A heritage of complexes. A cultural crisis of the borderlands?
Abstract
The borderlands perceived as borderlines, peripheries, a small homeland form a discourse of multiculturalism, one of the strongest discourses successfully functioning in the light of others, an anthropological, sociological or historical one nowadays. It was 1989 that made us aware of not only rich traditions of what was traditionally called the borderlands, but confronted Poles with the existence of the “Other” and “Foreign”, as well as discovered a series of relations that joined us with them. The awareness of cultural, social and traditional differences slowly overlapped with a belief that the freedom of Poland is not only the result of their dedicated battle, and martyrdom inscribed into our patriotic genotype. Apart from pride, Poles strongly felt the sense of injustice for territorial, cultural and economic loss, unjust accusations of our neighbours, but also a hidden sense of guilt, Poles’ co‑responsibility for the Holocaust or our colonization past. A discourse of multiculturalism is considered to be the product of passion and power, needs, anxieties, projects and longings. Searching joint experiences with our neighbours, we establish our existence according to the latest biding criteria. We use politics to hear “Polishness” when saying “multiculturalism”. A multicultural pot included accusations of xenophobia and arguments against it, our openness to the “Other”, tolerance of various ethnoses, joint historical experiences. Multiculturalism is an answer to Jews’, Lithuanians’, Ukrainians’ or Germans’ grudges telling their own history in a way totally different from our versions. Collapsing borderland projects discover a new space of multivoicing, without ideological benefits for the Polish culture. The problem of the “Other” is becoming a suggestion to find a real self, deprived of an embarrassing heritage and „overload of everyday life” in its face.
Uniwersytet Szczeciński Instytut Polonistyki i Kulturoznawstwa Poland
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
