“Black Balts” Abroad: White Racism, Homosexuality and (Non-)Tolerance in Lithuanian and Latvian Emigration Narratives

Abstract

The present article will use the method of literary imagology in order to study the 21st-century Lithuanian and Latvian (e)migration literature and experiences in the context of racial, sexual, and cultural otherness. It will discusses marriage to a foreigner as something more than an official legitimation of one’s love for a person of other ethnicity, the introduction of foreignness into the world of one’s own culture, and the ideological penetration of the other into that which is inherited, ordinary and familiar. Provinciality, intolerance, and inability to admit and accept the Other or perceive oneself as a sexual Other remain an important part of Lithuanian and Latvian identity. In turn, emigrants in the host communities are a minority with counter-negative images, especially social ones.