Narrating the nation: The 'imagined community' of Ukrainians in Bradford

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 367-387

  Smith, Graham ^a   Jackson, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ETHNICITY; IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION; IMMIGRANT POPULATION; MEMORY; MINORITY GROUP;

BRADFORD; UNITED KINGDOM; WEST YORKSHIRE;

EID: 0032842726     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1006/jhge.1999.0120     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. Comparisons between Ukrainians in different countries have been attempted, including A. L. Pawliczko, Ukraine and Ukrainians Throughout the World: A Demographic and Sociological Guide to the Homeland and its Diaspora (Toronto 1994).
2. O. Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto 1988) 538-72.
3. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London 1983).
4. H. K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London 1990).
5. S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London 1997).
6. Compare, for example, P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past (Oxford 1988)
7. with J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1986).
8. See, for example, J. Sangster, Telling our stories: feminist debates and the use of oral history, Women's History Review 3 (1994) 5-28;
9. J. Okely and H. Galloway (Eds.), Anthropology and Autobiography (London 1992);
10. S. B. Gluck and D. Patai (Eds.), Women's Word: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (London 1991);
11. and L. Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Autobiography (Manchester 1992).
12. M. Frisch, The memory of history, Radical History Review 25 (1981) 9-23.
13. S. Schrager, What is social in oral history? International Journal of Oral History 4 (1983) 76-98.
14. It is also an approach that encourages a diversity of voices as W. C. Booth notes in his introduction to M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Manchester 1984) xx.
15. Schrager, op. cit., 285.
16. We are aware that the following account runs the risk of presenting a unitary and linear representation of Ukrainian history when our aim throughout this paper is to convey a multiplicity of ways of'narrating the nation'. The brief chronology in this section is intended to provide an initial context for those who have little familiarity with Ukrainian history. Other recent histories include Subtelny, op. cit.; T. Kuzio and A. Wilson, Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence (London 1994);
17. A. Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (London 1995);
18. P. R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto 1996);
19. and A. Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine (London 1998).
20. R. Perks, Ukraine's forbidden history: memory and nationalism, Oral History 21 (1993) 43-53.
21. N. L. Chirovsky, An Introduction to Ukrainian History. III: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Ukraine (New York 1986) 224-36 and 287-327.
22. L. de Jong, The German Fifth Column in the Second World War (London 1956) 130-1.
23. There do not seem to be any separate statistics for Ukrainian labour, although the Nazis were more enthusiastic for Ukrainian than for Russian workers.
24. E. L. Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton 1967)
25. and U. Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany 1880-1980 (Ann Arbor 1990) 127-92.
26. On the history of the EVW scheme, see J. A. Tannahill, European Volunteer Workers in Britain (Manchester 1958);
27. C. Holmes, John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (London 1988);
28. and D. Kay and R. Miles, Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain, 1946-1951 (London 1992).
29. Perks, op. cit., 44, 49, 53.
30. As Perks concludes, British Ukrainians are "a divided community, from which the dominant voice that emerged was that of western Ukrainians, many of them fervently nationalistic and whose political views were derived from a romanticised view of a country that no longer exists . . . Ukrainian independence has left them wondering what to do next" (ibid., 53). Underlining the Ukraine's troubled history, Perks notes that one of his informants (an 80-year-old woman from L'viv) has lived through two world wars, a revolution, a civil war, three famines, violent occupation by four armies and ten years imprisonment in Siberian workcamps (ibid., 52).
31. See for example The new immigrants - friend or foe. Your views on the new émigrés and what they think of you, in Zdorov!, The English Language Magazine for Ukrainians 8 (Winter, 1997) 15-18.
32. On the history of immigration to Bradford, see BHRU, Here to Stay: Bradford's South Asian Communities (Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, 1994);
33. J. A. Jowitt and R. Perks Destination Bradford: A Century of Immigration, (Bradford, Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, 1987);
34. and Peter Jackson, The racialization of labour in post-war Bradford, Journal of Historical Geography 18 (1992) 190-209.
35. From September 1998 the original collection will be available in the University of Sheffield Library with copies in Bradford Central Library.
36. For an account of the BHRU collection, see Robert Perks, Immigration to Bradford: the oral testimony, Immigrants and Minorities 6 (1987) 362-68. In addition the National Sound Archive's collection of Ukrainian oral histories can be found at accession number C548.
