ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine, as a “hyper-event”—an event that triggers chain reactions that rearrange agential relations operating on multiple spatial and temporal scales. The scales examined include the bio-cultural region of north-central Polissia; the state-level national imaginary of Ukraine in its late Soviet and early independence eras; the military–industrial system of the USSR within the Cold War political order; and the technological modernity of the era increasingly known as the Anthropocene. Media are seen to play a role in each of these layers: in the visuality of the Soviet nuclear sublime, in media treatments of Ukraine in the post-cold war global information (dis)order, in the cinematics of the postnuclear and posthuman “Zone,” and in visualizations of the Anthropocene.