Misha Zakharov: How Do We Hyphenate the Two Souths?

Editor's note: On 21 February 2026, Misha gave a talk at the Political Dumplings - Talks & Collective Cooking with Bordered Lives. The following is the transcript and proofread by them.

Misha at the Political Dumplings - Talks & Collective Cooking with Bordered Lives. Photography by Momo Ye Mu.

I

Before I begin my presentation today, I just want to briefly recount a story that happened to me last December, inspired by Mita’s discussion of food sovereignty and appropriation. At the time, I was staying at my friends’ place in Dulwich in South London, which is quite posh, and at some point, I saw on Google Maps a place called Khachapuri, in an even posher Triangle in Crystal Palace. I was enticed by the name of it, as I thought that maybe Georgians had opened a new place. I went there and, to my big surprise, I discovered that it is actually run by a Russian cook, a white Russian woman, and her British husband. There were no Georgians in sight whatsoever. I would say that the British husband was more the brain behind the entire operation, whereas the Russian lady was cooking in the kitchen. He proceeded to tell me the backstory behind the place: supposedly his wife knew how to cook khachapuri since single digits, as her father made a fortune by importing Georgian wine to Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I found many aspects of this whole situation rather problematic.

First of all, because of where the money is flowing, and because this is actually an indigenous cuisine that we are talking about. Their entire idea behind the place was that people would discover Georgian food there. And by ‘people’, they obviously meant white, posh people who live in Crystal Palace, who might then go on to visit other Georgian businesses. But there are already dozens of Georgian businesses across London, including restaurants, wine shops, and bistros. In Peckham alone you can go to several Georgian places. In North London, there are also a few Georgian restaurants. I found all of this rather troubling. The food was okay, but I would not recommend going there. In fact, I would suggest actively boycotting it.

The story was not coincidental, because it also fits into the broader structure of this presentation.

Collective Koryo-Saram dumplings making (pigodi, also known as pyanse) at the Political Dumplings. Photography by Momo Ye Mu.

II

My presentation today is called How Do We Hyphenate the Two Souths?

I will begin by giving you a few notes on my own positionality, as I think it can also reflect some wider processes. The very idea of positionality can help us move away from identity politics and from categories that we may find quite oppressive or stifling, such as area studies, the idea of the nation-state, or other frameworks that can be too confining. Here, I am thinking in particular of the American scholar Michael Rothberg and his idea of the implicated subject, which describes a troubling position in which a person may simultaneously be a victim and a perpetrator, or a kind of indirect perpetrator. I think it is very important to consider each person’s positionality in this sense.

I am Russian-born, and thus I am complicit in Russia’s colonial invasion of Ukraine. I am also UK-based, and therefore implicated in the UK-backed and facilitated genocide in Palestine through my documents, my taxes, and my imbrication within the wider colonial apparatus. I am currently doing a fully-funded PhD at the University of Warwick, which is itself implicated through ongoing collaborations with companies such as Moog, BAE Systems and Rolls‑Royce.

I am ethnically non-Russian: I am Korean; and I am also queer. I am someone who has experienced racism and homophobia in Russia and comes from a working-class family. I had access to free education there, although it was ideologically fraught and accompanied by strong nation-state propaganda. I was raised by a single parent, my white Russian mother. My South Korean father is estranged, and the last time I saw him was when I was four years old. As a result, I do not speak Korean and grew up somewhat outside Korean culture. At the same time, I was born and raised in Russia and carried a passport that was stronger than those of many immigrants in the country, particularly those from the Caucasus and Central Asia. I also speak a language that remains dominant and colonial in relation to the Indigenous lands of Russia and the so-called post-Soviet states.

I was born in one of the westernmost cities in Russia, very close to the border with Belarus and relatively close to the epicentre of resources — that is, Moscow and all the hegemonic whiteness that it entails. Yet my hometown is still considered peripheral and provincial, precisely because of its proximity to Belarus and Ukraine. Even the way I spoke in my early years was perceived as provincial by the Russian mainstream because of its proximity to Belarusian speech patterns — for instance, in the pronunciation of the letter g, which is often articulated as an h sound. Apparently, there is no such sound in standard Russian.

This is why I would say that whiteness functions here more as an abstract category than as a strictly ethnic one. I do not think that whiteness necessarily correlates with ethnicity. Sometimes whiteness simply means proximity to centres of power and resources. And of course there are many shades of whiteness and many shades of privilege.

