2 - Postcolonialism in Poland

Summary

The title of this chapter should not be read as announcing a systematized overview of the short history of Polish postcolonial studies; such surveys already exist. Although the chapter does outline the reception history of postcolonial theory in Poland, its main task is to reflect on the particular conditions and perspectives of postcolonial discourse in a Polish context. Since postcolonial theory was formulated outside of East-Central Europe, it is seen by some Polish scholars as a “foreign body,” with its alien idiom and methodology viewed as inadequate for addressing local issues. From this perspective, the foreignness of postcolonialism stems, in the first place, from the sociopolitical genesis of postcolonialism (the disintegration of Western colonial empires and decolonizing processes) and, second, from its ideological messages (Marxism that is burdened with objectionable, and easy to understand in Poland, connotations).

It is thus not at all obvious that postcolonial studies have been assimilated into the realm of Polish literary scholarship. Their presence in Poland cannot be explained solely with reference to the enchantment of Polish humanities with imported ideas, despite a fairly widespread tradition of these kinds of borrowings. When a translation of Edward Said's Orientalism first appeared in Poland (in 1991), it went almost entirely unnoticed; similarly ignored were Polish translations of anti-colonial classics, such as Frantz Fanon's Les damnés de la terre (which came out as Wyklęty lud ziemi in 1985). No one could have suspected that these works would become important to Polish readers and for Polish studies after dozens of years—and not as criticism of scholarship about the exotic Near East, or as a diagnosis of the state of social consciousness in equally exotic Algeria, but as texts for Polish humanities scholars to reference in studying Polish culture.

Postcolonial studies arrived in Poland via neither Orientalism nor any other postcolonial classic, however. Its origins in Poland should be attributed instead to the reception of Ewa Thompson's book Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism, translated into Polish as Trubadurzy imperium (Troubadours of the empire) and published in 2000, a pioneering discussion that utilizes postcolonial ideas in interpreting Russian literature. The ground for its reception was presumably prepared by then.