Authors

Discussion

The identity politics in modern Lithuania has often centered on narratives of ethnic and cultural integrity and resilience to the experiences of exile. After the restoration of independence in 1990, the Lithuanian government began to support the return of  deportees and their family members to Lithuania. Several thousand individuals have “restored” Lithuanian citizenship, “returned” and received social support in different forms over 35 years. The state “return programme” was largely based on the consolidating idea of a unified national identity, amplified by the discourse of collective trauma of deportation. As mentioned by some scholars (Ciubrinskas 2009, 2017, Kuznecoviene 2007), the public narratives about the ‘true Lithuanian’ appeared together with the rise of national identity based on ethnicity and ethnic culture. The trend can also be traced in the results of recent field work in the diasporas of Trans-Volga and Siberian regions of Russia and in Kazakhstan (Ciubrinskas 2023, Venzlauskaitė 2024, Kuznecovienė 2023, Šutinienė 2023). The idea of ethnic “purity” necessary for recognition on micro and macro levels reproduces the discourse of deservingness of being included (Vitus and Lidén 2010, Wihstutz 2024).

While the figure of a deportee is symbolically loaded in the national imagination, the experiences of descendants - particularly those who relocate (or “return”) to Lithuania - remain underexplored. This paper examines how these descendants navigate top-down politics of identity in Lithuania and how their belonging is simultaneously recognized, negotiated, and contested within the public sphere and within their own narratives. This negotiation reveals multiple tension between the sedentary/national and mobile/transnational (Basch, Glick Schiller, & Blanc Szanton 1994, 2003; Vertovec 2009; Čiubrinskas, Glick Schiller 2025). At the same time it allows us to explore how “deterritorialized” descendants unlock the "spatial incarceration of the native" through interplay of places, identities and cultures (Gupta and Ferguson (1992).

Having performed multiple transgressions – temporal (overcoming postmemory), spatial (relocating across continent), linguistic, cultural and national – the relocating descendants might find themselves in a liminal space negotiating their belonging. My goal is to explore their life-world as expressed in their narratives against the backdrop of public discourse and official documents.   

The study is based on in-depth interviews with the descendants and analysis of the media discourse. Personal narratives often demonstrate the experiences of othering and inclusion in everyday encounters, as well as situational identities and commodification of troubled legacy. The paper argues that negotiation of descendants’ belonging is mediated through a broader question of national identity, striving to be reinvented rather than restore