Terra Invicta

Ukrainian artists and humanists respond to the identity-defining war.

This volume presents intellectual and creative responses to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, with an eye toward the future of Ukrainians’ relationship to the land they are defending.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 produced not only military and humanitarian responses but also scholarly and artistic ones from Ukrainians looking to the future of their country.

Terra Invicta is a series of critical and creative articulations of pasts, presents, and possible futures involving humans and the more-than-human world. Contributors suggest that Ukraine is caught in an environmental war, waged by a fossil-fuel superpower against people who are prepared to lay down their lives to protect their land. This volume explores the relationship between Ukrainians – a multiethnic and multireligious people with a complicated history – and the Ukrainian land, the zemlia to which they belong. Themes include decoloniality, ecocultural identity, the politics of reconstruction, and artistic responsibility amid a war for national survival. Chapters emphasize the value of reviving multispecies relations with the land, positively transforming multicultural relations with history, and reinvigorating grassroots engagements with the state and society.

Terra Invicta grapples with the role of artistic expression in the face of war and collective loss and what it means to commit to a place, a land, a territory, in a world set in constant motion.