n.
Part I Pamięć (Memory) consists of two chapters. Chapter 1. Czytanie pamięci jako zapominanie (Reading memory as forgetting) presents the general assumptions of the work, its chronological and conceptual scope, and the main inspirations for taking up research. These include Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” which extends from the First World perspective (of an American researcher, in this case) to Second-World conceptualizations and narratives; Susan Buck-Morss’s “universal history,” which despite always being locally rooted and trying to give voice to the subaltern, searches for ethical and moral frameworks for globally thinking about history and man. These two attitudes are still cognitively fertile and analytically and interpretively open, and give new meanings to postcolonial studies. Finally, they are identical with the intuitions of Polish socialist postcolonialism.
Chapter 2. Re/konsolidacja pamięci – studium historyczno-teoretyczne (Memory re/consolidation – A historical-theoretical study) provides an overview of what memory studies call forgetting and being forgotten as well as blanking out. A kind of asymmetry is pointed out between – on the one hand – the social sciences and humanities, which concentrate on memory, and – on the other hand – the medical sciences, psychology, and neuroscience, which focus on forgetting as a research subject. The author discusses attempts in the humanities and social sciences to conceptualize oblivion and forgetting, with particular emphasis on Paul Connerton’s argument from Seven Types of Forgetting (2008). However, contrary to these conceptualizations, a different understanding of forgetting, drawn from psychology and neuroscience, is suggested, using the categories of memory consolidation and reconsolidation, which demonstrates the processual character of remembering and forgetting. The starting point is the individual, biological and psychological level, characteristic of the medical sciences. This model is then transferred – using metaphors and mechanisms of remembering/forgetting – to the collective level, proper to culturally-oriented humanities and social sciences. The suggestions of Thomas J. Anastasio, Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, Patrick Watson and Wenyi Zhang enounced in Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation: Analogous Processes on Different Levels (2012) are examined and modified. It is clear that on the cultural and social level, the content of memory stabilizes only incidentally, while it is always labile in the long-term perspective. Changes concern not only output data, facts and events, but also their interpretations in the form of changing patterns of memory, narrative forms, stories, artifacts, and places of memory. The substance of memory is subjected to constant re/consolidation, reconfiguration, and is influenced by conditions such as trauma, revolution, war, generational change, new paradigms, etc. These are defined and illustrated in the chapter summary (Diagram 1, p. 69).
Part II Historia (History) starts with the chapter Wojna i pokój – historia postkolonializmu socjalistycznego (War and peace – the history of socialist postcolonialism). The most important question here concerns similarities between the condition of postwar Poland, deeply and dramatically tried during World War II (as suggestively described by M. Zeremba or A. Leder), and the condition of decolonizing states and nations all over the world, including those that can already be regarded as postcolonial. Analogies between the postwar condition of states belonging to the Second World (Eastern Bloc) in the second half of the 1940s to the postcolonial states of the Third World are recognized.
The Recovered Territories Exhibition and the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in 1948 played a key role in the development of the idea of uniting the Eastern Bloc and non-European territories. It was at the Congress – both in the documents prepared beforehand, the reports and party bulletins, and during the debates – that the anti-imperialist idea of relations between socialist and postcolonial nations was enounced. It was exploited by socialist propaganda, Soviet and Polish, and remained a kind of supranational ideal for leftist centers all over the world: in the West, in the Eastern Bloc, and outside of Europe. The slogan “fight for peace” used in this struggle is interesting. This oxymoron is a perfect illustration of the ambivalence characteristic of Second-World postcolonialism. Taking socialist involvement in this version of postcolonialism into account, we must not ignore the works of the Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist classics and – due to the non-explicit tone of the party documents analyzed – archival materials. What is surprising from today’s perspective is the high awareness of the global nature of social-political and economic processes and of the categories of critical philosophy and postcolonial thought among Polish intellectuals in those times. The chapter ends with a synthetic analysis of the poetry involved in building the new socialist reality of the 1940s and 1950s (authors like T. Borowski, R. Bratny, A. Mandalian, W. Szymborska and others), whose propaganda dimension is more significant than its critical element. This poetry, however, is a good reflection of the post/colonial worldview of contemporary poets. The crucial questions are included in Schemat najważniejszych tematów w polskiej poezji zaangażowanej na przełomie lat 40. i 50. (w zakresie „walki o pokój” i relacji do światów pozaeuropejskich) (Outline of the most important subjects in Polish engagé poetry of the 1940s and 50s within the framework of the “fight for peace” and the relationship to non-European worlds) (Outline 2, p. 124).
