Rethinking Modern Polish Identities

Rethinking Modern Polish Identities PDF Author: Agnieszka Pasieka
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250580
Category : National characteristics, Polish
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A critical examination of the category of "Polishness" - that is, the formation, redefinition, and performance of various kinds of Polish identities - from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Inspired by new research in the humanities and social sciences as well as recent scholarship on national identities, this volume offers a rigorous examination of the idea of Polishness. Offering a diversity of case studies and methodological-theoretical approaches, it demonstrates a profound connection between national and transnational processes and places the Polish case in a broader context. This broader context stretches from a larger Eastern European one, a usual frame of comparison, to the overseas immigrant communities. The authors, renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, thus demonstrate that an understanding of modern Polish identity means crossing not only historical but also geographical boundaries. Consequently, the narrative on Polish identity that unfolds in the volume is a personalized and multivocal one that presents the perspectives of a wide range of subjects: peasants, workers, migrants, ethnic and sexual minorities-that is, all those actors who have been absent in grand national narratives. As such, the examination of Polishness sheds light on the identity question more broadly, emphasizing the interplay of pluralizing and homogenizing tendencies, and fostering a reflection on national identity as encompassing both sameness and difference.

Rethinking Modern Polish Identities

Rethinking Modern Polish Identities PDF Author: Agnieszka Pasieka
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250580
Category : National characteristics, Polish
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A critical examination of the category of "Polishness" - that is, the formation, redefinition, and performance of various kinds of Polish identities - from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Inspired by new research in the humanities and social sciences as well as recent scholarship on national identities, this volume offers a rigorous examination of the idea of Polishness. Offering a diversity of case studies and methodological-theoretical approaches, it demonstrates a profound connection between national and transnational processes and places the Polish case in a broader context. This broader context stretches from a larger Eastern European one, a usual frame of comparison, to the overseas immigrant communities. The authors, renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, thus demonstrate that an understanding of modern Polish identity means crossing not only historical but also geographical boundaries. Consequently, the narrative on Polish identity that unfolds in the volume is a personalized and multivocal one that presents the perspectives of a wide range of subjects: peasants, workers, migrants, ethnic and sexual minorities-that is, all those actors who have been absent in grand national narratives. As such, the examination of Polishness sheds light on the identity question more broadly, emphasizing the interplay of pluralizing and homogenizing tendencies, and fostering a reflection on national identity as encompassing both sameness and difference.

Rethinking History, Reframing Identity

Rethinking History, Reframing Identity PDF Author: Alexandra Wangler
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3531192264
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This book contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion about how the diverging experiences of generations and their historical memories play a role in the process of national identity formation. Drawing from narratives gathered within the Ukrainian minority in northern Poland and centered on the collective trauma of Action Vistula, where in 1947 about 140,000 Ukrainians were resettled from south-eastern Poland and relocated to the north-western areas, this study shows that three generations vary considerably with regard to their understandings of home, integration, history and religion. Thus, generational differences are an essential element in the analysis and understanding of social and political change. The findings of this study provide a contribution to debates about the process based nature of national identity, the role of trauma in creating generational consciousness and how generations should be conceptualized.

Queering Polishness in Polish Theatre Since 2005

Queering Polishness in Polish Theatre Since 2005 PDF Author: Jonas Vanderschueren
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031645383
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description


Rethinking the Space for Religion

Rethinking the Space for Religion PDF Author: Catharina Raudvere
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
ISBN: 9187121956
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
A broad discussion about how history and religion contribute to identity politics in contemporary Europe, this book provides case studies exemplifying how public intellectuals and academics have taken an active part in the construction of recent and traditional pasts. Instead of repeating the simplistic explanation as a return of religion, this volume focuses on public platforms and agents and their use of religion as a political and cultural argument. Filled with previously unpublished data gathered from texts, interviews, field observations, artifacts, and material culture, this record challenges stereotypical images of East and Southeast Europe.

Individualism and the Rise of Democracy in Poland

Individualism and the Rise of Democracy in Poland PDF Author: Tomek Grabowski
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250599
Category : Democratization
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
"This book investigates the long-term preconditions of lasting and successful democratization. It counters conventional wisdom that they are a matter of proper institutional design, or that the political culture of democracy is a by-product of modernizing economic change. Instead, it argues that achieving lasting democracy is difficult without a prior breakthrough to individualism: a system of beliefs centered on the belief in one's inner worth and in one's inner capacity for judgment. The rise of an individualist belief system that is widely proliferated in society requires social conditions that are in turn hard to meet, including a widespread breakdown of traditional culture, a frontier experience, and a process of civic nation building. The book's empirical focus, Poland, demonstrates the logic of the individuation process in a condensed form. Poland's road to individualism (and with it, to democracy) consisted of a catastrophic uprooting of broad segments of society in the aftermath of World War II, the rise of a frontier environment in the Western Territories acquired from Germany, and an unlikely emergence of the Catholic Church as a civic nation-builder in these Territories in the 1960s and the 1970s. However, the Polish case is not unique, and the book offers an analytical approach that could successfully be brought to bear on other cases of democratization, both past and present"--

Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe

Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe PDF Author: Masha Shpolberg
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805393758
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere after World War II dramatically reshaped popular understandings of the natural environment. With an eco-critical approach, Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe breaks new ground in documenting how filmmakers increasingly saw cinema as a tool to critique the social and environmental damage of large-scale projects from socialist regimes and newly forming capitalist presences. New and established scholars with backgrounds across Europe, the United States, and Australia come together to reflect on how the cultural sphere has, and can still, play a role in redefining our relationship to nature.

Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust

Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust PDF Author: Nadege Ragaru
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 164825070X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
During World War II, even though Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, it never deported its Jewish community. Until recently, this image of the country as an heroic exception has prevailed—despite the murder of almost all Jews living in Bulgarian-occupied territories. Nadège Ragaru presents a riveting archival investigation of the origins and perpetuation of Bulgaria's heroic narrative, restoring Jewish voices to the story. Translated from the original French edition. On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Anthropology of Transformation

Anthropology of Transformation PDF Author: Juraj Buzalka
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1800643659
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This collection of essays is the result of the joint efforts of colleagues and students of the leading social anthropology and post-socialism theorist, Professor Chris Hann. With the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 2019 as their catalyst, the authors reflect upon Chris Hann’s lifelong fieldwork in the discipline, spanning regions as diverse as East Central Europe, Turkey, and the Chinese north-west. The collapse of the Berlin Wall naturally triggered a plethora of analysis and scholarly research. Sociocultural anthropology, with its focus on ethnographic study and on the gradual evolution of social relations, sharply contrasted with the emphasis on dramatic rupture brought about by the 1989 transition. Continuing in this tradition, this volume, through micro-level analysis of societal transformation from the post-war years to the present day, provides an alternative perspective to the neoliberalist views often encountered in the scholarship on political and economic modernisation. The more nuanced analysis of social transformations proposed here is a particularly useful tool in the investigation of contemporary issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the refugee ‘crisis’, and the rise of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Anthropology of Transformation will be of interest to researchers in the fields of socio-cultural anthropology, religion and economics. Moreover, the book’s discussion of issues widely discussed beyond the field of academia such as neoliberalism and the welfare state, and populist and exclusionary politics, will appeal to non-specialist readers.

Music and Change in the Eastern Baltics Before and After 1989

Music and Change in the Eastern Baltics Before and After 1989 PDF Author: Rūta Stanevičiūtė
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN: 164469896X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This volume provides a transnational study of the impact of musical cultures in the Eastern Baltics—Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Russia—at the end of the Cold War and in the early post-Communist period. Throughout the book, the contributors explore and conceptualize transnational musical collaboration and the diffusion of information, people, and ideas focusing on musical activity which shaped the moral and artistic outlook of several generations. The volume sheds light on the transformative power of politically and socially engaged music and offers a deeper understanding of the artistic potential of societies and its impact on social and political change.

A Doctor's Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust

A Doctor's Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust PDF Author: Arthur Kessler
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250939
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
"Based on detailed notes taken during a doctor's incarceration in the concentration camps and ghettos of Romanian-ruled Transnistria during the Holocaust, this memoir tells a gripping story of calculated murder, resistance, and survival. In the aftermath of the Romanian Holocaust, Transnistria, a little-known region north of Odessa, between the Dniester and Bug rivers, came to be known as "the forgotten cemetery." Between 1941 and 1944, an estimated 300,000 Jews were killed or died there from starvation and disease. This memoir by Dr. Arthur Kessler, based on daily notes he kept as a physician during his two-year imprisonment in Transnistria's Vapniarka concentration camp and Olgopol ghetto, provides a unique perspective of a Jewish medical doctor who witnessed murderous death as well as brave acts of resistance and survival. Introduced and annotated by historian Leo Spitzer and translated from German by the late Margaret Robinson, Dr. Kessler's memoir provides an engrossing account of his infamous discovery that Vapniarka's Romanian authorities routinely, and it seems knowingly, fed camp inmates a daily soup containing toxic chickling peas (Lathyrus sativus) that induced paralysis, kidney failure, and oftentimes death. It reveals the daring by which he, together with fellow inmate medical associates, saved hundreds of lives by organizing a hunger strike that resulted in the camp's dissolution and the prisoners' relocation to ghettos throughout Transnistria. Kessler's narrative continues with an account of privileges attainable by deportees with useful skills and provides illuminating details about informal systems and practices that enabled many to survive and to provide care to fellow victims of genocidal persecution. The memoir is illustrated with moving drawings produced by prisoners in the Vapniarka concentration camp and presented to Dr. Kessler in recognition of his brave work of healing"--