Panel “Perverse Decolonization and Popular Culture” at the MEMPOP conference in Ljubljana

Panel 5a

20 April 2026, 5:30 p.m.

‘Perverse Decolonization’ and Popular Culture (Part I): Contested Legacies, (Anti-)Imperial Appropriations and Illiberal Uses of the Past

‘Perverse decolonization’, a concept that Ekatarina Degot and David Riff conceived one year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022, refers to the manipulative nature of autocratic regimes’ abuse of certain arguments in the decolonization debate, while the age of resurgent nationalism progresses (Degot/Riff 2021). At the same time, however, the notion of the perverse is also a queer concept that enables appropriation from below, by the oppressed and discriminated. We wish to discuss this ambivalence of ‘perverse decolonization’ in two panels by focusing on the politics of memory and popular culture in East-Central and Eastern Europe. This first panel explores how different popular media forms – television series, music, fiction, and comics – become arenas where decolonial narratives are re-signified. By foregrounding the interplay of memory politics, affect, and cultural performance, the panel interrogates how ‘perverse’ decolonization both consolidates new exclusions and opens space for alternative solidarities.

Matthias Schwartz, The Marginalised of the Empire: The TV Series Salam Maskva as a ‘Perverse Decolonization’ Strategy

Indira Hajnacs, Losers in the West, Stars in the East – (Perverse) Decolonization and the (Re)Invention of the Steppe Music Tradition in Hungary

Aleksandra Szczepan, The Emotional Life of Perverse Decolonization: Polish Popular Culture and Nationalistic Imaginaries

Svitlana Pidoprygora, Perverse (De)colonial Aesthetics on Graphic Novel Covers: The Case of Ukraine

Chair: Alexandra Kolesnik

Panel 9

21 April 2026, 3:45 p.m.

‘Perverse Decolonization’ and Popular Culture (Part 2): Vernacular Voices, Mnemonic Struggles, and Post-Dependent Voices

This panel continues the debate on ‘perverse decolonization’, a concept describing how emancipatory discourses of decoloniality are inverted and sometimes mobilized to legitimize authoritarianism, cultural exclusion, and nationalist narratives (Degot/Riff 2021), by situating it in a broader context of Central-East and Eastern European popular culture. The papers discuss popular culture as a critical site of decolonial resistance, where mnemonic struggles, vernacular voices, and semi-peripheral positionings challenge dominant narratives of history and belonging. Focusing on popular music from Ukraine, the diverse appropriations of Viktor Tsoi’s legacy across the post-Socialist space, the ‘grey zones’ of (post-)dependent Slovakia and East Germany as well as on Russian Left online platforms, this second panel reflects on popular culture as both a terrain of struggle and a laboratory of a ‘perverse’ decolonization, where subaltern and semi-peripheral voices unsettle, but sometimes also affirm hegemonic memory frameworks.

Iuliana Matasova, Refrains of the 1990s in Contemporary Ukrainian Pop: Surzhyk as a Decolonial Intuition

Alexandra Kolesnik, Mnemonic Struggles and Postcolonial Belonging: Soviet Rock as Contested Heritage in the Post-Soviet Space

Olha Norba, Grey Zones of (Post-)Dependence in Slovakia and (East) Germany: Narrating the Socialist Past Between Self-Colonization and Resistance

Gleb Koran, Decolonial Narratives on Russian Left YouTube: The Restoration of Justice Against the West

Chair: Matthias Schwartz

Program of the conference