‘Kresy’ as The Heart of Darkness: Reading Polish and Belgian Colonialisms Cover Image
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‘Kresy’ as The Heart of Darkness: Reading Polish and Belgian Colonialisms
‘Kresy’ as The Heart of Darkness: Reading Polish and Belgian Colonialisms

Author(s): Anna Shimomura
Subject(s): Regional Geography, Studies of Literature, Political history, Polish Literature, Identity of Collectives, British Literature
Published by: SAGE Publications Ltd
Keywords: Poland; colonialism; postcolonial studies; Kresy; East Central Europe; Joseph Conrad; Józef Obrębski; serfdom;

Summary/Abstract: ‘Kresy’ [borderlands/outskirts] is a sentimental term used by Poles to denote the lands of today’s Western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The Polish rule in that region has rarely been discussed in terms of colonialism. In this article, I employ the framework of postcolonial theory within the context of Polish rule in ‘Kresy’. The article juxtaposes anthropologist Józef Obrębski’s ethnographic writings about Polesia region (a part of ‘Kresy’ that was polonised in the most extreme manner) with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – a Polish-British author born and raised in ‘Kresy’, that during his time was subjugated by Russian Empire. The figure of Conrad, whose ambivalent relationship with colonialism was pointed out by many postcolonial scholars starting with Chinua Achebe, becomes a point of departure to think about what Maria Janion describes as ‘the paradoxical Polish postcolonial mentality’: the ambivalence of being a colonised coloniser. The article is an attempt of contribution to the ongoing debate about identity and dependence in the East Central Europe region.

  • Issue Year: 30/2022
  • Issue No: 4
  • Page Range: 323-348
  • Page Count: 26
  • Language: English