The Showman And The Ukrainian Cause

A quixotic figure, Vasile Avramenko (1895-1981) used folk culture and modern media in a life-long crusade to promote Ukraine’s struggle for independence to North American audiences. From his base in New York City, he built a network of folk dance schools and produced musical spectacles to help Ukrainian immigrants sustain their identity. His feature-length Ukrainian language films made in the 1930s with Hollywood director Edgar G. Ulmer, the “king of ethnic and B movies,” were shown throughout North America. Orest T. Martynowych’s The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause is a fascinating portrait how culture can become a political tool in a diaspora community.

While Canada is home to one of the largest Ukrainian diasporas in the world, little is known about the life and culture of Ukrainians living in the country’s rural areas and their impact on Canadian traditions. Drawing on more than ten years of interviews and fieldwork, Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies describes the culture of Ukrainian Canadians living in the prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Despite powerful pressure to assimilate, these Ukrainians have managed both to preserve their sense of themselves as Ukrainian and to develop a culture sensitive to the realities of prairie life, creating their own uniquely Ukrainian Canadian traditions. The Ukrainian church, an iconic though now rapidly disappearing feature of the prairie landscape, takes centre stage as an instrument for the retention of Ukrainian identity and the development of a new culture. Natalie Kononenko explores the cultural elements of Ukrainian Canadian ritual practice, with an emphasis on family traditions surrounding marriage, birth, death, and religious holidays. Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies gives voice to a group of everyday people who are too often overlooked, highlighting their accomplishments and their contributions to Canadian life.

Moving Together: Dance and Pluralism in Canada explores how dance intersects with the shifting concerns of pluralism in a variety of racial and ethnic communities across Canada. Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contributors examine a broad range of dance styles used to promote diversity and intercultural collaborations. Examples include Fijian dance in Vancouver; Japanese dance in Lethbridge; Danish, Chinese, Kathak, and Flamenco dance in Toronto; African and European contemporary dance styles in Montréal; and Ukrainian dance in Cape Breton. Interviews with Indigenous and Middle Eastern dance artists along with an artist statement by a Bharata Natyam and contemporary dance choreographer provide valuable artist perspectives. Contributors offer strategies to decolonize dance education and also challenge longstanding critiques of multiculturalism. Moving Together demonstrates that dance is at the cutting edge of rethinking the contours of race and ethnicity in Canada and is necessary reading for scholars, students, dance artists and audiences, and everyone interested in thinking about the future of racial and ethnic pluralism in Canada.

In Perogies and Politics, Rhonda Hinther explores the twentieth-century history of the Ukrainian left in Canada from the standpoint of the women, men, and children who formed and fostered it. For twentieth-century leftist Ukrainians, culture and politics were inextricably linked. The interaction of Ukrainian socio-cultural identity with Marxist-Leninism resulted in one of the most dynamic national working-class movements Canada has ever known. The Ukrainian left’s success lay in its ability to meet the needs of and speak in meaningful, respectful, and empowering ways to its supporters’ experiences and interests as individuals and as members of a distinct immigrant working-class community. This offered to Ukrainians a radical social, cultural, and political alternative to the fledgling Ukrainian churches and right-wing Ukrainian nationalist movements. Hinther’s colourful and in-depth work reveals how left-wing Ukrainians were affected by changing social, economic, and political forces and how they in turn responded to and challenged these forces.

This two-volume encyclopedia profiles the contemporary culture and society of every country in Europe. Each country receives a chapter encompassing such topics as religion, lifestyle and leisure, standard of living, cuisine, gender roles, relationships, dress, music, visual arts, and architecture. This authoritative and comprehensive encyclopedia provides readers with richly detailed entries on the 45 nations that comprise modern Europe. Each country profile looks at elements of contemporary life related to family and work, including popular pastimes, customs, beliefs, and attitudes. Students can make cross-cultural comparisons-for instance, a student could compare social customs in Denmark with those in Norway, compare Greece's cuisine with that of Italy, and contrast the architecture of Paris with Amsterdam and Barcelona. Culture and society are changing in each region and nation of Europe due to many political and economic forces, both inside and outside of each nation's borders. This encyclopedia considers many of the transformations connected to globalization, as well as traditions that still hold strong, to provide a complete assessment of the processes that make European societies and cultures distinctive.

