Creation of Fictional Community

This work will explore how the creation of a fictional community can be understood as ¿imagining¿ one that does not exist, and is thus constituted as an ¿imagined¿ community. I will analyze how my sense of a Lithuanian identity has been shaped by memories of Lithuania''s history and by the changing international political context, up to and after restitution of Lithuanian independence in 1990. Few years ago I was away from my native Lithuanian community for quite a long period of time, but did not find a new community to belong to, and remained to a large extent marked as a ¿stranger¿, though I was in certain circumstances trying to represent and incorporate some collective Lithuanian features in my daily living. In my work I will discuss the dynamic process of balance between, on the one hand, freedom and loneliness, versus, on the other hand, the security of being inside one''s native community. This book should be especially useful to the academics researching about the nature of collective memory and the notion of ¿collectivity¿, or anyone else who may be interested in the politics of intercultural representations.