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.

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Toruń: Nicolaus Copernicus University Press 2018

484 pp.

ISBN: 978-83-231-3978-2

More on: https://www.academia.edu/36421718/Socialist_Postcolonialism_Memory_Reconsolidation