Author Description

"There is no such thing as one Polish culture. Even understood in the most broad and simple sense, that is, as a collection of all the cultural achievements made by Poles together, one immediately faces problems with understanding the concepts of 'Polishness' and 'cultural achievement' themselves. The historical, geographical, legal, ethnic, religious, and linguistic changes - and differences - create such a diversity that it is impossible to find one commonality through which one homogeneous sense or meaning can be teased out. Even though schooling - for example - reproduces such simplifying, patriotic models, it does not mean they translate into a consistent interpretation. Lastly, every narrative within cultural studies reveals and names as much as it covers and conceals; this is because it cannot be constructed without emphasizing certain facts while silencing others. The 'one culture', then, breaks up into a multitude of cultures. The monologue of the centrally-defined discourse of Polishness passes into a polyphony of peripheries, into a dialogue of subcultures of borderlands, into a chorus of those who are to be silenced by the homogeneous centre"--