Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia (original) (raw)

The whole book (PDF) is available for for free here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania . From back cover: Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia. “What do travelers from Europe’s east recognize or reject in southeast Asia? Escaping Kakania is a stimulating contribution to studies of travel writing and identity issues in eastern Europe, particularly for its productive linkage of two regions that have both been defined in terms of their in-betweenness and heterogeneity, and their relationships to powerful others, above all an imagined ‘Europe.’ As well as introducing a broad array of intriguing writers and perspectives, the emphasis here on varieties of difference, and a world that is interconnected in a multiplicity of ways, makes this book an important intervention in travel writing studies in general.” Wendy Bracewel, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London “Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.” Hendrik MJ Maier, University of California, Riverside