#You havea PhD and a job and I know more than you

[chicago-geniza]

According to The Slavic Review there is a "[post]colonial" turn in Polish studies/Polish history and works that discuss the Second Republic in terms of...colonial frameworks have only been published for the last couple of years like. This rhetoric dominated public discourse! My go-to example is Wanda Melcer's "Czarny ląd" reportage series for Wiadomości in 1932 and Debora Vogel's rebuttal that compares her POV to a British or French--will need to double check--colonial administrator-cum-anthropologist who published a book about the Primitive Natives. It's telling that Stefania says "we in Western Europe," implicitly including Poland in that cultural construct as a contrast to the East, when recording her impressions of the USSR. Do you know how widely Haeckel was read in the Habsburg empire. I joked that Stefania's review of Green Pastures, where she made a great chain of being re: civilizations remark, as "ontology recapitulates phylogeny," but I wasn't wrong! Those ideas actually informed her reading of the film! And let's not even get into the Jewish Uganda project!!! Or the multiple semantic facets of the word "murzyn"!!! Or the 393948484875 colonial projects Poland was developing re: the Baltic Sea, or the fact that UJ added courses on tropical medicine etc. for future colonial doctors to its curriculum in the late 30s, at the Ministry of Education's behest, overseen by a doctor-bureaucrat who trained in France and did his practicum in FRENCH ALGERIA. I just. New imperial history that accounts for the three partitions, for the fact that while the November and January uprisings can be integrated into national mythology, the uprisings associated with the Spring of Nations can't, because they're too regionally fractured and too specific to each empire, these tensions spill over in the Second Republic, you can't study interwar Poland for more than 30 seconds without these frameworks, how is this NEW or NOVEL