Postcolonial Studies in East Central Europe

Thursday 9 March 2023, Register via MS Forms.  All welcome. 

The deadline to register is midday, March 9. Teams invitations will be sent after the deadline has passed.

Join us for a special event of the Polish Studies Working Group with Professor Dorota Kołodziejczyk (University of Wrocław) who will present the main idea behind her forthcoming book East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Professor Siegfried Huigen (Stellenbosch University and University of Wrocław), as well as discuss her upcoming projects. The forthcoming volume examines cultural and literary narratives from twentieth-century East Central Europe in a tentatively postcolonial perspective.

Professor Kołodziejczyk will talk about the advantages and pitfalls of applying postcolonial studies tenets to the histories, literatures, and cultures of the region. She will reflect on how to transfer categories developed in one theoretical centre to another location without exoticising or erasing difference and contexts. One example of such an ex-centric contribution to postcolonial studies, as will be shown, could be postdependence studies.

Professor Kołodziejczyk will demonstrate that, if postcolonial studies is to account for complex historical, political and cultural processes, the field needs to be comparative, translational and reciprocal. The talk will be followed by Q&A and a discussion. 

Dorota Kołodziejczyk is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She is Chair of Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Centre. Academic Research Centre,  director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre and board member of the Postdependence Studies Centre, an inter-university research network in Poland. She has published on postcolonialism, comparative literature and translation studies. Her recent publications include East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Siegfried Huigen; Nieskończona genesis literatury światowej. Pisarze postkolonialni o władzy, języku i wyboraźni [The Endless Genesis of World Literature. Postcolonial Writers on Power, Language, and Imagination] – a volume of literary essays by postcolonial writers in student translation project, co-edited with Tomasz Bilczewski; Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge 2016, 2018), co-edited with Cristina Sandru; guest-editing of the European Review with Siegfried Huigen: Cultural Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe After WW2 and the Collapse of Communism (2022) and New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages (2021); “Through the Iron Curtain: The Geopolitics of Writing” with Mirja Lecke, in: The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature (2020), and numerous articles. Board member of the Palgrave Macmillan “New Comparisons in World Literature.”

The Polish Studies Working Group (PSWG) is part of the TORCH Critical-Thinking Communities