Chapter 2. Postkolonializm – perspektywa socjalistyczna (Postcolonialism – a socialist perspective) reconstructs the main claims of Polish texts and translated works (mostly prefaces and commentaries), which make up the body of Polish socialist postcolonial literature. The analysis of the relevant scientific and literary discourses is based on a number of mutually complementary assumptions. The perspective is that of knowledge archaeology, discovering the postcolonial paradigm present in Poland between 1948 and 1989 and blotted out of collective memory. This is done by – on the one hand – searching for conceptions that directly appeal to the categories of “postcolonialism” and “postcoloniality” – and on the other hand by using other definitions which directly refer to the classical understanding of postcolonialism and postcoloniality in world scholarship. The problem is with using concepts like “neocolonialism,” “decolonisation,” “the time after colonialism” and others in Polish, whose semantic scope doesn’t fully correspond with the paradigmatic understanding of postcolonialism and postcoloniality. Peripheral texts like the prefaces and afterwords of Polish editions of postcolonial classics – like Aimé Césaire or Frantz Fanon – are examined in addition to the remarks on covers of Polish translations of postcolonial fiction, where these kinds of references appear. This analysis is completed by a look at encyclopedia and dictionary entries, where the terms postcolonialism and postcoloniality appeared as early as 1967. The chapter draws on the findings of the digital humanities, particularly when it comes to the frequency of citing postcolonial authors or present reception of postcolonial texts in Poland. We can clearly see a dissonance between socialist postcolonialism and Polish postcolonial studies today because the latter are mostly based on imported – for the most part Western – scholarship (“suitcase scholarship,” as Krzysztof Abriszewski calls it), but very rarely do they consider Poland’s own roots. The chapter discusses classical postcolonial works, such as Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, Leela Gandhi, Robert J.C. Young, David Spurr, Mary Louise Pratt, Ania Loomba. Reviewing the main ideas in this trend, we are able to say that Polish socialist postcolonialism did not differ from the works seen today as classics because it used similar arguments, an identical rhetoric, and analogous political and philosophical references. However, it was also marked by different Second-World features whose introduction into global knowledge circulation today would enrich postcolonial discourse, making possible a dialogue between the Second and Third Worlds, excluding metropolises. In this sense, the counterhegemonic potential of postcolonialism is still to be realized. The present book represents the developing research tendency exemplified by the Socialism Goes Global project (http://socialismgoesglobal.exeter.ac.uk/ ).
Chapter 3, Ratunek, czyli w stronę lokalnej szkoły historii światowej. Interludium teoretyczne (Rescue or towards a local school of world history: A theoretical interlude) is an attempt to reconstruct the innovative theory developed by Polish historian Marian Małowist, who is regarded as a precursor of world-system theory (which I discuss in other publications). The book shows how the ideas and historical interpretations of Małowist can be read in the context of Polish socialist postcolonialism. They turn out to be analogous in many respects, both in their understanding of non-European worlds and in their attempt to bring these into league with the European (semi)peripheries. Małowist emphasized several important postcolonial issues, such as the lack of sources for pre-colonial history, the lack of analytical categories for expressing pre-colonial local histories, the hegemonic knowledge structures of the colonizers, the structural relationship between Central and Eastern Europe and non-European territories, the mechanisms of colonial oppression and domination, etc. Małowist advocated for a reversal of the knowledge order and the adoption of the local bottom-up perspective on history. His research was interdisciplinary (he drew on the biological sciences, demography, etc.) and attempted to fill knowledge gaps where traditional historical sources were not sufficient for complete historical reconstruction. In this sense, his ideas from the 1960s and 1970s are a significant component of postcolonial thought in the Second World and can still provide an attractive background for today’s humanities.
