The city as memory in contemporary Polish women's literature (original) (raw)
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A comparative analysis is made of the evocation of urban memory in the work of the Polish author of detective fiction Marek Krajewski and the leading Ukrainian writer of postmodernist fiction and popular historical publications Iurii Vynnchyuk. The cities that form the focus of the work of these writers, Wroc/law for Krajewski and L␣viv for Vynnychuk, both experi- enced massive population shifts after World War II, meaning that the post- war populations had little or no memory of the pre-war cities. The legacy of this disjunction can be felt to this day. This study demonstrates how both writers re-create a sense of memory through a number of similar memory strategies and concludes that the recreation of memory in these writers’ work can be understood as what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, yet that this is postmemory removed from the traumatic context of Hirsch’s original concept. It is also argued that these writers demonstrate that an effective ‘cultural memory’ can be produced in a situation when ‘communi- cative memory’ is lacking, through an imaginative and accessible representa- tion of the ostensibly inaccessible past. This is achieved through the utilization of mass cultural forms, which some theorists of urban memory see as conducive only to forgetting.
Gendering Memory: Intersectional Aspects of the Polish Politics of Memory
Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej, 2020
The article is devoted to the process of gendering memory as a counterpoint to the politici-zation of memory observed in the Polish context. The core problem of the paper is a description of a local case of this type of gender 'memory practising' in the area of the public urban sphere, specifically one created by the Łódź Women's Heritage Trail Foundation (https://www.facebook.com/ŁódźkiSzlakKobi-et)-a gender-profiled female grassroots initiative that is concerned with the city's past. The article consists of three main parts referring to, respectively, the functioning of memory in the urban public sphere as a form of dialogue (hemerneutic-interpretative anthropology with Jurgen Habermas' and Seyla Benhabib's theories is the theoretical foundation here), the process of gendering memory (appearing alongside the narrative phrase and feminist proposals for the interpretation of memory as a form of its plural-ization), and the presentation of the activities within the Łódź Women's HeritageTrail Foundation's particular initiative-namely 'Women Routes in Łódź'-as a kind of case study for the city as a landscape of memory. The paper deals with the tension observed between the politics of memory and the political practice, and the alternative memories that arise from the idea of multiplicity and polyphony, including the voice of women. The authors raise the issue of the genderization of memory in the context of an inquiry into how the pluralism of collective memory and the diversification of the public sphere develops as a result of the discourses and operation of the alternative memory, including gender-focused memory.
Women in the Contemporary Polish Streetscape. Memory Wars
Acta Poloniae Historica, 2024
As diversity, equity and inclusion policies gain momentum in the Global North, the strikingly low visibility of women in Polish public space is being addressed not only via bottom-to-top activism but also through initiatives by local governments. This, in turn, results in controversies over the very need for gender equality in urban naming, as well as over the commemoration-worthiness of particular personages. The present paper aims to assess the changes that have taken place in Poland since the beginning of 2018, when an analysis of the 12 biggest cities revealed a persistent under-representation of women as namesakes in street naming. We offer a quantitative analysis and then focus on four selected case studies, each exemplifying one type of situation: open confl ict, covert tactics, and two combinations of surface vs core values relationship.
Nationalities Papers, 2014
This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L’viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city’s “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L’viv’s memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L’viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L’viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L’viv’s Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city’s memory culture.
Baran-Szołtys, Magdalena / Dvoretska, Olena / Gude, Nino / Janik-Freis, Elisabeth (eds.): Galizien in Bewegung. Wahrnehmungen – Begegnungen – Verflechtungen. Göttingen: Vienna University Press bei V&R unipress, 2018
The nostalgia for a lost home and bygone times is the starting point of many travels to old Austrian Galicia that are processed in Polish literature after 1989. This article analyzes Dukla (1997) by Andrzej Stasiuk and Dwanaście stacji (2004) by Tomasz Różycki based on the theoretical concept of nostalgia (Boym, Hutcheon, Huyssen). Following two traces from the past within the present-day space which activate this longing (the sarcophagus and the attic), I show how nostalgia influences the texts on a narrative and poetic level. Both Stasiuk’s and Różycki’s nostalgia constructs alternating, metafictional, and mythologizing visions of Galicia which are characterized by overlapping layers of different kinds: past and present, personal and public, reality and imagination. Through this, they do not verify different “truths”, instead they play with the myths, possibilities and “alternate futures”. By doing that they change the perception of Galicia and make significant contributions for Galicia’s transmission into the future.
