Drawing on the discourses of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and globalization, Vitaly Chernetsky maps out the new cultural developments in literature, architecture, painting, film, and performance art emerging in Russia and Ukraine, the two largest successor states to the Soviet Union, situating these phenomena in a greater global context.

In Mapping Postcommunist Cultures Chernetsky argues that Russia and Ukraine exemplify the principal paradigms of post-Soviet cultural development. In Russia this has manifested itself in the subversive dismantling of the totalitarian linguistic regime and the foregrounding of previously marginalized subject positions. In Ukraine, work in these areas shows how the traumas of centuries of colonial oppression are being overcome through the carnivalesque decrowning of ideological dogmas and an affirmation of a new type of community, most recently demonstrated in the peaceful Orange Revolution of 2004. Mapping Postcommunist Cultures also critiques the neglect of the former communist world in current models of cultural globalization.