Part III, Literatura, sztuka, nauka (Literature, art, and science), consists of four chapters. Chapter 1, Między niewyrażalnością doświadczenia a literaturyzacją wojny (Between the inexpressibility of experience and the literaturisation of war) begins with reflections on the im/possibility of comparing different experiences of war, genocide, death camps, World War II and the Holocaust. On the one hand such comparisons are an unjustifiable malpractice, and on the other hand they still function in different postwar discourses. Another problem has to do with a kind of paradox. While the experience of the Holocaust and of the concentration camps seems inexpressible and incommunicable (see Adorno, Arendt, Agamben), there is an overproduction of narratives on the subject – a process which has been defined as the literaturisation of war. At the crossroads of these questions there are there are also narratives about non-European conflicts (China, Korea and Vietnam – also discussed in other chapters) which postcolonial socialist Polish narratives compare with World War II and (rarely) with the Holocaust (which is central to Rothberg’s reflections). The chapter analyzes and interprets the following reportage texts with clear postcolonial potential, but not free of propaganda and political involvement. These are Lucjan Pracki’s Korespondent wojenny z Korei donosi… (1953), Wojciech Żukrowski’s Dom bez ścian (1954) and his photo album Niepokonani… Wietnam Północny w fotografiach Zbigniewa Staszyszyna (1971), concerning, respectively, the wars in Korea, Indochina (with France) and Vietnam (with the USA). These books are compared with, among others, Aimé Césaire’s classical text Discourse on colonialism (broadly perceived as the foundational text of the postcolonial tradition), which appeared in Polish a few months after the original publication (1950), and the writings of Fanon. A linguistic analysis and overview of the literary terms, philosophical and political arguments, and rhetoric used evidences many common elements and builds a kind of understanding between Poland, Korea and Vietnam. The key factor is of course protest against the experience of the German occupation of Poland and the Western (imperialistic, neo/colonial) occupation of non-European territories. It is clearly seen how anti- and de-colonial discourses mix with postcolonial thought, shaping mature analytical categories, interpretations and rhetoric.
Chapter 2, Ilustracje wojenne i egzotyczne (War and exotic illustrations) presents a visual analysis of Pracki’s, Żukrowski’s and Staszyszyn’s three books. In Pracki, we have propaganda use of photographs from the Korean war, in Żukrowski – the illustrations of eminent artist Aleksander Kobzdej, and in Staszyszyn – aesthetically sophisticated black-and-white photos. It should be noted that whereas in the previous chapter we could distinctly see the critical dimension of socialist postcolonial writing (even when infected with unmistakable propaganda language), it is difficult to distinguish any unequivocal claims in the case of visual material. The text in these books often warned against “orientalizing” narratives, while the illustrations are unable to avoid this. Visual elements such as military men, partisans, but also women, children or even nature are analyzed and interpreted. The chapter concludes with two problems. First, the potential iconicity of Staszyszyn’s photographs from Vietnam, which could not achieve popularity on a par with e.g. the photos of Nick Ut from the same war because of the semi-peripheral status of their author and publication. This has led to a situation when the Polish image of the Vietnam war is shaped by hegemonic narratives and American illustrations. Second – the chapter symbolically ends with Chris Niedenthal’s photograph from the beginning of martial law in Poland, presenting an armoured transporter in a Warsaw street in front of Moscow Cinema on which a banner advertises Apocalypse Now - an iconic representation of communist repressions against the Solidarity Movement protests of the early 1980s. Despite their ambivalence (between postcolonial criticism on the one hand and orientalizing stereotypes on the other), illustrations, likewise Polish war narratives about Korea or Vietnam, try to erect bridges between Poland and non-European worlds based on a shared experience of war, oppression, domination, violence, trauma, etc., but also of liberation, rebuilding, modernization, education, etc.