Ever since Pierre Nora's work in the 1980s on lieux de mémoire, research on the relationship between history and memory has grappled with changing perceptions, constructions, and representations of space. 1 Questions of how people attach meanings to their surroundings, how collective identities crystallize around particular places and sites, and why particular locations come to be associated with specific values, emotions, and morals, have all featured prominently in recent research. Scholars of Central and Eastern Europe have actively engaged with this so-called "spatial turn" as a means of studying the ways in which changing borders and geopolitical regimes over the last two hundred years have shaped the region's mnemonic landscape. Cities have often been at the focal point of this research, as sites of diverse and sometimes contested collective memories. 2 Studies of different efforts to symbolically and physically appropriate certain cities and their surrounding territories by different actors and communities have made important contributions to our understanding of the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These works have drawn on a variety of different sources and methods in order to investigate how cities were constructed as reference-points for different collective identities and political projects, ranging from studies of the urban built-environment focusing on architecture or monuments, to studies concentrating on popular history writing, educational curricula, museums, and commemorative events, to name but a few. Notably contributions to this field include Felix Ackermann's (2011) book on twentieth-century Hrodna/ Grodno, which uses the palimpsest as metaphor for understanding how different ac-
Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 2023
This paper addresses the group of works of contemporary Ukrainian literature in which the narrators’ reminiscences about urban areas directly relate to the formation of a national identity. In the Ukrainian fiction of the last two decades, the urban identity of the Soviet period is mainly shown as a specific ideologically caused type of identity, intended to replace or blur the national and the local identities. Marc Augé’s anthropological theory, which is based on the opposition of “places” and “non-places”, underlies the theoretical framework for this study. In the analyzed literary works, non-places as transitional areas, devoid of historicity and identity, are viewed as predominating over places and represented by either communal or private locations. Protagonists’ memories of communal non-places, – such as schools, hospitals, grocery stores, places of commemoration, monuments and administrative buildings, – often emphasize these characters’ feelings of alienation and misery in urban space. Communal non-places are also depicted in fiction as a means for authorities to exert ideological influence on citizens in order to restore the totalitarian regime (as is shown in the novel (Rivne / Rovno (The Wall) by Oleksandr Irvanets). Fiction depicting memories of private places also acquire non-place characteristics, such as the private apartment of the Lvivan Cilycks’ family in Victoria Amelina’s novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom. The transformation of the private area into a non-place demonstrates the danger of ignoring one’s own history, which leads to a loss of urban and national identity and the repetition of historical mistakes made by previous generations.
WORLD WAR I "CARTOGRAPHIES" MAPPING THE POLISH LANDSCAPE OF FORGETTING IN LEGNICA DOMINIKA CZARNECKA
Traditiones 47 (1): 135–152, 2018
This article focuses on mapping the landscape of forgetting in the context of World War I in Legnica, a town in southwestern Poland. It describes the process of (re)constructing and (re) negotiating the cultural landscape of the town by using the metaphors of conversation and conflict. This analysis shows that World War I remains a past that is impossible to deal with by Legnica’s contemporary inhabitants. Keywords: boundaries, cultural landscape, memory studies, metaphor, Legnica, The First World War
Landscapes of Polish memory: conflicting ways of dealing with the communist past in a Polish town
Doctoral thesis, UCL (University College London)., 2010
I owe my very special gratitude to Michael Stewart, who supervised this and my previous thesis. Michael, thank you for all the sources of unconventional inspiration I received from you, for your constant support, understanding and a rigour of clarity that you passed on to me. It is thanks to you that my encounter with anthropology lasted. Alexandra Argenti-Pillen was a fabulously engaged and motivating second supervisor. Alex, thank you for your vigour, expertise, imagination and creativity. I feel unable to express how much I learned from you during our scheduled and accidental meetings. Frances Pine was a friend, a host, and an invaluable teacher throughout the duration of this project. Thank you for all the time spent together, for the night talks and enlightening trips. All of these are unforgettable. The UCL Anthropology Department proved to be a particularly fruitful academic environment. I am pleased that I had a chance to live a part of my life around this institution. Particularly precious was Diana Goford's genuine help, as well as all the stimulating exchanges with my excellent colleagues. John's proofreading help remains inestimable.