GLOBAL ASPECTS OF LITHUANIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY

The features of the American Lithuanian identity are prompted by different historical dramas and the fate of the refugees of the Soviet occupation after WWII unfolding on the American continent. Here, the catastrophe of forced loss of homeland and state, American globalism, colonial pains of racism and enslaved peoples, and archetypes of Lithuanianness – the forest, the quietly flowing Nemunas river, the village, the Vilnius antiquarian, the historical archives and memory of photographs – intermingled. This safe image of the native home, with its snowdrifts and the greenery of the birches, was being changed by the ocean, the continent, and the accident. It is the intersection of catastrophism and lyricism’s connections with nature, where the new globalism of Lithuanian American longings, empathy for enslaved nations, left on the outskirts of the world, and “non-family members” forgotten by the world’s oblivion. So, during the upheaval, the Lithuanian transformation of Christian values acquires the wings of suffering. The poetic phenomenon of an American Lithuanian is born in the poetry of Algimantas Mackus (1932–1964) and the prose of Antanas Škėma (1910–1961). Meanwhile, the dimensionalism of the sea and space, born in the works of Vytautas Bacevičius (1905–1970) in the thirties in Lithuania, crystallises into cosmism in music, its transcendental waves and rays, voicing the “cosmic soul of music” in America that outgrew its temporality. The spreading of the Lithuanian American identity takes themost unexpected turns in philosophy, photography and imagery of experiences, emerging phenomenalism, exploring the depths of the consciousness of the peoples of the world like Algis Mickūnas (*1933) and Alphonso Lingis (*1933). And with the greatest paradox, it returns to Lithuania, as a kingdom of metaphors, to “defeat Russia” – to destroy the Soviet Union through absurdity in its system. This way, George Mačiūnas’ (1931–1978) trickery personal expression takes place through the Fluxus avant-garde art movement and the minimalism inspired by the poet and film avant-gardist Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) and discovered by Lithuanians. The changes hidden in the details and intonation cells of their work as a “crumbling time” lead to a “quiet turn of theworld”, a paradoxical Jungian synchronism that inspired the Baltic mind of the present day (according to the Estonian thinker Jan Uldusk) and led to the liberation of Lithuania and other Baltic countries. This global convergence of identities is also a peculiar American invasion into Lithuania through culture – poetry, literature, music, cinema, phenomenalism and political emigration, which has become the essential actualisation code for a Lithuanian, one of those who cut through the citadel of Sovietism and its iron curtains with the unique swing of the axe of the Fluxus scene.