Narrative strains: Tracing the Russian Mennonite migration through Canadian literature

Narrative Strains: Tracing the Russian Mennonite Migration through Canadian Literature examines the repeated narration of the Mennonites' mass migration from their prosperous colonies in Ukraine to Canada in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on recent work in diaspora studies that emphasizes how migrant communities often mythologize a seminal dispersal in their histories as a way of affirming a communal identity across national and generational boundaries, this dissertation posits a careful consideration of literary rewritings of a key migration history---the "narrative strains" of a "break event"---as a methodology that focuses discussions of migrant fiction while enabling an exploration of the heterogeneous ways in which migrant communities are imagined in Canada. Taking the 1920s migration as a break event in Canada's Russian Mennonite community, I examine four strains of emphasis among the many novels that return to this history as a way of negotiating the shifting contours of Mennonite collective identity in Canada: theo-pedagogical (Janice Dick's Out of the Storm, Al Reimer's My Harp is Turned to Mourning), ethnic (Arnold Dyck's Lost in the Steppe), trauma (Sandra Birdsell's The Russlander), and meta-narrative (Blue Mountains of China). The study historicizes the rise of Mennonite Canadian literature in the 1970s as part of the wider emergence of "ethnic literature" that resulted from the Canadian government's promotion of multiculturalism, and examines the tensions that have marked Mennonite writing as a consequence of this critical frame. I argue that a historically informed focus on novels that rewrite a given migrant experience offers a way of acknowledging the impact of the critical, institutional, and political discourses in which the novels circulate, while exploring the wider range of positions by which they seek to locate their respective communities. While the relationship between literature and communal identity is well established, my findings suggest that a focus on rewriting as a site of communal debate demands a reconsideration of the function of narrative specifically within the context of repetition, where questions of referentiality, difference, and temporality complicate the location of migrant fiction within the larger narrative of the nation-state.