Authors

Discussion

In Polish literature, there exists a paradigm of “giving testimony” (Z. Herbert) understood as a moral obligation towards those who perished or suffered persecutions. Since the 19^th century, writing about real people and real events (esp. acts of violence and discrimination) became a platform to make a political and ethical statement, for instance as an act of resistance against propaganda or censorship. In such a perspective, the commemoration of victims was considered as the moral obligation of the author, which became particularly visible in the 20^th century with the emergence of literary works that concerned not only the experience of the WWII, but also the brutality of colonialism and the repercussions of the Cold War in Africa, Asia, and South America. In this perspective, a special attention deserves the oeuvre of Kapuściński and his literary reportages on South American and African countries, as well as his later theoretical writings on the necessity of intercultural dialogue and the responsibilities of nonfiction literature and media reporting in the era of postcolonialism and globalization. I am going to show to what extend travelogues of Kapuściński and other representatives of the Polish School of Reportage are to be seen within the Polish moralistic tradition of “giving testimony”.