Narratives of Identity: A Postcolonial Rereading of Dalia Grinkeviciute'sLithuanians by the Laptev Sea

摘要

The effort of Lithuanians to articulate and assert a collectiveidentity has encountered strong — and often violent — resistancein the recent past of Soviet oppression. Because Lithuania iswell into its second decade of independence, contemporary ex-pressions of identity struggle with the question of how to ad-dress this history of oppression. Dalia Grinkeviciute's famousautobiographical account of the 1941 deportations to Siberiaprovides a fascinating case study of the dialogues around con-temporary Lithuanian identity. The present article draws onprevailing current readings of Grinkeviciute's text and re-ex-amines them within the framework of a growing discussionabout the relevance of post-colonial theory for literature frompost-Soviet countries. While the traditional reading tends to fo-cus on the authenticity of the eyewitness account and links thetext to Lithuania's political independence, this article, draw-ing on a widening discussion about the relevance of postco-lonial theory to literature from post-Soviet countries, arguesthat postcolonial theory, specifically the work of Homi Bhabha,makes it possible to view Grinkeviciute's narrative of deporta-tion in a new light.