Polish Literature and National Identity: A Postcolonial Perspective by Dariusz Skórczewski (review)

The Nonstrategic Essentialism of Right-Wing Postcolonial Theory

Dariusz Skórczewski's book is a rare example of contemporary literary scholarship that openly takes the position of essentialism, without either elaborating on the philosophical background behind it, or arguing for its benefits, or even defining the term with any appreciable clarity. His essentialist stance does his work an immediate disservice as he repeatedly throws around such fraught words as, for instance, "honor," assuming them to be self-explanatory and not at all historically conditioned. More problematic still is the writer's constant reliance on the misbegotten category of "mentality," whose vagueness serves no identifiable conceptual purpose. Ultimately, all Skórczewski proposes in defense of his essentialism is the following: "Here I can only address a question of prime importance from the perspective of these reflections. In this I am aided by Gayatri Spivak, who – despite the influence of Derrida's thought on her own writing – admits that 'the moment of essentialism or essentialization is irreducible. In deconstructive critical practice, you have to be aware that you are going to essentialize anyway. So then strategically you can look at essentialisms, not as descriptions of the way things are, but as something that one must adopt to produce a critique of anything'" (P. 51).

In invoking Spivak's famous formula of "strategic essentialism," Skórczewski tellingly fails to mention that Spivak herself, as early as 2008 (in Other Asians), disavowed the term precisely out of her bitter realization that it had been deployed to promote conservative agendas and "non-strategic" versions of essentialism––in other words, precisely what Polish Literature and National Identity: A Postcolonial Perspective sets out to accomplish.¹ Marshaling Spivak's authority while neglecting to point out, even in a footnote, that the concept has long been disowned by its originator is a lamentable oversight at best and an instance of intellectual dishonesty at worst.

One paragraph later, Skórczewski declares his method to be based on Anthony D. Smith's concept of "ethnosymbolism": "For ethnosymbolists, in turn, nations exist because of the grounding of a real community within a symbolic world composed of such elements as language, myth, art, and religion – the 'varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.' This view accents the role of myths, historical memories, values, and symbols in the process of creating a nation. These elements add up to the foundation of ethnic identity, while this identity's development into a modern national identity is the effect of continuation of the pre-modern 'myth-symbol complex' – in Smith's words, the mythomoteur of the nation" (P. 52). While one can agree with Skórczewski that Smith's position is neither purely primordialist nor constructivist, it is definitely far removed from the notion of "strategic essentialism," which foregrounds the collective characteristics of an oppressed group to further its self-interest and emancipation. Spivak's concept has considerably affected "identity politics" and, despite her disavowal, still enjoys traction within that political tradition, while conservative uses for "strategic essentialism" can only exist in distorted nonstrategic modes. Smith's "ethnosymbolism" is neither a strategy nor a formula but, simply, an alternative conceptualization of nation-forming. All questions regarding the validity of such an approach aside, one cannot help but notice that Skórczewski, contrary to the announcement in the introduction, does not analyze Polish nation formation from an ethnosymbolist point of view, thus pointing up the book's overall problem: a strange lack of continuity between what is initially averred and what is subsequently laid out. Most pointedly, his is not an inquiry into the influence of national myths, folk traditions, or political organization on the Polish collective identity. In the main part of his book, Skórczewski, drawing mostly on Edward Said, discusses Polish literature of different periods through the conventional postcolonial tensions between colonizer and colonized...