I am now also a refugee in the UK, and I am still perceived by this broken system as more desirable than asylum seekers from many other so-called post-Soviet states, largely because of my command of the English language and what the Home Office deems to be ‘integration’. Whenever you begin contributing economically to this country and appear integrated, you are treated as a more desirable refugee. Meanwhile, Ukrainians, for instance, often cannot obtain refugee status, and their position is obviously much more precarious than mine. If they were ever to travel back to Ukraine, that could then be interpreted by the Home Office as evidence that Ukraine is a ‘safe’ place to return to.

I am also white-passing or white-adjacent in certain contexts, especially within the overwhelmingly white British film academia and industry, while simultaneously performing what Sara Ahmed calls ‘diversity work’. Ahmed uses this term in her studies of British and Australian academia to describe how institutions use people of colour to symbolically diversify their walls and reputations. At the same time, I am simply trying to survive within the UK’s arts and culture sector, which has been deeply eroded by years of budget cuts, privatisation, and neoliberalisation.

Both of my parents are engineers. My father worked as a freelancer with Samsung, and my mother was a recent graduate of a local engineering university when they met at the construction site of a military town on the Russian-Belarusian border. This town was built to house soldiers who had previously served in the German Democratic Republic and who, in the mid-1990s, were being repatriated to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other words, my existence is tied to both corporate and military infrastructures — to companies like Samsung on the one hand, and to the Russian Ministry of Defence on the other.

I have described much of this story, as well as my broader coming-of-age, in my novel, which was published after I left Russia in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Misha Zakharov, Doramaroman, No Kidding Press, 2022.

Between 2014 — the year of the occupation of Crimea and the beginning of the war against Ukraine — and the full-scale invasion in 2022, I studied and worked in Moscow, primarily in film, contemporary art, and publishing. When Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I quickly realised that I could no longer remain in the country for several reasons. One was that I was a male person of conscription age. Another was that I am queer, and it was clear that conditions for queer people in Russia were rapidly deteriorating. I was also still officially registered in my hometown near the Belarusian border, a region from which conscription happens disproportionately. Russia often drafts people from Indigenous groups such as Chechens or the Sakha, but also from economically marginalised communities and from regions close to the European border.

In the book that I wrote before Russia invaded Ukraine, I describe my coming of age, the racism and homophobia I experienced, my precarious cultural labour in Moscow, the gay sexual politics of contemporary Russia, and the states of drifting, mutating, and being on the move. The first chapter was published in the literary magazine Tupelo Quarterly and translated by a friend of mine, Nathan Jeffers.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I left almost immediately — about ten days after the invasion began. I first went to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, where I stayed for about five months. I was very fortunate to secure a job at the Venice Biennale, where I worked for three months at the first-ever national pavilion of Uzbekistan. After that, I came to the UK to pursue my PhD in Film and Television Studies.

III

I will now speak about how, through my film-curatorial work, I try to hyphenate, as I call it, the two Souths. By this I mean what used to be called the Second and the Third World: the countries that were aligned with the Soviet Union and considered part of the so-called Eastern Bloc, and the broader Global South. I would also add that the very category of the Global South must constantly be questioned. We need to think about it situationally, perhaps even site-specifically. We also need to think in terms of oppression and resistance, rather than in terms of proximity to whiteness or to centres of resources and power. In other words, how do we build South-South solidarity between these two vastly different groups of people and contexts?

The website page of Screening Rights Film Festival (SRFF), which is the West Midlands’ festival of socially engaged and formally innovative cinema from the Global South.

As part of my PhD, I ran two editions of Screening Rights, a film festival which my PhD supervisor founded in Birmingham in 2015, and which I took over for two years (2023-24). In the 2024 edition in particular, subtitled Double Bill, we attempted to bring together very different communities through carefully curated film events. This is something I continue to do today.

To give you an example, we organised two Palestinian-Ukrainian solidarity screenings. One explored cultural genocide and linguistic erasure in both regions. Another focused on militant Palestinian and Ukrainian cinema. Between the two screenings we organised a communal meal, featuring food from a Ukrainian restaurant called Sunflower and a Yemeni restaurant called Bayt Al-Yemeni. This shared meal helped to mitigate some of the tensions between the two groups — these two ‘Souths’ — because they do not necessarily align politically on every issue. We were deeply moved by the outpouring of solidarity. People were extremely grateful for the events, especially because they created a space for discussion between communities that might not otherwise meet within a shared setting.

We also organised an event linking the histories of genocide in Ethiopia and Armenia.

