Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
910984475
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
Ostashewski, Marcia,1974-
Title
Performing heritage : ukrainian festival, dance and music in Vegreville, Alberta.
Degree
Ph. D. -- York University, 2009
Publisher
Ottawa : Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, [2013]
Description
8 microfiches
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
<?Pub Inc> Investigating the politics of identity negotiated in and through music and dance performances at an early-twenty-first century Ukrainian cultural festival in western Canada (the Vegreville Pysanka Festival), I observed two different and complementary modern narratives of Ukrainian Canadian heritage operating simultaneously through central aggregate images, or tropes of Ukrainian Canadian identity. These tropes of Ukrainian Canadian identity, the cossack and the Ukrainian Canadian prairie pioneer, are not merely ethnic stereotypes; they are also gendered, class-defined and regionally located. The cossack represents a core Ukrainian national myth and the pioneer represents a core Canadian national myth, each intertwined with the other in music and dance performances, and in the continuing negotiations of a Ukrainian ethnic heritage in Canada. These images, and the particular historical narratives to which they relate and from which they draw meaning, have been, and continue to be, mobilized within a multicultural context as a means of (re)presenting an ethnic group identity. Considering broad historical narratives as well as detailed ethnographic material, I explore narratives of historical continuities versus assemblages of heritage in a wide variety of expressive mediums. The music and dance that Eastern European immigrants brought with them to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been shaped by changing socio-political contexts of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and, in particular, by the creation of national Ukrainian performance practices through a cultural revival that was integral to a wider process of modern Ukrainian nationbuilding. In Canada, during the twentieth and into early twenty-first century, Ukrainian music and dance have continued to be mobilized as powerful symbols--and points of negotiation--through which Canadians negotiate their understandings of individual and group histories and identities, and engage in creative expressions of Ukrainian-Canadian heritage. I show that, at cultural festivals like Vegreville's Pysanka Festival, individuals and groups of people discursively negotiate Ukrainian-Canadian identity through the production of heritage and the mediums of music and dance. Rather than understanding heritage performance, culture and identity, only as being "caught" at particular points in a web of interrelations (of passively finding oneself at intersections of social, cultural and political systems all of which have implications for the distribution of and access to different kinds of power) I see the performance of heritage through music and dance as a means by which individuals actively negotiate a contemporary Canadian identity.
ISBN
9780494903551
0494903554