Authors

Discussion

Recent years have seen an interrogation of Polish culture and identity at a scale not witnessed in a long time: from publications such as Being Poland (Trojanowska et al. 2018)to the recent two anthologies dealing with Polish literature as world literature (Florczyk&Wisniewski 2023; Bilczewski et al. 2022). There are many reasons for this resurgence of interest among publishers, including Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel prize and Polish cinema’s second ‘Polish school’ moment. While there has long been an awareness among Polish scholars of the need to confront national narratives of canonicity and other forms of symbolic hegemony, Polish studies as a generalized field remains bound to the framework of comparison through recognition. A transnational framework, modeled after the approach postulated by Burns and Duncan (2022) requires a sustained engagement with Polish culture that explores the transnational elements inside it, rather than only the culture’s external reference points. This paper proposes what a concerted effort to transnationalize Polish studies might entail, centering attention to relationality rather than world presence. With reference to cultural policy and scholarly discussions in the field of the last decade, I will address the need for addressing Polishness transnationally, especially at a time of heightened political rhetoric around identity in Poland, as well as some of the benefits such an approach can bring to Polish studies scholars.