Polish historiography since 1945 has accommodated surprising interdisciplinary exchanges, as historians have regularly read and cited the work of scholars of literature. Kazimierz Wyka, Michał Głowiński, Maria Janion, and Jan Błoński come immediately to mind as having made important contributions to the study of history during and after the communist era; among contemporary scholars, Przemysław Czapliński and Jan Sowa regularly partake in debates about the Polish past. This may not be unique to Poland, where a deep-seated discomfort with theory among Polish-trained historians leaves the field open for scholars more willing to develop new conceptual tools and to think more broadly about what constitutes evidence about the past.
Whether or not his work will make the same impact, Adam Kola certainly descends from this tradition. Socialist Postcolonialism: A Reconsolidation of Memory uses literary and scholarly texts from the 1940s through the 1980s (and occasionally later) to consider how second-world Poland described and interpreted third-world societies. Kola is not concerned with the political fascinations (with Cuba, India, or Vietnam) among students and intellectuals that scholars such as Anne Gorsuch, David Engerman, or Małgorzata Fidelis have recently explored. His focus is on texts: poetry, literary scholarship, travelogues, novels, and historical studies that provide evidence of a largely forgotten archipelago. The postcolonial world mattered a great deal to Communist Poland; Kola aims to restore the memory of socialist postcolonialism and to reconsider the cultural geopolitics of the Cold War era.
Postcolonial discourse filled a number of functions for Polish writers. First, it was a way to articulate the global vision of communism, and to manifest solidarity with those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who were throwing off the yoke of imperialism. Kola slogs through the second-rate poetry of the Stalinist era, with titles like “On the Tears of a Chinese Soldier Returning from the War,” or “Call Your Home ‘Korea,’” to discern the standard tropes of anti-imperialist struggle. He notes that Polish engagement with the postcolonial went beyond mere communist affinities: it provided a way of conceptualizing Nazi occupation, too. Polish suffering during the war became a global calling card, as early as the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, held in Wrocław.
Ryszard Kapuściński would later build his reportages in part on his wartime experience. But his case, Kola points out, also points at a different postcolonial analogy: Soviet occupation. Kapuściński would only be able to explore this angle after 1989, but Kola finds allusions to it hidden in the scholarship and literature of the communist period.
Socialist postcolonialism did not consist only of orientalist evocations of brown-skinned victims. Kola finds plenty of serious global scholarship and thoughtful literature. If there is a hero in his book, it is probably Marian Małowist (1909–88), a prolific and influential economic historian of the early modern world. Kola's Małowist practiced an ethical approach to history, conscious of not imposing models on the societies he studied (which ranged from western Sudan to the Levant to Poland, all in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), instead studying them from below. Another hero is the writer Wojciech Żukrowski (1916–2000), whose novel Kamienne tablice (Stone Tablets, 1966) originated in his work in the Polish embassy in New Delhi in the late 1950s. Kola argues that the novel, whose characters are not archetypes but instead hybrids shaped by first-, second-, and third-world experiences, “breaks free of a solely orientalizing perspective and aims toward a genuinely postcolonial literature” (385).
Readers of any discipline should approach this book with caution. It lacks the elegant prose and compelling analysis of predecessors who have crossed the disciplinary divide. Kola frequently begins a discussion with three or four rhetorical questions in a row, each of them so complex as to defy the reader's engagement. More significantly, the fascinating textual analyses are submerged in successive waves of theory from which the author never quite emerges. This reader despaired upon encountering the following exhortation on page 194, nearly halfway through the book: “Let us therefore return to questions of definition.” As important as it is to clarify concepts like “postcolonial,” the constant reframing weakens the argument. Nevertheless, Adam Kola has produced a valuable archaeology of cultural and political orientations in Communist Poland. Eastern Europeanists interested in the global turn will benefit from acquainting themselves with this work.
