Description

This talk will be an account of my ongoing research project on the relationship between Ukrainian diaspora communities and their original homeland during and after the Cold War. It will focus on the reception of the Ukrainian dissent by the younger generations of the Ukrainian diaspora (especially in the US) and on the ways these younger Ukrainian-Americans tried to change the relationship with Soviet Ukraine. The analysis will address the question of the multiculturalism of these second-generation Ukrainian Americans aiming at a working definition of otherwise ambigous concepts such as “transnationalism” and “diaspora.”

Simone Attilio Bellezza completed two PhDs: the first one at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, where he defended a dissertation on the German civil administration of Dnipropetrovs’k region during World War II, and the second at the University of the Republic of San Marino, where he wrote a dissertation on the Ukrainian dissent during the 1950s and 1960s. He specialized in Soviet and particularly Ukrainian history, and the fil rouge of his work is the study of national identity and its relationship with other kinds of loyalty (social, political, cultural, and religious). He is now working on a new research project, whose aim is to verify to what extent the human rights activism of the 1970s and 1980s constituted the basis for the new-born foreign policy of post-Soviet Ukraine, by creating numerous networks of international relationships. His first objective will be to investigate the relationship between Ukrainian diaspora communities and their original homeland in the emergence of the human rights movement.