LAUSR

This essay aims to place Poland in the field of postcolonial studies. Its point of departure is the problematic place of the so-called Second World within the field of postcolonial studies: as a region which is for the most part absent from it, but which can be considered both in terms of being a victim and perpetrator, or at least as complicit in the system of global colonialism. This comes from the region’s semi-peripheral position, which locks it between aspirations of joining the core – the First World – and fear of falling to the peripheral position of the Third World. Poland, an example of a Second World country, is also implicated in the European system of colonialism and imperialism in a number of ways. It can be considered a victim of its neighbours’ (Germany and Russia/the USSR) imperialism, and mechanisms of orientalization and “othering” coming from Western Europe. However, it can also be considered a colonizer in its own Eastern borderlands, and complicit in European overseas expansion as a nation sharing in the European “colonial mind”, reproducing its hierarchies and stereotypes, for example in literature and science.