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An interview with Ewa GąsowskaIn the interview, Ewa Gąsowska described her ten-year-long struggle with the Polish legal system. Gąsowska’s objective has been to reinstate the good name of her grandfather, Jan Rybak, who was murdered in 1945. According to Gąsowska, the reason for her grandfather’s death was his political activity in PPR (Polish Labourers’ Party) and his post-war commitment to the reconstruction...
The unforgotten 1942 Ewa Weinberg relates her story of the deportations of Polish citizens to the USSR in the summer of 1940 and their life in 1942. After the Sikorski-Majski Pact had been signed and Anders‘s Army established, the deportees tried to leave Siberia for Samarkand, Uzbekistan. In Samarkand, it turned out that the category of citizenship is no more valid for the deportees: anti-Semitic...
Communists have no homeland: a portrait of Wanda Wasilewska The paper offers an analysis of a number of biographies of Wanda Wasilewska, written in different historical periods. An attempt was made to reconstruct the mechanisms that governed the functioning of Wanda Wasilewska’s communist figure in the Polish political discourse; explain how she was perceived by the society, and how it altered in...
Mutually illuminating planes: the silent and the distant in J.S. Foer’s 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'The paper offers an analysis of sub-renting relations in J. S. Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which are put in the context of the author’s debut novel Everything Is Illuminated. I suggest that the two novels shed light on, or “illuminate”, each other. The writer, a descendant of...
Incognito ergo sum: on indifference The present article is an analysis of various types of indifference of non-Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw to the plight of Jewish Poles. The words of Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz, a historian and “Żegota” activist, provide the vantage point for the analysis: Dunin-Wąsowicz claimed that around 75 per cent of the inhabitants of Warsaw “were indifferent to what was taking...
The terror of modernism or Scott’s 'tunnel vision' The article analyses James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Scott’s book examines different aspects of a modern state’s activity and its methods of control over the population. Scott describes diverse failures in state planning and links them to the ideology of what he terms “high...
Producing the 'guilt of indifference' and the category of "indifferent witness". A case study of Jan Błoński’s 'Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto'Błoński’s article Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (1987) is regarded as a milestone for the Polish awareness of the Holocaust. Błoński tried to tackle the issue of the Polish complicity, and his narration updated an important model in the Polish culture...
Non-whites, non-males and other non-genuine citizens. The reproduction of social inequalities as seen in Karen Brodkin’s 'How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about America'The article offers a review of Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about America. Brodkin analyses the social and political transformations in America and puts the analysis in the context of...
‘You have the floor, Comrade Mauser’. Literature and engagement: Mayakovsky’s revolutionary poetry as a case studyThe Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was criticised not only by conservative or moderate critics and writers, but also by Bolshevik ideologists and activists. While moderate authors criticised Mayakovsky’s engagement in the communist movement and worried about the waste of his...
But... These worlds are tendentious The article focuses on the term tendentious novel and its special use in the Polish literary theory: the context of socialist realist novels. Taking into consideration Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of pure and impure taste, the article calls into question the idea of tendentiousness in discourse, and categorizing novels as “strongly...
An interview with Nada Prlja Nada Prlja is an artist who works in the public space and tackles the issues of social inequalities and exclusion. During the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, she built a Peace Wall across Friedrichstrasse and thus she blocked the passage between the northern part of the street, which is a tourist attraction, and where expensive shops and restaurants are located;...
The body and the stigma. Defloration as an act of building femininity The paper offers an analysis of the cultural meanings of the bodily attributes and practices related to virginity and defloration; the most important are “bloodstains” (a sign of the loss of virginity) and “penetration” (regarded as the only “true” form of sexual intercourse). The obligation to present the defloration and the shame...
Tearing Off the Masks: Narratives on Jewish CommunistsThe paper presents an analysis of the contemporary Polish debate on Jewish communists. The analysis was performed in the framework of colonialist theories. I deconstructed narrations about Jewish communists, which belong in the Polish political mainstream, and are regarded as moderate, objective and devoid of any ideology. The tropes shared by...
An illusion of symmetry. On the Polish translation of the Jewish anti-gospel “Toledot Yeshu”The article was inspired by the introduction to the Polish translation of Toledot Yeshu (by Jan Iluk). The translator suggests that Toledot Yeshu might have been the cause of the Christian anti-Judaism. This is an unjustified opinion, and this paper provides a review of the current state of research on the...
From melancholy to despair. About Andrzej Stasiuk’s prose worksIn Moja Europa, Jadąc do Babadag and Fado Andrzej Stasiuk describes his travelling to the countries of the East-Central Europe: its diminished, forgotten part, lying on the margins of History and Progress. It is a land of melancholy, of the eternal emptiness and lack. To praise it means to give an ironic response to the enthusiasm of a...
Casimir the Great’s Flying Circus presents: ‘The narrowest house in the world – an event on a global scale’. Historical re-enactment on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Aktion ReinhardtThe article provides a multifaceted analysis of the Keret House as an artistic installation and a cultural event. The construction is placed in the analytical context of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, Le Corbusier’s...
Uncle JankielThe idea of Jewish self-hatred has been present in the humanities since the 1930s. The research on this subject has usually focused on Western Europe, especially German-speaking countries. The paper analyses Jewish self-hatred using examples from contemporary official discourse in Poland. Sander Gilman’s approach to Jewish self-hatred (1986) is used to interpret the examples. It seems...
Litotes situated in the grand narration of the anthropological theatre: a case study of Teatr Węgajty/Projekt TerenowyThis article is an excerpt of the author's MA thesis: Litotes in the anthropological theatre’s grand narrative. The case of Teatr Węgajty/ Projekt Terenowy. It analyses the attitude of the anthropological theatre towards principles that constituted its foundation, such as the fascination...
Heroines, fighters or losers? Spanish narrations about women left-wing activists of the first half of the 20th centuryThe Spanish public discussion of the recent years has given rise to new ways of speaking about women in the times of the Second Republic and the Civil War. First, they emphasise the importance of women’s actions and show how women’s public activities change their aspirations, the...
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