Natalia Khanenko-Friesen – författare

Throughout twentieth-century Ukraine, letters were lifelines. Under two of history’s most repressive regimes – the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany – Ukrainians wrote to sustain family ties, affirm identity, and resist erasure, even as every word passed through the machinery of surveillance and censorship.Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials, including documents from the Ukrainian Archives of the former KGB, this groundbreaking work is the first comprehensive study of censorship and epistolary culture in Ukraine under totalitarian rule. Postal Censorship, Surveillance, Resistance reveals how correspondence functioned as an emotional artifact, a political instrument, and a historical document, showing how the act of writing could be both deeply personal and profoundly political. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary framework to examine how systems of control shaped the practices of letter-writers – from Ostarbeiters and Gulag prisoners to diaspora families, Jews, former communists, émigrés, and Mennonites – who devised strategies of resilience through metaphor, folklore, and coded language. Ten key instructional documents of the Soviet secret services, spanning 1940 to 1990, are presented in an appendix, giving readers direct insight into the rules and mechanisms of surveillance.Bridging history, anthropology, literary studies, and memory studies, and grounded in rich primary sources, Postal Censorship, Surveillance, Resistance positions Ukraine as a crucial site of postal repression and subversive ingenuity, highlighting the persistence of human creativity in the face of silencing.

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.

The first twenty-five years of life in post-socialist Europe have seen vast political, economic, and cultural changes, as societies that lived under communist rule struggle with the traumas of the past and the challenges of the future. In this context, oral history has acquired a unique role in understanding the politics of memory and the practice of history.Drawing on research conducted in Belarus, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, Reclaiming the Personal introduces theory and practice in this vital and distinctive area to a global audience. Focusing on issues such as repressed memories of the Second World War, the economic challenges of late socialism, and the experience of the early post-socialist transition, the essays underscore the political implications of oral history research in post-socialist Europe and highlight how oral history research in the region differs from that being conducted elsewhere.

Orality and Literacy investigates the interactions of the oral and the literate through close studies of particular cultures at specific historical moments. Rejecting the 'great-divide' theory of orality and literacy as separate and opposite to one another, the contributors posit that whatever meanings the two concepts have are products of their ever-changing relationships to one another.Through topics as diverse as Aboriginal Canadian societies, Ukrainian-Canadian narratives, and communities in ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and twentieth-century Asia, these cross-disciplinary essays reveal the powerful ways in which cultural assumptions, such as those about truth, disclosure, performance, privacy, and ethics, can affect a society's uses of and approaches to both the written and the oral. The fresh perspectives in Orality and Literacy reinvigorate the subject, illuminating complex interrelationships rather than relying on universal generalizations about how literacy and orality function.