Fictional literature is also characterized by attempts at mutual understanding and ambivalence, particular to World War II postcolonialism, and is analyzed in detail in chapter 3 Literaturyzacja wojny i rewolucji – proza fikcjonalna (Literaturization of war and revolution: fictional prose). Three Polish novels qualified as postcolonial are analyzed and interpreted. The first, Mirosław Żuławski’s Rzeka Czerwona (The Red River) (1953), is probably the first novel concerning the war in Indochina, constructing a multidirectional memory stretched between the First and Third Worlds, but also including the unique perspective of the Second World. The novel is not free from simplifications typical of involved literature, but it is far from being one-dimensional like the nonfictional works discussed above. The second novel is Igor Newerly’s Leśne Morze (The Wood Sea). The book is different from the others not only because it is geographically set in the North, in Manchuria, but also on account of its historical context – World War II. Like in the other novels, its multidirectional knot was tied by the author in an intriguing way, indicating connections between the First, Second and Third worlds, and even more distinctly – demonstrating the relativity of these kinds of definitions, the contingency of our identities, the ambiguity of political interests, and the changeability of individual and community fates. The third novel, Wojciech Żukrowski’s Kamienne tablice (Stone Tablets) from 1966 is a perfect illustration of this understanding of postcolonial literature. Describing the complicated story of Hungarian diplomats in India in the crucial year of 1956, it not only takes a multidirectional perspective, but also – as in Żuławski and Newerly – adopts the nonobvious and critical thinking still present in postcolonial studies. All of these books emphasize gender, natural and political aspects, they make an attempt to break out of the orientalizing model and to create postcolonial literature in socialist Poland. Although not free from various ideological and orientalizing defects, the books can serve as examples of successful postcolonial novels. I argue for the exceptionality of looking at the Third World from the Second World perspective, without any need for First-World intermediation, although with the full awareness of its neo/colonial aspirations (a completely different issue – to some extent complementary with regard to the present book – would be a history of Soviet neo/colonialism, as currently practiced in Polish and Central European postcolonial studies referring to the Eastern Bloc, but also to non-European territories; however, it would be an entirely separate project).
Chapter 4. Postkolonialna historia autoreferencyjna (Postcolonial self-referential history) turns the reader’s attention to the 1980s, i.e., the time when communism collapsed in Poland, the time preceding political transformation and the emergence of mature postcolonialism imported from the West. It was also a time when Poland’s postcolonial legacy was gradually forgotten. Martial law and subsequent repressions significantly contributed to the removal of that tradition of memory. We can look at Polish thought of the 1980s from a double perspective. Firstly – the potential interpretation of the Poles’ own condition of having been colonized by external conquerors (the Soviets) and by comprador-style political elites subservient to them. This kind of reading appears in various academic analyses, e.g., those of Jadwiga Staniszkis (Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, 1984), and in oral creations, occasionally responding to the crisis of the 1980s. Referring to the last case, the reception of Alex Haley’s novel Roots and of a television series based on it is analyzed (the story of Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped in Africa and sent to America as a slave, which was very popular in Poland in the 1980s). It sheds light on the possibility of resistance, characteristic of postcolonial thought, but also – as I demonstrate – on the fact that due to the earlier involvement of Second-World postcolonialism in the socialist propaganda apparatus, the said opposition potential was not realized. This fact had a significant impact on the history of postcolonialism in Poland, which as late as a decade after the collapse of communism had started to develop its own position within the Academy and political discourse, in an original, local form, without Marxist and socialist connotations. The chapter ends with a theoretical coda – a reconstruction of Jerzy Wiatr’s postcolonial theory. Wiatr, a Polish sociologist, deeply involved in the communist system, developed his own postcolonial theory from the 1960s onwards, drawing directly on authors from the postcolonial circle, world-system theory and related terminology. He combined global postcolonial thought with a revolutionary and socialist background, but also – and this is an original aspect of his conception – with national and emancipatory elements. On the one hand, this was a derivative of the Polish or Central European attitude towards the problem of decolonisation, and on the other hand, an attempt to situate global processes in a compact conceptual frame. However, this political potential was not used, and due to Wiatr’s political involvement, his writings were forgotten and his ideas are not at present a background for Polish postcolonialism.
The book is completed by a summary, Model i historia (Model and history). I return once more to the question of reconsolidating the memory of postcolonialism, outlining the advantages of reconceptualizing memory studies (i.e., the transition from forgetting, by removing remembrance, to memory reconsolidation), where forgetting is treated from the viewpoint of a continuum of recollection, constant memory work, labile composition, in which some elements, although seemingly constant (such as books, illustrations, monuments, museums, etc.), are constantly subjected to historical and accidental changes. The summary also includes a brief statement on the history of Polish socialist postcolonialism from the perspective of memory work – the process of continuous re/consolidation. I indicate key geo/political events which influenced the evolution of postcolonial traditions in Poland, with different accents in the decades that followed and the ultimate reasons why the trend faded after 1989.
