Provincializing Europe, Orientalizing Occident or Reproducing Power Imbalance? Representations of the UK in Post-2004 Polish Migrants’ Narratives1
Provincializând Europa, orientalizând Occidentul sau reproducând dezechilibrul puterii? Reprezentări ale Marii Britanii în ficţiunea polonezilor emigr

Summary/Abstract: The unprecedented wave of post-2004 migration from Poland to the UK could not but lead to the re-conceptualizations of the images of the receiving society. In this article we consider this recent intercultural contact from the overlapping perspectives of postcolonialism and post-communism. We place migrant narratives in three dimensions of (quasi)postcolonial context: British imperial past, Poland’s partitions and Soviet domination history as well as urbanization as experienced by migrating peasants. Our main question is whether the power relations between Poland and the UK set out by the (quasi)postcolonial context are being challenged on the basis of the first hand lived experience of the receiving society. In particular we try to find out whether one of the three strategies of resistance is present in migrants’ narratives: Provincializing Europe, Orientalizing the Occident or reproducing the power imbalance.

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