Egzilinė (ne)tapatybė naujausioje lietuvių emigrantų literatūroje

Abstract

This article discusses Lithuanian emigration literature written after 1989. In this context the question is raised of whether in an epoch of globalization it is still possible to define emigration literature according to the geographical place in which this or that work was written. Introducing the additional concept of emigrant self-consciousness, the author recommends not identifying emigration literature with emigre literature. The utopian consciousness characteristic of the latter has disappeared from the emigrant’s literature even though nostalgia remains the principal mode of the his relationship to the homeland. Nostalgia as the dominant passion and the native language in which all the emigration literature has been written lead one to doubt whether the concepts of hybridity, and especially that of epiphanic diversity, formed in Western postcolonialist theories, can be applied to Lithuanian literature. Following Sten Pultz Moslund, the author suggests renouncing the opposition between the discourse of hybridity and that of identity. Instead, the newly-introduced conception of different speeds of emigrant becoming allow us to describe Lithuanian emigrant literature as a literature of a slow velocity of becoming, or one of an organic hybridity. However, this literature of slow becoming constitutes a broad scale of differing speeds – from the slowest, when the writer’s emigrant status is barely noticeable, to the fastest, when the alien culture makes its approach through the children and one gets immersed in it oneself (for example, through being a translator, as reflected in the essay of Dalia Staponkute). There also exists an epistemic poeticizing of the nomad (the prose of Valdas Papievis).