Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. New Book. Paperback. 290 pp.

What happens to ethnic communities when they have two homelands to love-one real and immediate, the other distant but treasured in the heart and imagination?

Ukrainian Otherlands is an innovative exploration of modern ethnic identity, focused on diaspora/homeland understandings of each other in Ukraine and in Ukrainian ethnic communities around the globe. Exploring a rich array of folk songs, poetry and stories, trans-Atlantic correspondence, family histories, and rituals of homecoming and hosting that developed in the Ukrainian diaspora and Ukraine during the twentieth century, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen asserts that many important aspects of modern ethnic identity form, develop, and reveal themselves not only through the diaspora's continued yearning for the homeland, but also in a homeland's deeply felt connection to its diaspora. Yet, she finds each group imagines the "otherland" and ethnic identity differently, leading to misunderstandings between Ukrainians and their ethnic-Ukrainian "brothers and sisters" abroad.
An innovative exploration of the persistence of vernacular culture in the modern world, Ukrainian Otherlands, amply informed by theory and fieldwork, will appeal to those interested in folklore, ethnic and diaspora studies, modernity, migration, folk psychology, history, and cultural anthropology.

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is an associate professor of cultural anthropology, head of the Department of Religion and Culture at St. Thomas More College, a founder of the Oral History Program at the Prairie Centre for Study of Ukrainian Heritage, and an adjunct professor in the Department of History, all at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the founding editor of the Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning.