Na skrzyżowaniu spojrzeń. Polska - Europa - Afryka
At the Crossroads of Views. Poland-Europe -Africa

Summary/Abstract: In an introduction to a discussion about Joseph Conrad and colonialism, the author proposed a synthetic description of Polish encounters with Africa: from Beniowski. Szolc-Rogoziński, Sienkiewicz, Conrad, Czekanowski and Malinowski to Kapuściński. She also recalled Poles taking photographs of Africa: starting with Jan Czekanowski, Kazimierz Zagórski and Witold Grzesiewicz, to Ryszard Kapuściński and Chris Ledóchowski. „The history of Poland compels her to oscillate between methods deployed by the colonialists and those of the colonised. This past is the reason why Polish encounters with exotic cultures were rarely devoid of intermediaries. The third link, a combination of a matchmaker and a duenna, were usually West European institutions. Conrad and Malinowski arrived from the peripheries and, as writers, were condemned to cosmopolitan European identity and a Polish cultural distance; they examined the world from positions which enabled them to apply encounters with the Other for creating new paradigms of ethnographic subjectivity and self-creation”.

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