Socialist Postcolonialism and Alternative Globalities
Overview
The history of postcolonial thought is usually narrated as a movement from former European colonies to Western academic institutions. This account leaves out the socialist Second World: a space that participated in global anti-colonial movements, produced its own knowledge about colonialism and decolonisation, and developed extensive political, scientific, literary and artistic relations with Asia, Africa and Latin America.
My research reconstructs these neglected intellectual and cultural connections. I use the term socialist postcolonialism to describe forms of postcolonial thought and representation that developed in socialist Central and Eastern Europe before 1989. In Poland, this tradition included translations of anti-colonial authors, debates about neocolonialism, world history, literature about wars of liberation, visual representations of Asia and Africa, and attempts to connect the European experience of occupation and war with struggles against colonial domination.
These connections were neither innocent nor politically unambiguous. Anti-imperial solidarity coexisted with Soviet domination, state propaganda, paternalism and Orientalism. Socialist societies could criticise Western colonialism while remaining embedded in their own hierarchies of power. The concept of socialist postcolonialism is intended to preserve this ambivalence rather than replace one idealised global history with another.
The broader category of alternative globalities describes forms of global connection that did not originate in the principal political and academic centres of the West. It draws attention to the intellectual agency of semi-peripheral societies and to exchanges between the Second and Third Worlds that cannot be understood solely through relations between colonial centres and their former colonies.
Projects and Current Work
Socialist Postcolonialism as a Research Programme
This continuing research programme reconstructs the postcolonial traditions that developed in socialist Poland and Central and Eastern Europe before 1989.
Its central argument challenges the assumption that postcolonial thought reached the region only after the collapse of state socialism, through theories imported from Western universities. Polish intellectuals, writers, translators, historians and artists had engaged with decolonisation, colonial violence and the political cultures of Asia and Africa since the late 1940s. Terms such as colonialism, neocolonialism, postcolonialism and national liberation circulated in Polish scholarship and public discourse long before postcolonial studies became an established academic field.
The programme examines political documents, academic scholarship, translations, literary works, journalism, photography and visual culture. It asks why this tradition largely disappeared from intellectual memory after 1989 and how its recovery changes the history of postcolonial knowledge.
Socialist postcolonialism is understood here neither as an authentic alternative free of political manipulation nor as propaganda that can simply be dismissed. It was a contradictory intellectual formation in which ideological instrumentalisation, genuine international solidarity, cultural curiosity and critical knowledge developed alongside one another.
Alternative Globalities and Semi-Peripheral Knowledge
This strand of my research examines how actors located outside dominant global centres produced concepts, narratives and institutions through which the world could be understood.
Semi-peripheral societies are usually described as recipients of ideas produced elsewhere. My work reverses this perspective. It investigates how Polish and Central European scholars contributed to world history, world-system analysis, comparative literature and postcolonial thought. It also examines how their geopolitical location shaped both the possibilities and the limitations of the knowledge they produced.
A central case is the Polish historian Marian Małowist. His studies connected the history of Central and Eastern Europe with Africa, the Mediterranean and the emergence of the capitalist world economy. Małowist demonstrated that the histories of European and non-European peripheries could be analysed together and that concepts later associated with global history and world-system analysis were also being developed in socialist Europe.
Alternative globalities do not constitute a single coherent model. They include competing attempts to build transnational relations, circulate knowledge and imagine universal histories outside dominant Western frameworks. They must be studied together with the political infrastructures, exclusions and asymmetries that made them possible.
Selected Research Foundations
Central European Romanticism in the Postcolonial Context
2012–2017 · Research-group member · National Programme for the Development of the Humanities
The project investigated how postcolonial approaches could be adapted to the specific histories of Central Europe.
Its purpose was not simply to transfer theories developed for overseas colonial contexts to another region. Instead, it asked how postcolonial concepts must change when applied to societies that experienced imperial domination while also participating in regional hierarchies, nationalising projects and their own forms of cultural exclusion.
My work within the project developed the concept of localised postcolonialism. It connected the study of Central European modernisation with the intellectual legacies of scholars such as Marian Małowist and the Croatianist Joanna Rapacka.
