East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century

This open access book explores the ambiguity of East Central Europe during the twentieth century, examining local contexts through a comparative and transnational reworking of theoretical models in postcolonial studies. Since the early modern period, East Central Europe has arguably been an object of imperialism. However, at the same time East Central European states have been seen to be colonial actors, with individuals from the region often associating themselves with colonial discourses in extra-European contexts. Spanning a broad time period until after the Second World War and covering the governance of Communism and its legacies, the book examines how cultural and literary narratives from East Central Europe have created and revised historical knowledge, making use of collective memory to feed into identity models.

Siegfried Huigen is Professor of Dutch and South African Literature at the University of Wrocław in Poland and Visiting Professor at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He has written and co-edited a number of books and journal articles on colonialism in South Africa, Indonesia and East Central Europe. His most recent book, Shaping a Dutch East Indies (2023), explores the construction of an authoritative representation of the Dutch colonial empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Dorota Kołodziejczyk is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She is Chair of Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Centre. Academic Research Centre, Director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre and board member of the Postdependence Studies Centre. Her publications include Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe (2016, 2018), co-edited with Cristina Sandru, three issues of the European Review co-edited with Siegfried Huigen, and studies in comparative literature.