“Indigenous Resurgence or Criminal Pop?: Mapping the Music of Jamala’s QIRIM”

What kind of threat can a pop star pose? In late 2023, the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar pop star Jamala was arrested in absentia by the Russian state. Her crime? She allegedly spread “fakes” about the Russian Army on her social media after mass civilian atrocities in Bucha and other Ukrainian sites came to light in April of 2022. While Jamala was hardly the only Ukrainian celebrity to post about her anger and despair, she was the only one to be arrested in absentia by the Russian state a year later. In this talk, I explore how Jamala’s unique position within the popular music industry as a representative of her Indigenous Crimean Tatar community has made her an explicit target of the Russian state dating back to 2016, when she rose to international prominence as the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. Crimea, the strategic and contested Black Sea peninsula that was illegally annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, is seen by many political analysts as a key site in the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine. Just months before her 2023 arrest was made public, Jamala released a new album named after the peninsula, titled QIRIM. The album attempts to re-territorialize Crimean Tatar folk songs in ways both literal and metaphorical, thus building a case for Indigenous resurgence from a position of territorial exile. This resurgence avoids what Sheryl L. Lightfoot (Keweenaw Bay Anishinaabe) calls the “pessimism traps” of some Indigenous resurgence theory, instead imagining Crimean Tatar Indigeneity as part of a global movement for Indigenous rights. I argue that Jamala’s musical politics mount a profound threat to Russian narratives that attempt to construct Crimea as historically—and therefore inevitably—Russian. Jamala’s QIRIM maps a different future for Crimea: by reinvigorating Indigenous claims on the past, and by deepening ties of postcolonial solidarity with Ukraine.

Maria Sonevytsky is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard College. She has published two books: Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019, winner of the 2020 American Musicological Society’s Lockwood First Book Prize) and Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi (2023), accompanied by the first formal release of the band’s cult 1989 cassette album Tantsi on the California-based label Org Music. Prof. Sonevytsky is writing a new book titled Singing for Lenin in Soviet Ukraine: Children, Music, and the Communist Future, for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2022. Earlier, she produced and sang on The Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Songs from a Lost World (released in 2015 on Smithsonian Folkways). In the late 2000s, she developed a multi-media exhibition on Crimean Tatar repatriates called “No Other Home” with the photographer Alison Cartwright Ketz which was shown at museums in Bucharest, Kyiv, New York, and online on the journal Triple Canopy. She has written multiple articles and essays on Ukrainian music, culture, and history, including, recently, public-facing pieces on the ethics of performing Russian Imperial musical works during the Russian war on Ukraine. In addition to her scholarly work, she performs as a singer and accordionist.

mariasonevytsky.com