37. For a useful summary of the two approaches, including their strengths and weaknesses, see Rosemary Sayigh, Engendered exile: Palestinian camp women tell their tales, Oral History (Autumn 1997) 39-48. In our project the common-sense approach was taken. That is we tried to respect the interview partners' wishes regarding how the data were collected. We also ensured that we followed the ethical and copyright guidelines provided by the Oral History Society. All interviews cited in this paper have copyright clearance.
38. These are recordings MERC, EEMB 01, EEMB 04, EEMB 21.
39. When the BHRU interviews were collected, oral historians in Britain were rather more concerned with representativity in samples than with saturation of knowledge. For an explanation of the difference see Daniel Bertaux, From the life-history approach to the transformation of sociological practice, in Bertaux (Ed.), Biography and Society (London 1981)29-46.
40. See for example MERC, EEMB 19. Conducted over four sessions, the first session was with Helen, the second session with Helen and her husband (who had been interviewed by BHRU, see B0052) and took the form of a joint interview. The third and fourth sessions completed the recording of Helen's life story.
41. See Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 205-6 for the case against interviewing more than one person at a time.
42. See Perks, Immigration to Bradford, 363.
43. BHRU, B0005/2/25. This and other oral histories from the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit's collections are referred to as BHRU, while those from the current project are MERC. This is followed by the interview number (B0005), the cassette number (2) and the page number(s) of the transcript (25). Where recordings are not transcribed reference is made to cassette number (tape 2) and side (A).
44. BHRU, B0021/01/21.
45. BHRU, B0034/02/44.
46. BHRU, B0006/02/49.
47. BHRU, B0030/01/37.
48. BHRU, B0006/02/34.
49. BHRU, B0007/01/20-21.
50. Compare S. Pavlylychko, Between feminism and nationalism: new women's groups in the Ukraine, in M. Buckley (Ed.), Perestroika and Soviet Women (Cambridge 1992), 82-96.
51. BHRU, BOO 14/02/25-6.
52. BHRU, B0009/01/26.
53. Ukrainian man, quoted in Roy Kerridge, Ukrainians in exile, Spectator (5 September 1987).
54. Compare Margaret R. Somers, Narrative identity: a relational and contextual approach, Theory and Society 23 (1994) 605-49.
55. BHRU, BOO 15/02/6.
56. BHRU, B0007/02/41.
57. Cf. Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations (London 1997), 160
58. and Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London 1995).
59. MERC, EEMB 21/1/12.
60. A recent discussion of the narrative construction of Latvian identities makes a similar point about the way that "Men tend to link their childhood memories to well-known historical persons or events whereas women's memories are of cyclical family celebrations": Vieda Skultans, Remembering time and place: a case study in Latvian narrative, Oral History (Spring 1988) 55-63. The quotation is from page 57.
61. MERC, EEMB 21/1/1.
62. BHRU, B0007/1/11 and 16.
63. MERC, EEMB 21/1/1.
64. BHRU, B0007/02/3.
65. MERC, EEMB 01. Interestingly both men were employed on public transport in Bradford whereas most Ukrainian migrant men tended to be employed in textiles.
66. The All-Party War Crimes Group, Report on the Entry of Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators into the UK, 1945-1950, House of Commons, November 1988, 25-32. See also the principal researcher to the Group, David Cesarani, Justice Delayed (London 1992).
67. See David Cesarani, Justice Delayed, 129-33.
68. Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton 1987) 23-6.
69. Subtelny, op. cit., 323.
70. Taras Hunczak, Between two leviathans: Ukraine during the Second World War, in Bohdan Krawchenko (Ed.) Ukraine Past, Ukraine Present: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990 (Basingstoke 1993), 97.
71. Perks, Ukraine's forbidden history, 50.
72. Cited in Cesarani, Justice Delayed, 131.
73. See for example the return of 30 000 members of the Cossack Corps to the USSR reported in S. J. Newland, Cossacks in the German Army 1941-45 (London 1991).
74. The Orthodox Priest in Bradford who tends to serve eastern Ukrainians suggests that remigration was no greater amongst his flock than it was amongst the Ukrainian Catholics. See MERC, EEMB 02.
75. MERC, EEMB 16 Tape 2 Side B.
76. MERC, EEMB 14 Tape 1 Side B.
77. MERC, EEMB 16 Tape 1 Side A.
78. Quoted in A. Hunt, Bitter in Yorkshire, New Society (21 November 1986). Wally also visited Ukraine as part of an official delegation prior to independence.
79. MERC, EEMB 07 Tape 2 Side A.
80. Recent research on the construction of Polish identities in Britain suggests that such public expression of 'ethnicity' is a highly gendered process: cf. Bogusia Temple, Constructing Polishness: researching Polish women's lives, Women's Studies International Forum 17 (1994) 47-55.
81. See for example Cesarani, Justice Delayed, (1992) and in particular chapter 6, 'The WaffenSS Comes to Britain II: The Ukrainians'.
82. MERC, EEMB 11 Tape 1 Side B.
83. Cf. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge 1995).
84. MERC, EEMB 13/1/12.
85. MERC, EEMB 11 Tape 2 Side A.
86. MERC, EEMB 03 Tape 3 Side A.
87. MERC, EEMB 10 Tape 1 Side B.
88. MERC, EEMB 04 Tape 1 Side B.
89. BHRU, 80007/02/41-42 and MERC, EEMB 21/1/6-7.
90. T. Smith, R. Perks and G. Smith, Ukraine's Forbidden History (Manchester 1998) 97.
91. BHRU, BOO 15/03/65.
92. Victor Susak, Becoming an agent of changes: interactions of social and personal experiences as told by leaders in post-Soviet Ukraine, unpublished paper, Second European Social Science History Conference, Amsterdam 5-7 March 1998.
93. MERC, EEMB 05 Tape 2 Side B.
94. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London 1997) x, xii, 180.