Dnipro: Some Reflections on Attempting to Write a City's Biography

Abstract

This is a contribution to the discussion forum "Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation." Andrii Portnov's book Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City (Academic Studies Press, 2022) was published in late 2022. In his contribution to the forum, Portnov proposes a way of overcoming nation-centered teleological history by underscoring the incompleteness of one's object of study. To Portnov, Dnipro is important as an example of an "unfinished city" that is open to interpretation, depending on a scholar's research question. It should be added that Portnov's book won the 2022 Ab Imperio Award for the best study in new imperial history and the history of diversity in Northern Eurasia up to the late twentieth century.