Migrant Self-Reflectivity and New Ukrainian Diaspora in Southern Europe: The Case of Portugal

Abstract

One of the ways to examine how migrant communities grow to become diasporas would be to track the evolvement of migrants’ personal reflectivity and to analyze its impact on community development. Personal reflectivity has been on the rise in Ukrainian migrant communities in Southern Europe, as reflected in proliferation of various works of fiction and poetry produced by the migrants, all focusing on their experiences of displacement, nostalgia and adaptation to the new cultural environs. Yet, this cultural phenomenon, in its active unfolding in the Ukrainian diaspora, has not been subject to any scholarly evaluation. In this article I discuss such migrant self-reflectivity that had evolved in the last two decades amongst the Ukrainian migrants in Europe. Here I focus on migrants ‘poetic economy’ as it is pursued in the Ukrainian community in Portugal. Based on my ethnographic work in greater Lisbon area, with the Ukrainian vernacular poets and their texts, I argue that migrant reflectivity and poetic economy, a term I coined to illustrate the workings of migrant poetry production, distribution and consumption, serve the Ukrainians in Portugal as effective means of diasporic community building.