Another event focused on the deportation of Chinese seafarers from Liverpool after World War II. During the war, the British state invited Chinese sailors to Liverpool to support the fleet. Once the war ended and they were no longer needed, many of them were deported overnight. Even today, many of these histories remain partially unknown or undocumented. Some of you may know Hester Yang, who runs the series of ESEA film events called Sine Screen. She is also a filmmaker whose work addresses the deportation of Chinese seamen from Liverpool. Her film, The Undesirables, was accompanied by another film, Three Borders, by Koryo-saram filmmaker Alisa Berger.

Koryo-saram — ethnic Koreans of the former Soviet Union — have a very complicated history of displacement. Initially, many Koreans were displaced by Japanese colonial expansion at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, before the later partition of Korea by the United States and the Soviet Union. They moved northwards and eventually settled in parts of the Soviet Far East. In 1937, however, they were forcibly deported by the Soviet authorities as part of Joseph Stalin’s secret ethnic deportation campaigns. The Soviet government was rearranging numerous minority populations it considered politically unreliable. Koreans were suspected of potentially collaborating with Japan. As a result, they were deported to Central Asia, particularly to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Many died during the journey. Those who survived built new communities and contributed significantly to the agricultural and cultural life of the region, including the development of their distinctive cuisine. In fact, today we will be cooking pigodi, a type of Korean-Central Asian dumpling that emerged from this diasporic history.

Through this festival and through my work in the Midlands and later in London, I developed several principles that guide my curatorial practice.

• One of them is a belief in world-making from below, as opposed to map-making from above. By this I mean finding new ways of making sense of the world that sometimes bypass the rigid frameworks imposed by nation-states or by dominant narratives of solidarity. This can be difficult, because solidarity between certain peoples is often seen as impossible or even prohibited.

•   Another principle is solidarity with people rather than with nation-states.

• I also believe in what I call situated solidarity — that is, solidarity that is self-critical and site-specific. When I was working in the Midlands, it was particularly important to consider the region’s history of post-colonial and labour migration, and the ways in which places like Coventry and Birmingham have been shaped by multiple waves of migration. These cities continue to be shaped by migration today. They are Cities of Sanctuary that actively welcome refugees, and they also have large student populations, which creates vibrant and diverse communities. At the same time, we must also take into account the broader infrastructural and industrial history of the Midlands.

• I also strongly believe that we need to find common ground, while recognising differences and where our limits lie.

Asian Imperialisms, The Funambulist Magazine, issue 55, Sep-Oct 2024. 

One publication that has influenced my thinking is a 2024 issue of The Funambulist magazine, Asian Imperialisms, dedicated to lesser-known genocides, histories of displacement, and settler colonialism. It discusses issues such as the Uyghur genocide and the situation in Kashmir. I feel that there is still far too little discussion about many of these issues. Even framing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a colonial and imperial project requires a significant epistemic shift for many people, and it involves a great deal of emotional labour — labour that people like myself often have to undertake precisely because we feel complicit in it.

I would like to conclude by mentioning two books that helped me build the theoretical framework for this festival and for my PhD research.

One is Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. In this book, she develops the idea of potential history, which she argues can only be opened or unlocked collectively — through companions, with like-minded groups of people that you build expected alliances with. I found this idea particularly meaningful because, as someone who had had little prior engagement with the Middle East — and given that there is almost no literature about Palestine available in Russian — I had to undertake a great deal of self-education. Yet this is precisely the kind of work we all need to do if we want to become companions to one another and unlock what Azoulay calls potential history. This means challenging what she calls the imperial shutter: the way colonial epistemologies frame history through institutions such as museums, films, literature, and university curricula — institutions that often carry an enormous legacy of epistemic violence.

Another thinker who has deeply inspired me is the Argentinian philosopher and feminist theorist María Lugones. In her book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, she introduces the concept of world-travelling. At first glance this idea might sound colonial or ethnographic, but Lugones actually uses it to describe the process of crossing boundaries that dominant power structures attempt to impose upon us. According to her, this kind of world-travelling requires a profound epistemic shift and a transformation in how we think.

I would like to end with a quote from Lugones: ‘Coalition is always the horizon that rearranges both our possibilities and the conditions of those possibilities.’ ■

*Note: With the exception of images specifically noted, all other visual materials are provided by Misha Zakharov.

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The Political Dumplings - Talks & Collective Cooking with Bordered Live was hosted at The Advocacy Academy's The Liberation Centre on 21 February 2026, with support from Edge Fund. Organised by Nicole Zhang and Qianrui Hu, Graphic by Ning Jiang.