Description
Book SynopsisAnna Brzozowska-Krajka’s
Ethnoculture in the Diaspora: Between Regionalism and Americanisation is a pioneering monograph in Polish and American cultural studies. It deals with various aspects of the functioning of Polish immigrants’ folk culture in the context of American multiculturalism. This monograph is based on its author’s many years of research into the culture of Polish immigrants in the United States, mainly in the areas of metropolitan Chicago and on the East Coast. It defines the significance of the local (regional) cultures of the immigrants’ country of origin for shaping their cultural identity under the conditions of diaspora. It indicates various degrees of identification with and distance from the source culture (of the country of origin).
The monograph presents, interprets, and theorizes various forms of cultural expression of the Tatra highlander ethnic subgroup (Górals) within American Polonia, of the private and public face of its ethnicity. They include musical, song, and dance folklore, folk rituals (of the liturgical year, family rituals), folk art, folk costume, regional architecture, and ethno-marketing.
Ethnoculture in the Diaspora is an essential work for the increasingly important field of folkloristic investigations of diasporic cultures that draw on the application of methods from the anthropology of culture and cultural studies. The study also has diagnostic value in the context of the explosion of ethnicity in the U.S. since the 1960s.
Trade ReviewAnna Brzozowska-Krajka’s monograph significantly reinterprets and complements the image of the culture of Polish immigrants to the United States of America and initiates folkloristic studies of the culture of the Polish diaspora in the U.S. This perspective is especially important given the fundamentally folk, rural character of Polish emigration. Brzozowska-Krajka presents a critical overview of both American and Polish studies, sometimes taking a polemical stance, and reinterprets the results of research in this field. Illuminating are those parts of her polemic where the methodology of folkloristic studies leads to formulating new interpretations. -- Roch Sulima, University of Warsaw
Table of ContentsIntroduction
I. “Betwixt-and-Between”: Diasporic Experience in Macroperspective
1. Diaspora as an analytical category: in the realm of operational concepts
2. From Rev. Wacław Kruszka to Karen Majewski: the culture of American Polonia in scholarly discourse: tendencies, priorities, inadequacies
II.“Betwixt-and-Between”: Diasporic Experience in Microperspective
1. Regionalism as a specific form of religion: the Tatra highlander paradigm and its American variant
2. The Polish Tatra highlanders in America: reproduction of source culture
3. Spatial distance to the roots: continuity or transformation?
4. Metropolitan identity v. regional identity in the diaspora
5. Being and community: Polonian memoir poetry
6. ”We for ours”: Polonian memoir advertisements
7. Nationality and ethnicity in Polonian writings (the case of The Tatra Eagle)
8. The Tatra highlander theater in America: auto-communication or expression of ethnicity
9. Between ethnic folklore and American pop culture: the Polish style of Eddie Blazonczyk’s polkas
10. Christmas in diaspora and American political correctness
Conclusion: regionalism v. ethno-images in diaspora
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