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Reviews Challenging the nationalist hegemony The third generation displaced persons and new approaches to the difficult past
Review article of Kassandra Larysa Luciuk, Making Ukrainian Canadians: Identity, Politics, and Power in Cold War Canada, (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2021) xv+338 pages.
Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2024:4, pages 89-103
Published on balticworlds.com on December 9, 2024
Review article of Kassandra Larysa Luciuk, Making Ukrainian Canadians: Identity, Politics, and Power in Cold War Canada, (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2021) xv+338 pages.
abstract
Recent years have seen the emergence of critical studies produced by third- generation Displaced Persons (hereafter DPs), questioning ethno-nationalist historical narrations, hegemonic in the community. Yet, in the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, such studies have been absent. Kassandra Luciuk’s current study is written by someone raised in the political elite of the Ukrainian ethno-nationalist community, in dialogue with and challenging the historical memory that her parents dedicated their lives to promote. Her study reads like a Bildungsroman of a young person whose eyes were opened to an ostracized rivalling leftist community tradition. In the process, she started to question the Nationalists monopoly of defining what it means to be Ukrainian in Canada. Her still-unpublished 2021 dissertation sheds new light on ultra-nationalist political violence in Canada and the central role of Ukrainian Nationalists in establishing normative multiculturalism in Canada. The Nationalist hegemony in the community was established through the erection of monuments, a politicized folklore, and the development of an elaborate victimization narrative of Soviet genocide abroad, Canadian concentration camps and “linguistic genocide” at home. Through claiming a share for Galician Ukrainians in the settler colonialist project, Ukrainians insisted on a special status as a “founding people” on the Canadian prairies.
KEYWORDS: Long-distance nationalism, normative multiculturalism, Ukrainian diaspora, historical memory, Cold War.
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