Authors

Discussion

In this paper I consider the modes in which Bronisław Malinowski and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz conceived of their Polishness against the background of British colonial enterprise and through their reading of Joseph Conrad’s works, especially Lord Jim (1900). In 1914, Malinowski, the founder of British social anthropology, and Witkiewicz, a Polish philosopher, playwright, and painter sailed together to Australia. During their journey, they read and discussed Conrad’s Lord Jim. As a result of that journey, and with great debt to Conrad’s writings, Malinowski published his Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), and Witkiewicz wrote his three “tropical plays” (1920-21). While the events that inspired Malinowski’s and Witkiewicz’s respective works took place when Poland was absent from the maps of Europe, the works themselves were not written and published until after the country regained its independence in 1918, thus spanning a key period in the country’s modern history. Malinowski’s and Witkiewicz’s explicit interests as writers-intellectuals were, first and foremost, in understanding and recounting their experience of non-European otherness and of British colonialism, but, as I will argue, a negotiation of their sense of Polishness forms an implicit subtext to these writings, pointing to a crucial at the time question, namely that of (new) Poland’s place in the modern world. I link my discussion to recent scholarship on the construction of whiteness in Eastern Europe, probing the modes in which Malinowski and Witkiewicz engaged with the notion of race in their works.