Rethinking Modern Polish Identities: Transnational Encounters, ed. Agnieszka Pasieka and Paweł Rodak

Devoting a volume to contemplation of Polish national identities might seem to lean into the predictable, and thus perhaps exhausted, central preoccupation of Polish Studies. As Agnieszka Pasieka notes in her introduction to the book, it was not long ago that scholars were being urged to move ‘beyond identity’, recognising the fluidity and ephemerality of different projects of collective (self-) definition. But the editors and other contributors to Rethinking Modern Polish Identities make a persuasive case for thinking critically about identity claims while also taking seriously their continued power and appeal. The coupling of a national (Polish) framing in the before-the-colon portion of the title with the promise of ‘transnational encounters’ in the after-the-colon portion nicely captures the approach of the authors. Across a range of fascinating specific contexts, they demonstrate that the people, qualities and historical experiences that stand at the core of some articulations of Polishness can be, and have been, situated at the margins or outside of Polish identity in other articulations.

The fifteen chapters of the book (not including the introduction and Paweł Rodak’s conclusion) are impressively multidisciplinary, with contributions from historians, anthropologists, sociologists and scholars of literature, film and music. The authors include many leading scholars in Polish Studies, at various career stages. The chapters are grouped loosely in three sub-sections: ‘Redefining Polishness’; ‘Identity in the Making’; and ‘Portraits and Performances’. These sub-sections serve as bridges rather than silos, encouraging readers who may have been drawn into the volume by a particular contribution in their discipline/sub-field to linger to explore adjacent contributions with less familiar topics or approaches.

Reviews of such edited volumes can never do justice to all of the individual chapters, and it would be arbitrary to discuss only a few of them at length. Some observations on overarching themes that cut across a number of contributions will therefore have to suffice. Migration predictably looms large, with several chapters looking at Polish immigrants to (but also returning migrants from) North America, and others exploring migration within Europe, as well as internal migration within Poland’s frequently disappearing, reappearing and shifting frontiers. Another prominent theme cutting across many chapters is the role of borderlands and cultural (religious/linguistic) minorities in shaping Polish identities. Jewish–Polish and Lithuanian–Polish interactions and entanglements are discussed most extensively, offering some especially compelling examples of exclusion and suppression as well as ambiguous embraces and appropriations. The intersections between nationality and gender are central to several contributions and at least touched upon in most of them. Historians will be impressed by the careful attention that even non-historian contributors give to change over time as well as synchronic contestation in the roles that all of these factors play in defining both the centres and the boundaries of different articulations of Polishness.

No such volume can cover everything, of course, and each reader will have a list of the themes or topics that they felt merited more attention. One issue that is tantalisingly mentioned in Geneviève Zubrzycki’s chapter on philosemitism but otherwise absent from the volume is the role of sexual minorities in visions of Polishness. This will almost certainly play a more prominent role in future analyses of Polish identities, not only due to very recent controversies about current-day LGBT+ rights but also growing scholarship about queer Polish pasts. Another theme that gets relatively little coverage in the volume—it comes up in interesting ways within several chapters but is not a central focus of any—is the relationship between Polishness and Germanness/Germans/Germany. This might reflect, at least in part, the relative greater weight of the more distant past (the demography and geography of the early modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the inter-war republic) compared to a still-not-fully-digested recent past (the mid-twentieth-century westward migration and re-founding of the current Polish state and society, in large part on former German territory) in understandings of Polishness. A similar lag might be detected in the absence of discussion of Polish identities’ relationship to the UK/Britishness/Englishness—an omission that might seem especially striking to readers of The English Historical Review. This will also no doubt change in coming decades, as the new migration patterns and related cultural innovations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries get more fully baked into evolving understandings of Polishness.

While these reflections on a few (relative) absences in the volume might seem critical quibbles, they are intended to serve as further testimony to the value of the editors’ open-ended invitation to explore modern Polish identities. The contributions that they have brought together, informed by their insightful editorial framing, illustrate that Polish identity projects have always involved, and will continue to involve, complex engagements with both internal diversity within Polishness and external points of reference beyond Polishness. There is no end in sight to the ‘rethinking’ that this will require.