Sounding Diaspora through Music and Play in a Russian-American Summer Camp

Abstract

Music, ethnicity, youth and social bonding: perhaps nowhere do these elements intersect more powerfully than within the ethnic-American summer camp. Although summer camps have been virtually absent from ethnomusicological inquiry, they present rich sites for interrogating the nuanced negotiations of identity that can occur within a diaspora. Based on fieldwork conducted at a Russian-American summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains (New York, USA), this paper explores how camp music presents a productive sphere for playing out contentious issues of diaspora (including inter-wave tension, hyphenated identity politics and disagreements over the purpose of a long-standing diaspora). Analysing music-making within this community through a theoretical lens of play (igra), this paper presents an original study of Russian émigré music and demonstrates how summer camp music presents a site for mediating competing epistemologies of the Diasporic Self for a diaspora that is facing an ontological juncture.

Keywords:

• Summer Camps
• United States
• Adolescents
• Russian-American
• Diaspora
• Homeland
• Play Theory
• Emigration
• Post-Soviet

Notes

¹ The full name is Organizatsiia Rossiiskikh Iunykh Razvedchikov.

² Although leaving Russia in 1920, Vertinsky returned in 1943.

³ Russia's migration history is typically categorised around five major periods: the pre-World War I migration (1880–1914); the First Wave (1917–mid 1920s); the Second Wave (World War II); the Third Wave (1970s); and the post-Soviet Fourth Wave. For more on the different waves of emigration, see, for example, Cassedy (1997), Evtuhov and Stites (2003), Feingold (2007), Glad (1999), Orleck (2001) and Shasha and Shron (2002).

⁴ For an in-depth history of ORUR, see Kudriashov (2005: 281–94).

⁵ For a first-hand account of an ORUR camp that took place in a Displaced Persons Camp, see Aristova (2003: 236–50).

⁶ All translations in this paper are my own.

⁷ The Soviet Pioneer scouting organisation (founded in 1922 by Vladimir Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya) consciously modelled itself on aspects of the pre-revolutionary Russian scouting programme, switching references from the tsar and Russian Orthodoxy to Lenin and the Communist Party (Kudriashov 2005: 131–6 and 154–5). For more on the Pioneer scouting movement, see Kelly (2007: esp. 61–92).

⁸ I identify all consultants with pseudonyms due to the sometimes sensitive content of their statements.

⁹ The enrolment in New York's chapter has been capped at 125 campers since 2004 with a healthy waiting list of hopefuls each year.

¹⁰ For a history of Russian national anthems in the twentieth century, see Daughtry (2003).

¹¹ The use of ‘folk culture’ by the Soviet government to bolster national sentiment beginning in the 1930s adds another layer of complexity to ‘Katiusha's’ positive reception in the diaspora and points to the salience of the ‘folk’ trope for narratives of an essential Russian national identity. On the politicisation of folk culture in Stalinist Russia, see: Olson (2004: 38–43) and Stites (1992: 78–9).

¹² For a first-hand account of relations between First Wave émigrés and Soviet soldiers, see the memoirs of Ksenia Denikin, wife of the White Army general Anton Denikin (Denikin 1948: 256–69, esp. 261–5). A number of consultants that I interviewed who lived through the Second World War likewise expressed support for a Soviet victory over Germany.

¹³ Indeed, campers repeatedly noted the Internet as a predominant source for finding current Russian music. On diasporas and increasingly complex and multidirectional global flows, see Appadurai (1996).

¹⁴ For more on code switching, see Auer (1998) and Bullock and Toribio (2009).

¹⁵ The recent political developments in Russia and the conflict with Ukraine present another potential seismic shift in homeland–diaspora relations whose impact on the diaspora is left to be seen.