From the House of the Slave to the Home of the Brave. The Motif of Home in Poetry by Black Women since the late 1960s

Trzynastu badaczy podjęło się krytyki dominującej narracji o komunizmie w Polsce, proponując nowe analizy tego pojęcia, a także badając przejawy antykomunizmu. Publikacja jest wynikiem prac w ramach grantu NPRH (2013-2020) pod kierownictwem prof. Michała Głowińskiego. Grant był realizowany w Ośrodku Studiów Kulturowych i Literackich nad Komunizmem IBL PAN. 

Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap.

The book examines the modalities of witnessing in the works of Charles Reznikoff. Associated with the so-called “Objectivist” group created in New York in the early 1930s, Reznikoff is often called a poet-witness because the material he draws on in his poetry and, to a lesser extent in prose, comes from his observations of urban life and from authentic testimonies he found in archives. Yet, the process of turning eye-witnessed situations and contents of depositions given by other witnesses into literary texts is far from objective. In particular, Reznikoff’s use of archival material is informed by subtly camouflaged manipulation. To demonstrate various degrees of this change, the book centers on a comparative juxtaposition of the poet’s works with the original documents.

This book brings together papers that were presented at a workshop in May 2018 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Szmul Zygielbojm’s protest suicide. The workshop was organised at The Polish University Abroad within the framework of an ongoing seminar series on twentieth century Polish history.5 The volume opens with a message from Zygielbojm’s grandsons, Dr Arthur I. Zygielbaum and Paul S. Zygielbaum, to participants of the workshop (see p. 11), in which they highlight the continuing relevance of their grandfather’s sacrifice (Michael Fleming, Introduction).