Authors

Discussion

Over the past half-century, scholars from a range of disciplines have richly illustrated how Orientalism, as an enterprise concerned with producing authoritative knowledge about the Euro-American world’s backward “others,” grew intimately and often symbiotically entangled with the everyday exercise of imperial and colonial power in the modern world. In interwar Poland, however, an ethnically sundry cohort of scholars, adventurers, diplomats, and military intelligence officers belonging to the self-declared Promethean movement (ruch prometejski) proclaimed their commitment to fostering a novel strain of Orientalism that would facilitate the political liberation of the non-Russian nationalities from the neo-imperial domination of the Soviet Union. My proposed presentation reconstructs the intellectual origins and institutional foundations of this transnational project, paying special attention to the mental geographies of civilization and modernity elaborated by Promethean Orientalists who operated between Warsaw, Harbin, and the string of Eurasian cities linking them by the 1930s. I show that Promethean Orientalists, though trafficking in well-worn Polish tropes about a despotic and savage Russia, drew an intriguing distinction between the allegedy malignant “Muscovite” heartlands of Russian and Soviet imperialism and the supposedly redeemable, multiethnic expanses of Siberia and the Far East, seeing Manchuria and its principal city of Harbin as their most reliable regional base for organizing a front of anti-Soviet exiles. Facing logistical and financial barriers to their own designs, Promethean Orientalists developed a complicated fascination with the Chinese Guomindang and the Japanese pan-Asian movement as mobilizing forces for “Easterners” such as Buryats and Yakuts, whose only salvation they saw in the formation of mass-based nationalist movements. In closing, I will highlight some potentially constructive reflections to be drawn from Promethean Orientalist ideas about how we conceptualize geography and human diversity in the age of now while demonstrating, with contemporary discourses on Russia and Ukraine in mind, how this movement for the emancipation of Soviet Eurasia ultimately reproduced essentializing, Eurocentric notions of historical progress while excusing the excesses of Western capitalist imperialism and even flirting with fascism.