Authors

Discussion

This paper explores distinct aesthetics and ethics of personhood and protection invoked in the cultural archives of the oft forgotten Polish-Belarusian border conflict (2021-current). Positioned at the intersection of comparative literature, cultural analysis and postcolonial and Eastern European studies, the paper asks: Whose lives count? Who and what is deemed worthy of protection? How is personhood, a prerequisite for protection, made and unmade? Through an interdisciplinary analysis of non-fiction literary texts and films, the paper offers new perspectives on competing narratives of personhood and protection, their contrasting timescales and anchoring in legal, ethical, environmental or defence paradigms (Kużelewska et al. 2024). 

 To this end, I will unpack the distinct formulations of personhood across the following cultural objects: Jesus Died in Poland/Jezus Umarł w Polsce (2023) by Mikołaj Grynberg; documentaries such as We Came for the Body/ Szliśmy Po Ciało (2024) and San (2024) by Piotr Czaban; and Zone. Stories from the Buffer Zone/ Zona. Historie ze strefy zamkniętej (2022), an audio-reportage by Marcin Kołodziejczyk and Marta Mazuś. This polyphonic and open-ended archive of migrants’ lives imagines an alternative cultural and ethical space wherein the ‘negative personhood’ (Dayan 2011)  and grievability’ (Butler 2004) of those disabled by the law is reclaimed and social lack of empathy challenged, often triggering a heated socio-political debate. In sum, the cultural archives of the Polish-Belarusian border offer a unique starting point for a widely applicable and timely consideration of the manifold understandings of personhood and protection and the forms of (extra)ordinary violence they seek to confront.