Humanities of the (Semi-)Peripheries
2011–2016 · Collaborative research initiative
This initiative brought together researchers interested in the unequal geography of academic knowledge. It began with a conference devoted to the humanities on the semi-peripheries and resulted in a collective volume edited with Krzysztof Abriszewski and Jacek Kowalewski.
The project examined how intellectual work is shaped by the distinction between centres and peripheries. Academic semi-peripheries are not isolated from global knowledge circulation. They translate, adapt, contest and produce theories, but their contributions are frequently treated as local data rather than as concepts with wider explanatory power.
The initiative investigated whether the centre–periphery model adequately describes these relations and how the humanities might move beyond a simple opposition between global theoretical centres and passive regional recipients.
Books
Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation
Polish title: Socjalistyczny postkolonializm. Rekonsolidacja pamięci. Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University Press, 2018, 484 pp. Published in Polish with an extensive English summary.
The book reconstructs a Polish postcolonial tradition that developed before 1989 and was subsequently removed from intellectual memory.
Its historical point of departure is the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Wrocław. The congress helped establish a political vocabulary connecting the socialist Second World with anti-colonial movements and newly independent societies. These relations developed through translations, scholarship, political discourse, reportage, literature, photography and the visual representation of wars in Korea, Indochina and Vietnam.
The book argues that socialist Poland produced a recognisable form of postcolonial thought. It discussed colonial oppression, neocolonialism, cultural domination, liberation movements and the unequal production of knowledge. These discussions shared important features with what later became the international postcolonial canon, but they were shaped by the distinctive political position of the Second World.
The book also explains why this tradition was forgotten. After 1989, the language of socialist internationalism became associated primarily with state propaganda and Soviet domination. Postcolonial theory was then reintroduced to Poland largely through Western academic circulation, while earlier Polish engagements with decolonisation disappeared from view.
To analyse this process, the book adapts the concept of memory reconsolidation from psychology and neuroscience. Collective memory does not simply preserve or erase a stable past. Each act of recollection reorganises inherited narratives, changing the relationship between what is remembered, marginalised and forgotten.
English-language presentation of the book
Reviews
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Padraic Kenney, review in Slavic Review, vol. 78, no. 3, Fall 2019, pp. 826–828.
Read the review -
Kamil Piskała, review in Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, vol. 27, nos. 2–3, 2019, pp. 286–288.
Read the review -
Piotr Puchalski, review in The Polish Review, vol. 64, no. 4, 2019, pp. 97–100.
Read the review -
Anna Sosnowska, review in Acta Poloniae Historica, vol. 119, 2019, pp. 344–349.
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Tomasz Kamusella, “Postcolonialism in the Soviet Bloc,” New Eastern Europe, no. 6, 2018, pp. 136–140.
Read the review -
Katarzyna Taczyńska, review in Athenaeum. Polish Political Science Studies, vol. 58, 2018, pp. 253–255.
Humanities of the (Semi-)Peripheries
Polish title: Humanistyka (pół)peryferii. Edited with Krzysztof Abriszewski and Jacek Kowalewski. Olsztyn: University of Warmia and Mazury Press, 2016, 237 pp. Published in Polish.
The volume examines the position of the humanities within the global and national geographies of knowledge.
Its starting point is the proposition that academic centres and peripheries are not defined exclusively by geography. They are created through access to resources, languages, archives, publication infrastructures, prestigious institutions and the authority to determine which concepts are treated as universal.
The category of the semi-periphery captures a position characterised by participation without equal authority. Scholars working in semi-peripheral institutions are connected to international academic circulation but frequently expected to supply empirical material rather than theoretical innovation.
The volume does not treat this situation only as a form of exclusion. Semi-peripheral locations can also make visible relationships and asymmetries that remain less apparent from established centres. They can become sites for revising inherited theoretical hierarchies and producing alternative accounts of intellectual history.
Selected Articles and Chapters
“A Prehistory of Postcolonialism in Socialist Poland”
In Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Steffi Marung. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020, pp. 273–287.
The chapter reconstructs the intellectual and institutional prehistory of postcolonial thought in socialist Poland.