In 1947, grocer Johnny Lombardi went on air for the first time to share the sounds of "sunny Italy" with the radio listeners of Toronto. Meanwhile, in cities across the country, a handful of theatres began to show films in foreign languages. In the decade after the Second World War, these events were some of the earliest indications of the nationwide changes taking place in Canadian media as it responded to the new cultural, political, and economic visibility of cultural and linguistic minorities. Identity and Industry explores how ethnocultural media in Canada developed between the end of the Second World War and the arrival of digital media. Through chapters dedicated to film exhibition, newspapers, radio, and television, Mark Hayward documents the industrial and institutional frameworks that defined the role of media in Canadian multiculturalism. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book situates late twentieth-century "ethnic" media at the intersection of demand, cultural integration, and the changing economics of popular culture. As the development of ethnocultural media continues to shape Canadian society in the age of digital media, Identity and Industry provides richly detailed historical context for contemporary debates about identity and culture.

During the Cold War, more than 36,000 individuals entering Canada claimed Czechoslovakia as their country of citizenship. A defining characteristic of this migration of predominantly political refugees was the prevalence of anti-communist and democratic values. Diplomats, industrialists, politicians, professionals, workers, and students fled to the West in search of freedom, security, and economic opportunity. Jan Raska’s Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada explores how these newcomers joined or formed ethnocultural organizations to help in their attempts to affect developments in Czechoslovakia and Canadian foreign policy towards their homeland. Canadian authorities further legitimized the Czech refugees’ anti-communist agenda and increased their influence in Czechoslovak institutions. In turn, these organizations supported Canada’s Cold War agenda of securing the state from communist infiltration. Ultimately, an adherence to anti-communism, the promotion of Canadian citizenship, and the cultivation of a Czechoslovak ethnocultural heritage accelerated Czech refugees’ socioeconomic and political integration in Cold War Canada. By analyzing oral histories, government files, ethnic newspapers, and community archival records, Raska reveals how Czech refugees secured admission as desirable immigrants and navigated existing social, cultural, and political norms in Cold War Canada.

In August 1972, military leader and despot Idi Amin expelled Asian Ugandans from the country, professing to return control of the economy to “Ugandan citizens.” Within ninety days, 50,000 Ugandans of South Asian descent were forced to leave and seek asylum elsewhere; nearly 8,000 resettled in Canada. This major migration event marked the first time Canada accepted a large group of predominantly Muslim, non-European, non-white refugees. Shezan Muhammedi’s Gifts from Amin documents how these women, children, and men—including doctors, engineers, business leaders, and members of Muhammedi’s own family—responded to the threat in Uganda and rebuilt their lives in Canada. Building on extensive archival research and oral histories, Muhammedi provides a nuanced case study on the relationship between public policy, refugee resettlement, and assimilation tactics in the twentieth century. He demonstrates how displaced peoples adeptly maintain multiple regional, ethnic, and religious identities while negotiating new citizenship. Not passive recipients of international aid, Ugandan Asian refugees navigated various bureaucratic processes to secure safe passage to Canada, applied for family reunification, and made concerted efforts to integrate into—and give back to—Canadian society, all the while reshaping Canada’s refugee policies in ways still evident today. As the numbers of forcibly displaced people around the world continue to rise, Muhammedi’s analysis of policymaking and refugee experience is eminently relevant. The first major oral history project dedicated to the stories of Ugandan Asian refugees in Canada, Gifts from Amin explores the historical context of their expulsion from Uganda, the multiple motivations behind Canada’s decision to admit them, and their resilience over the past fifty years.