From the Estate to the Fazenda: Working an Other Lithuanian Identity in Stasys Jonas Jokubka’s 'On the Brazilian Plantations'

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media IV: Transcultural Flows and their Socialist Valences: Different Scales of Second and Third World Exchange

Abstract

This paper looks at the memoir short story collection On the Brazilian Plantations (1962) written by Lithuanian communist author Stasys Jonas Jokubka (1909-1998). The book’s stories explore both the journey taken by Lithuanian migrants after WWI as well as the dehumanizing work conditions they suffered while on in forced labor plantations in southern Brazil. Ash’s paper will investigate the lived experience of trans-nationality and the way Jokubka’s memoir reflects various contradictions of identity. On the Brazilian Plantations is just one example of a thriving Eastern European (most notably Polish and Ukrainian) cultural production and journalistic sphere that developed in southern Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century. Jokubka’s memoir also serves as an endlessly rich resource for challenging dominant narratives in both trans-national directionality and post-1917 Lithuanian memory.

Author

• Asher Anthony Maria, U of Pennsylvania