It challenges the assumption that Polish postcolonialism began after 1989 through the reception of Western theory. From the late 1940s onwards, Polish debates about colonialism and decolonisation developed through peace movements, translations, political discourse, literary writing and academic research. Intellectuals discussed many problems that would later become central to postcolonial studies, although they used a partly different conceptual vocabulary.
The chapter also explains why these genealogies were forgotten. The close association between anti-colonial rhetoric and the socialist state made it difficult after 1989 to recover this tradition as a source of critical thought. The post-socialist rejection of communist political language therefore also removed earlier forms of engagement with the postcolonial world.
“Marian Małowist’s World History and Its Application to World Literature”
In The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, edited by May Hawas. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 57–68.
The chapter recovers Marian Małowist as an important contributor to world history and the intellectual genealogy of world-system analysis.
Małowist studied the historical relations connecting Central and Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa. His work demonstrated that peripheralisation was a relational and global process rather than an attribute of isolated or supposedly backward regions.
The chapter argues that Małowist’s scholarship offers a model for understanding world literature. Literary systems, like economic and political systems, develop through unequal relations among centres, semi-peripheries and peripheries. This perspective makes it possible to connect the study of literary circulation with historically specific structures of power.
Recovering Małowist also changes the geography of theory. Concepts essential to later global history were not produced exclusively in Western academic centres. Socialist Central Europe was one of the locations in which the relations between European and non-European peripheries were systematically analysed.
“The Politics of the Archive in Semi-Peripheries”
In Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, edited by Ursula K. Heise et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 51–60.
The chapter examines how the archival record reproduces inequalities between academic centres and semi-peripheries.
The former socialist Second World has frequently disappeared from post-Cold War accounts of global literature and intellectual history. Sources produced in Central and Eastern Europe have been dispersed by war, migration and political upheaval. Many of the most important archives concerning the region are located in Western institutions, which influences who can access them and who possesses the authority to interpret them.
The problem is not simply that the semi-peripheries are insufficiently represented. The organisation of archives helps determine which historical experiences become visible, which are translated into theoretical language and which remain classified as local or regional.
The chapter argues that reconstructing semi-peripheral archives is necessary for recovering connections among the First, Second and Third Worlds that conventional disciplinary histories have obscured.
“Prolegomena to a Localised Postcolonialism: With Małowist and Rapacka in the Background”
Polish title: “Prolegomena do postkolonializmu zlokalizowanego (z Małowistem i Rapacką w tle).” In Central European Romanticism in a Postcolonial Context, edited by Michał Kuziak and Bartłomiej Nawrocki. Warsaw: Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2016, pp. 49–68. Published in Polish.
The chapter proposes a localised rather than mechanically transferred form of postcolonial analysis.
Postcolonial concepts cannot simply be detached from the histories for which they were developed and applied unchanged to Central Europe. At the same time, the region’s experience cannot be understood without examining imperial domination, peripheralisation and unequal cultural authority.
The chapter draws on Marian Małowist’s global history and Joanna Rapacka’s research on Central and Southeast European cultures. Their work demonstrates how locally produced scholarship can connect regional histories with larger structures without reducing them either to national exceptionalism or to imported universal models.
Localised postcolonialism therefore combines theoretical translation with historical reconstruction. It asks not only whether postcolonial theory can be used in Central Europe, but what Central European intellectual traditions can contribute to postcolonial theory.
“Humanities of the (Semi-)Peripheries? An Introduction”
With Krzysztof Abriszewski and Jacek Kowalewski. In Humanities of the (Semi-)Peripheries, edited by Krzysztof Abriszewski, Adam F. Kola and Jacek Kowalewski. Olsztyn: University of Warmia and Mazury Press, 2016, pp. 7–21. Published in Polish.
The introduction establishes the conceptual framework for studying the humanities through the unequal relations among centres, peripheries and semi-peripheries.
It asks how institutional location affects the kinds of research questions scholars can formulate, the languages in which they publish and the circulation of their concepts. It also considers why scholarship produced outside major academic centres is frequently required to demonstrate its regional specificity while work originating in those centres can present itself as universally applicable.
The text treats semi-peripherality not as a permanent deficiency but as a relational position. This position can reproduce intellectual dependency, but it can also provide a critical perspective on the mechanisms through which academic authority and theoretical universality are constructed.
Selected Public Contributions
“Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation”
Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago, 27 April 2018.
