My first book, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine, is now out in the Music/Culture Series of Wesleyan University Press!

Cover art by Sashko Danylenko

Here is the blurb the press came up with to describe the book:

What are the uses of musical exoticism? In Wild Music, Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.

And here are some kind things some scholars I really admire have to say about the book:

“Sonevytsky’s vivid prose brings together rich ethnography with sophisticated analysis. Through her concept of wildness, she shows how performers disrupt binaries of tradition and modernity, of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ culture, as they construct their country’s sovereignty. A powerful book!”

—Laada Bilaniuk, author of Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine

“Beautifully written, this vital and sensitive ethnography documents the social, affective, and discursive energies that flow within contemporary Ukrainian music. Sonevytsky highlights the possibilities for imaginative agency that “wild musics” provide, without ignoring the very real constraints that hem in the Ukrainian subjects whose complex personhood is the real focus of this remarkable book.”

—J. Martin Daughtry, author of Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq

“Post-Soviet Ukraine emerges in this beautiful and original book as a place of a vibrant musical and sonic culture. Marked by experiment, hybridity, and ‘wildness,’ this scene not only produces remarkably creative musical projects, but also makes new forms of political sovereignty, citizenship and community imaginable. A great achievement.”

—Alexei Yurchak, author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation

It can purchased directly from the press, on Amazon, or even better, from your local academic bookstore!