Search

This article explores how approximately 400 Russian émigrés living in fifty-eight countries during the inter-war period redefined Russian ethnicity. In responses to an amateur nation-building project, they provided a wide variety of either organic or voluntaristic definitions of Russianness, despite the fact that they were a fairly homogenous group in terms of their political views and their social background. Most of their criteria for determining Russianness were dissimilar to pre-revolutionary conceptions. Yet one overarching feature united their conceptions of Russianness: they were all intent on excluding entire groups of would-be Russians, even though it was in their interests to expand the size of the Russian diaspora. This article argues that statelessness forced Russian émigrés to refine their ethnicity and that the process of defining members of their diaspora nation paralleled their endeavour to create a Russian émigré ethnicity separate from that of Soviet Russians. The criteria they developed to exclude groups and sometimes individuals they encountered abroad mirror the criteria that used to disassociate themselves from Soviet Russians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This three-generation oral history study offers insight into why descendants of Italian migrants to the United States still choose hyphenated identities today. The research project shows how the meaning of Italianness shifts among the interviewees depending on class affiliation: among the middle-class offspring the use of the hyphen can be understood mainly as a reaction to the experienced pressure to give in to Anglo conformity. Among the blue-collar, urban progeny, Italianness expresses itself as a combination of an experienced ethnic environment on the one hand and a symbolic ethnicity on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research based on a sample of Brazilian youth living in Massachusetts reveals a variety of responses to racialisation of their phenotypes. Caught between the fluid patterns of colour categories found in Brazilian society and the more rigid racial stratification that characterises the USA, Brazilian-Americans have followed a variety of strategies to adapt to this situation. By exploring the reactions of these young adults of different appearance along the colour continuum to the constraints of the dominant society, questions concerning the future dynamics of race relations in the USA are raised against a background of the continuing post-racialism debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using interviews with 10 Orangewomen from England and Scotland, this article analyses how women could articulate a sense of ethnic identity through membership of the Orange Order during the second half of the twentieth century. What emerged from their reflections was a sense of how Irish Protestant identity interacted with, and was shaped by, Scottish, English and British identities. This article argues that these women's identity was rooted, for most, in a family background in Scotland and Ireland, which was strongly intertwined with their membership of the Orange Order. The example of the female Orange Order demonstrates that identities can be formed through the close interplay of family and ethnic associational life, suggesting ways in which historians of migration might further explore the interaction of migrants' public and private lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]