Dekolonizacja

The book Nonidentities. Tillion, Fanon, Bourdieu, Derrida and the Dilemma of Decolonization presents the histories of four French-writing, XXth century intellectuals whose biographies were associated with Independence War-era Algiers. Its goal is such a reading of their works that could uncover its Algerian-French duality. On one hand, the experience of close, direct biographic contact with Algiers allowed for a view from a distance (cultural, social and political) on France and Europe, which sharpened the view and imbued it with characteristics of criticism, but on the other education in the French cultural circle allowed for a specific way of writing and thinking about Algiers, a specific way of understanding and experiencing it. At the same time, that specific way (ways), which was shaped by assumptions placed at the foundations of certain traditions of thinking and related interpretative strategies - displays its power, but also its limitations in the confrontation with experience. The postcolonial timbre that connects the works of those authors does not limit itself to the confines of a single theory, but is located inside the entirety of contemporary humanities. It gives it its dynamism, but it also blows it up, that is to say by not allowing a permanent identity to be established. The decolonization of Algiers was not just a direct cause of the crystallization of basic terms characteristic to emancipatory discourses of the second half of the XXth century and first decades of the XXIst, but also a kind of social laboratory in which previous-century ideas of classic social philosophy could be put to test.
In exposing the Algerian entanglement of those authors, I did not seek to reveal hitherto unknown facts. My intention was an attempt at reading their works in a way that would highlight the French-Algerian duality and that unfull, unfinal and unfree of doubt belonging, cut across by the unerasable boundary between the two opposing shores of the Mediterranean, between “metropole” and “colonies”, “North” and “South”. This boundary is not only variously present in the texts I analyze, but also is the foundation of their strength and originality.

“Here” and “there” are not stable references. “Here” can at one time in France, at another in Algiers. This is the source of alterity, of the reversibility of points of view. To paraphrase a popular notion by Claude Lévi-Strauss, one can say that on one hand an experience of close, direct, biographical contact with Algiers can allow a view from afar, that is a look at France and Europe from a cultural, social and political distance. This makes the view sharper and imbues it with critical strength. On the other, education in the French culture allows a certain way of writing and thinking Algiers, a certain way of understanding and experiencing it. At the same time, this way (or those ways, because they are multiple) - established through assumptions laying at the foundations of certain traditions of thought and interpretative strategies associated with them - reveals then its limitations through confrontation with experiences, that is with with people, living and dead, people in flesh and bone.

The work I am describing here is not a book about the history of Algiers, but rather about a few French-speaking French intellectuals. They were all connected through Algiers, but also divided in how their varied biographical experiences of contact with the stormy history of that country in the XXth century was then processed by them. In that, it served to create an important, although always obvious, element of their attitudes and ways of critically examining the social, cultural, political and ethical. Neither is it a work from the field of research on collective memory. I am not posing questions about the causes of forgetting the history of Algiers and the European, especially French, participation in its fates. I am not attempting to “unforget” that story. However, it is my intention to directly address the colonial entanglement of the thought of the authors described, so that it can be properly appraised in the context of their intellectual work. It will allow a better understanding of what they had to say, and who and where we are, when we today ask questions in the language framework they built.

Matters of Algiers are not ones I follow closely, and postcolonialism understood as a complete, ready theory is not a perspective I employ to read the texts. What I call anticolonial or postcolonial timbre in analyzed works is not limited to a single theory, but is at home at the heart of the entirety of contemporary humanities. It gives it its dynamism, but also blows it up, allowing no stable identity. In searching for ways that Western critical thought can follow after the works of Bourdieu or Derrida, we find evidence that it is not, and maybe has never been “Western” in the sense that the language of identity implies, and that it is its nonidentity that makes it positive.

Nonidentities. Tillion, Fanon, Bourdieu, Derrida and the Dilemmas of Decolonization came to be as a result of at least two years of research based on queries both locally and abroad. To write it, I used foreign-language sources and materials that are poorly or not at all known in the Polish humanities, and which I hope to introduce to the local academic exchange. Many of them should be translated into Polish. I attempted to write the book in a way that, in spite of its extensive bibliographical references, allows it to be read by audiences outside the academic circles. In my view, the matters that the described authors touch and which I highlight, often against the grain of traditional interpretations, are of utmost importance. They deal with matters such as immigration, cultural fundamentalism or violence in service of political aims. In materials analyzed I show, on one hand, the nonobviousness of those issues, and on the other cognitive limits of the tools usually utilized to describe them.

Artykuł opisuje radziecki projekt kolonialny lat trzydziestych XX wieku. Na przykładzie socrealistycznej powieści Brunona Jasieńskiego "Człowiek zmienia skórę", autor analizuje hegemoniczny dyskurs metropolii oraz rozmaite strategie jego aplikacji na terenie Centralnej Azji. Rozprawa skupia się na takich zagadnieniach, jak nadreprezentowane w utworze wątki radzieckiej mission civilisatrice, patriarchalne uwikłania kolonialnej dominacji Rosjan oraz władanie poprzez narzucanie obecności, czyli wypieranie lokalnej problematyki i przywłaszczanie/przekształcanie obcej geografii.

The book 'Socjalistyczny postkolonializm. Rekonsolidacja pamięci' (Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation) is about the Polish postcolonial tradition of before 1989, which has been blanked out of memory. The year 2000, i.e., the year in which the Polish translation of Ewa Thompson’s book Imperial Knowledge. Russian Literature and Colonialism appeared, is taken as the beginning of Polish postcolonial thought. However, the general thesis of the present book is that widely understood postcolonialism functioned in Poland before 1989. The real beginning of thinking in postcolonial terms started with the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, held in Wrocław in 1948. The purpose of the book is to reconstruct the rubbed out history of socialist postcolonialism and to determine the reasons why this cultural phenomenon was remembered/forgotten. This first task is achieved by analyzing political, press, literary, scientific and artistic discourses referring to the so-called Third World and its relations with the semi-peripheral Second World, i.e., Poland; while the second task is treated within an original conceptual framework for writing about remembering/forgetting, using the category of re/consolidation drawn from neuroscience and psychology. The work uses the terms “socialist postcolonialism” and “postcolonialism of the Second World” alternately and refers to postcolonial studies, although conceptually it is rooted in memory studies which are also seeing intense development in Poland.