{"id":63,"date":"2022-10-17T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-17T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soniakh.com\/?p=63"},"modified":"2023-04-03T13:01:58","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T11:01:58","slug":"culture-tree-culture-z","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soniakh.com\/index.php\/2022\/10\/17\/culture-tree-culture-z\/","title":{"rendered":"From Culture Tree to Culture Z: War, Empire and Putin-Era Urbanism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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The Political Geometry of Russia\u2019s Re-Colonial War<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The coloniality of Russia\u2019s war on Ukraine manifests itself on a diversity of scales and in a variety of contexts. The war is colonial on the centrifugal<\/em> level of a vast post-imperial petro-state attempting to assert its ownership over a neighboring country one-thirtieth of its size. But it is also colonial on the centripetal<\/em> level, of the Russian state reaching its tentacles into its inner and outer peripheries, plucking out poor young men of color from predominantly (but not exclusively) Muslim indigenous groups and national minorities\u2014the post-imperial petro-states\u2019s colonial proletarian subalterns\u2014and sending them to kill and to be killed in Ukraine.[1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russia\u2019s floundering war is the par excellence manifestation of Putin\u2019s half-baked, pathological project to recreate post-Soviet Russia as a modernized imperial state: a self-avowedly reactionary neo-fascist recolonial<\/em> entity, coalescing under the banner of the swastika-like Latin letter \u201cZ\u201d, colonizing its interior as well as its exterior; eclectically fracking its own and its neighbors\u2019 pasts\u2014medieval, imperial and Soviet\u2014for distorted narratives of glory and prowess; trolling and attempting to undermine others\u2019 (whether Ukraine\u2019s or the so-called \u201ccollective West\u2019s\u201d) claims to historical or ideological legitimacy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most bizarre among Putin\u2019s increasingly unhinged war speeches came on 3 March 2022. Awarding a posthumous Hero of Russia award to a soldier from Dagestan who died in Ukraine, Putin put himself forward as a sovereign personification of the centripetal imperial diversity of Russia; and as a personalized microcosm of Russia\u2019s colonial war: \u201cI am an <\/em>[ethnically<\/em>] Russian <\/em>[russkii] person\u2014my family history goes full circle from Ivan to Maria. But when I see examples of such heroism as the accomplishments of the young Nurmagomed Gadzhimagomedov, a Dagestan-born ethnic Lak, I want to say: I am a Lak<\/a>, I am a Dagestani, I am Chechen, I am an Ingush, Russian, Tatar, Jew, Mordvin, Ossetian.”<\/em> [2]<\/p>\n\n\n

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