This English-language presentation introduces the book’s principal argument and explains the concepts of socialist postcolonialism and memory reconsolidation.
It outlines the history of Polish engagement with decolonisation from the late 1940s to the collapse of state socialism. It also presents the literary, scientific and visual materials through which connections between the Second and Third Worlds were constructed.
The text provides an accessible introduction for readers interested in postcolonial studies, socialist internationalism, memory studies and the global history of knowledge.
Selected Talks
“Semi/Peripheral Connection: Socialist Postcolonialism and the Vietnam Wars-language presentation introduces the book’s principal argument and explains the concepts of socialist postcolonialism and memory reconsolidation.
It outlines the history of Polish engagement with decolonisation from the late 1940s to the collapse of state socialism. It also presents the literary, scientific and visual materials through which connections between the Second and Third Worlds were constructed.
The text provides an accessible introduction for readers interested in postcolonial studies, socialist”
Social Change in Asia and Europe, Part 2, Warsaw, 4–5 October 2019.
The paper examined how the wars in Indochina and Vietnam were represented in socialist Poland.
Polish writers, journalists and photographers connected the experience of German occupation and the Second World War with Vietnamese resistance to French and American intervention. These comparisons created forms of solidarity between the Second and Third Worlds, but they also reproduced ideological simplifications and Orientalising representations.
The paper treated these texts and images as examples of multidirectional memory produced outside the dominant Western narratives of the Vietnam War.
“Anti-Empire as Method: War in Polish and Vietnamese Semi-Peripheral Literature and Visual Arts”
22nd Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Macau, 29 July–2 August 2019.
The paper developed anti-empire as a comparative method for studying literary and visual cultures located outside dominant imperial centres.
It examined Polish and Vietnamese representations of war, occupation and liberation. Rather than assuming that comparison must be organised through a Western metropolitan centre, it explored direct relations between two societies positioned differently within global political and cultural hierarchies.
The paper also considered the limits of anti-imperial comparison, including the risk of converting historically distinct experiences into apparently universal narratives of oppression.
“Is There Anything Like a Second World Postcolonialism? The History of Socialist Postcolonialism in Postwar Poland”
The Making of the Humanities VII, Society for the History of the Humanities, University of Amsterdam, 15–17 November 2018.
The paper presented socialist postcolonialism as an overlooked chapter in the history of the humanities.
It reconstructed the circulation of anti-colonial concepts, translations and research in postwar Poland. It argued that the history of postcolonial knowledge remains incomplete when it considers only the relationship between former colonies and Western academic institutions.
The Second World was both a geopolitical participant in decolonisation and a site of knowledge production. Its contributions require critical recovery rather than either nostalgic rehabilitation or automatic dismissal as propaganda.
“Grotowski – Haiti – Halka/Haiti: Glocal Contexts and Universal History”
From Jerzy Grotowski to Krystian Lupa: On the Influence of Polish Theatre in the World, Shanghai Theatre Academy, Shanghai, 13–14 October 2018.
The paper examined the connections among Polish theatre, Haiti and the global circulation of cultural forms.
It considered Jerzy Grotowski’s work in Haiti and the later Halka/Haiti project as examples of cultural encounters that complicate conventional divisions between European centres and non-European peripheries. These encounters created possibilities for mutual translation, but also raised questions about appropriation, asymmetrical mobility and the authority to represent another culture.
The paper used these cases to ask how universal histories can be constructed without erasing the local conditions and inequalities through which cultural exchange takes place.
“Marian Małowist: World History on the Socialist Semi-Peripheries”
Alternative Global Geographies, conference of the AHRC project Socialism Goes Global, in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe and the Centre for Area Studies, Leipzig, 13–14 November 2015.
The paper reconstructed Marian Małowist’s contribution to world history from the institutional and intellectual location of socialist Poland.
Małowist connected the history of Central and Eastern Europe with Africa and the emergence of the capitalist world economy. His research anticipated important elements of world-system analysis while retaining a strong interest in the agency and internal development of societies situated outside dominant centres.
The paper argued that Małowist’s work demonstrates the theoretical productivity of the socialist semi-peripheries. It also shows why the history of global knowledge must include concepts developed beyond the principal institutions of Western Europe and North America.