Narratives of Exile and Identity

This collection of essays considers the Soviet-era gulag in the Baltic States within the broader international research on displacement and cultural memory. Scholars from the Baltic States, Western Europe, Canada, and the United States explore the following questions: Do different groups of deportees experience deportation differently? How do the accounts of women, children and men differ? Do various ethnic groups remember the past differently? How do they use historical and cultural paradigms to structure their experience in unique ways? To answer these questions the authors researched archives, read testimonies (with an emphasis on testimonies by women and children), interviewed former deportees, and examined cultural artifacts produced since the late 1980s, applying cross-disciplinary approaches used in the study of Holocaust testimonies.
The essays in the book also examine the issues of cultural transmission and commemoration, as well as public manifestations of the after-effects of deportations in contemporary social, cultural and political contexts of Baltic societies, including refl ections of the Gulag in literature, the cinema and museums.