The author asks about the applicability of postcolonial criticism to the study of the culture of Central and Eastern Europe, especially Galicia. She presents the voices of Polish and Ukrainian proponents of this method, as well as those who are sceptical about the possibility of adapting it to the analysis of Central European culture. She indicates the factors which complicate transferring the theory of postcolonial studies to the Habsburg monarchy and the peoples living there, and defines the conditions that should be taken into account for the use of postcolonial theory to be persuasive. She presents the benefits of postcolonial criticism as applied to the analysis of literature created in Galicia, noting the hegemonic historiography contained in the literature and the narrative forms establishing the hierarchy of cultures, and protecting the value and superiority of one’s own culture – a phenomenon that has not been investigated.

The article integrates the 18th century vampire discourse with problems and approaches of postcolonial studies on the one hand, and with the Galicia research in historical and cultural studies on the other hand. For this purpose, vampirism and postcolonial studies are defined at first, while the change of the vampirism discourse – passing from the revenant image to the one of bloodsucker – is analysed in the next step. Finally it is shown how the vampire’s character and discourse have been adjusted and narratively transformed in 18th-century travel literature on Galicia

The article deals with the appropriation of postcolonial studies to look at Central Europe and Galicia. Beginning with the concept of“internal colonialism“, we follow the evolution of postcolonial theory from a basically economy-based concept into a poststructuralist cultural theory, presenting the development and uses of its central concepts, such as Orientalism or othering. Based on some examples, we also highlight its previous appropriation to Central Europe and the political implications it carries in this region.

This article analyzes the heuristic value of the possible application of postcolonial approaches to nineteenth-century Habsburg Galicia. It critically reviews some contemporary usages of “postcolonial” in Ukrainian historiography, and political and literary criticism. The article finds original postcolonial historical approaches to be of great heuristic value, especially for practitioners of social history. Using “postcolonial” tools, historical research may yield new insights into the history of nineteenth-century Galicia

Following the 19th-century language debates on the language of science and higher education, this paper follows three Polish texts from the middle of the century dealing with the Galician school and university system. These dispositives of language discourse, defined here as an outcome of the transformations at the nexus of hegemony, linguistic theories and the remainders of the Republic of Letters ideology, are analysed concerning the positioning of the Polish language as confronted with German and Ruthenian/Ukrainian, as well as the political implications resulting from the perceived misbalance. Given the political context of Habsburg neoabsolutism’s hierarchical understanding of languages and its application, the authors deal with both deconstructing the underlying ideology concerning German, and sustain it regarding Ruthenian

This study follows a postcolonial approach towards Polish and Ruthenian national master narratives in Habsburg Galicia by assuming that Galician historians placed past Polish-Ruthenian relations in a colonial setting and emphasized Ruthenian subalternity. The investigation focuses on one of the most controversial issues in Polish-Ruthenian historiography: the era of Casimir the Great and the incorporation of Red Ruthenia into the Polish Kingdom in the 14th century. The central question is how Galician historians depicted this period in their works and to what extent they interpreted it as the beginning of a hegemonic relationship between Poles and Ruthenians. Which discursive strategies were utilized either to justify a Polish civilizing mission in Red Ruthenia or to refute the necessity of Polish colonial rule in this region?

This paper offers a postcolonial analysis of Ivan Franko’s attack on the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, published as Ein Dichter des Verrathes (A Poet of Treason) in May 1897. Using Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial notion of subalternity, Ivan Franko’s essay is interpreted as an opportunity for Ukrainian (subaltern) culture in Galicia to gain its own voice in opposition to Polish cultural dominance. As a result of this strategy, Franko deliberately wrote his essay in German and published it in Vienna, the political centre of the Habsburg Monarchy.

The article presents the problem of colonial and postcolonial discourse in relation to Eastern Galicia. It discusses the forms of cultural domination existing throughout history in the region and draws attention to their conscious “playing” by successive rulers of this territory, consequently leading to the formation of memory conflicts.

The paper examines Edward Said's critique of Thomas Edward Lawrence view on Arabs and Arabian culture and society. On the one hand some of Said's allegations seems poorly grounded and can be deny with some excerpts from Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. On the other hand Said doesn't remark serious shortcomings of Lawrence's outlook of intercultural relations.

The article applies postcolonial approaches to economic discourses in regard to Habsburg Galicia at the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, focusing on the reform discourses of the state bureaucracy, the Galician landlords and the Polish national movement with regard to serfdom and agrarian reform. Making use of Said’s concept of “orientalism”, the article’s main section is dedicated to the analysis of how the definition and construction of peasants as social actors influenced reforms of serfdom until it was finally abolished in course of the revolution of 1848. Here, several different simultaneous narratives, as well as varying positions in the course of time can be observed, where cultural differences were overlapping with social cleavages. Thus, a polycentric, but not polyvalent approach of power and rule could help deconstructing or at least questioning binary dichotomies, in the way that hegemony is always dependent on a complex web of political, social and economic relations in a spatial context.

The paper deals with elucidating the semantic changes and pragmatic effects of the precedent phenomenon in modern Ukrainian media discourse. The examples chosen for analysis have appeared within Ukrainian discourse following Ukraine’s independence in 1991. It verbalizes one of the valuable concepts – ‘patriotism’. Taken into consideration is the phrase coined by Yevhen Chykalenko, about “love to the depth of a pocket” with references to its use in contemporary discourse. The research is based on the 13th version of the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian and on the Ukrainian Language Corpus test version. The functional variant peculiarities of this expression are described, and its truncated derivatives and its lexical shifts as well. The difference between the origin of Chykalenko’s phrase and its current modifications is deduced from the semantic-pragmatic point of view. The paper reveals the role the above mentioned phrase plays in the formatting of new expressions. Outlined is the manipulative potential of this precedent expression in the realization of the author’s intentions.

In the interview, Dipesh Chakrabarty gives an insight into recent transformations of historical thinking and writing. He discusses various faces of recent democratisation of history, like the proliferation of environmental history and the decolonialisation perspective. He outlines the genealogy of the term “provincializing”, known from his notable work Provincializing Eu-rope. Finally, he elaborates on the emergence of “the planetary” (or “a planetary age”) and recalls the contributions of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt on the conceptualisation of the issue.

Whereas Wincenty Pol’s topographical verse has usually been viewed as an expression of a ‘sentimental geography’, this article proposes a new reading of a well-known poem A Song about Our Land by Wincenty Pol in terms of ‘imagined geography’, a key term of an approach inspired by geopoetics and postcolonial studies. ‘Imagined geography’ refers to a poetic map, i.e. travelogue laced with motifs from the repository of national heritage. Its images, reshaped by the writer’s imagination, form an ideologically charged whole in which an emotive sense of place or scenery (‘touching the heart’) uncovers a complex cultural stratigraphy of the ‘imagined geography’. In the light of this approach, based on the insights of geopoetics, Wincenty Pol’s poem can be treated as textual representation of a map of the real and the symbolic territory of Poland.