Kuban Cossack Performance and Identity Negotiation in the Russian-Ukrainian Borderlands.

Abstract

My dissertation analyzes vocal performance practices and identity politics in the Kuban region of southwestern Russia. Rural Kuban music and language is characterized by a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian features. This frustrates post-Soviet nation-building agendas, which actively attempt to push Kuban culture into one national category or the other. I examine mechanisms by which Russian and Ukrainian agents claim Kuban culture, namely through academic discourse and state-funded professional ensembles. Distinctive elements of local self-identification are distorted or lost in the efforts to pigeon-hole the regional culture into a national belonging, however, contemporary local Kuban performances continue to function as sites where residents counteract these processes and carve out a nuanced regional identity – one that embraces hybridity and avoids strict national categorization. Through close readings of rehearsals, concerts and interviews with local performers, I reveal ways in which Kubanians resist Russian and Ukrainian essentialism through their speech and song. Rural performers deploy and discuss linguistic and musical hybridity in ways that play upon the opposition between Ukrainian-ness and Russian-ness. I apply theoretical frameworks from the fields of ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology to interpret musical and linguistic practices as social actions in which residents construct and negotiate their identities. This dissertation also examines the role of the Kuban Cossack Choir, a prestigious, state-funded Russian national ensemble that is arguably the most influential agent in Russia’s claims of Kuban culture. The image of Kuban Cossacks that the Choir presents in its performances and promotional materials is one of a Russian sub-culture, not a Ukrainian one. I identify ways in which the Choir strategically alters or erases elements of rural folk music practices in order to foster an institutional identity that is aligned with prevailing Russian national(ist) political ideology. The Choir’s dominant role in professional folk music culture affects contemporary regional identity construction in opposition to the local hybrid orientation.