in Ukraine.