The Exile History Review, 2023, No. 2

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12153/7499

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Browsing The Exile History Review, 2023, No. 2 by Subject "exile"

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    Exiles on Main Street: The Centrality of Exile in Transatlantic Relations
    (KUL Publishing House, 2023) Scott-Smith, Giles
    This article explores the meaning of exile in political theory and its importance within our understanding of political organization and more specifically transatlantic relations. Attention for the political ramifications of the movement of people across borders is divided among the study of diasporas, forced migration, and cultural transfer, as well as exile. The article covers the definition of the term and its use in the Western political tradition, focusing on its meaning and its relevance for conceptions of political progress under modernity. By examining the use of “exile” in relation to Latin American politics, the article puts forward a contrasting critical sketch of exile in transatlantic relations through the 20th century.
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    From “Exile” to “Diaspora”: The Shift in Self-Identification among Refugee Latvians, 1944-2023
    (KUL Publishing House, 2023) Plakans, Andrejs
    The 175,000- Latvians who fled their northeastern European homeland in the final year of World War II (1944-45) eventually resettled in some four continents and twenty different host societies. Their tasks were many, ranging from “freeing” Latvia among the politically minded to building a new life in their host societies. For some ten years after the war, their official status remained uncertain, as did the terms they used to describe themselves. Eventually, the agreed upon frame of reference became trimda (Eng. exile). It was the rare social, cultural, and political activity that was not discussed within the exile framework, and an impressive cultural superstructure was built upon it from the 1950s to the 1980s. This framework, however, became anachronistic after 1991 and the collapse of the USSR. Western Latvians could no longer claim to be in exile, but relatively few of them showed a willingness to return to the old homeland. Two decades of discussion about identity eventually led the new Latvian government and social-science researchers in Latvia to propose the term diaspora for all Latvians living outside the country’s borders. This term has been generally accepted, even by the still living World War II refugees and their descendants, who now refer to themselves as the vecā trimda (Eng. old exile) component of the diaspora.
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    In Search of “Good Russians”: Ukrainian-Russian Encounters in the United States During the First Cold War
    (KUL Publishing House, 2023) Kravchenko, Volodymyr
    The article is devoted to the topic of Ukrainian-Russian intellectual encounters in exile during the Cold War. The author focuses on Ukraine’s and Russia’s mutual representations in historical narratives in connection with their respective discourses of national identity. The article also describes sporadic attempts at establishing Ukrainian-Russian public dialogue in exile starting in the early 1960s. All of them were initiated and conducted by Ukrainian public activists and intellectuals. The author concludes that participants on both sides ascribed opposing meanings to historical terms. Russian authors, on the one hand, consistently used the modern designation “Ukrainian” as a synonym for “Little Russian,” which automatically situated Ukraine within the “pan-Russian” historical framework. Ukrainian historians, on the other hand, tried to reinterpret “Russian” as a modern national designation rather than an imperial one. Hence the Ukrainian-Russian dialogue had no chance of succeeding unless Russian participants agreed to rethink their discourse of national identity. It is no wonder that many American observers remained confused about the nature of Ukrainian-Russian debates: to them, they looked like a dead-end situation. Thus, rather than trying to find alternative interpretations of Ukrainian and Russian history, most Western specialists followed either one or the other respective national narrative.