(5 entries: book, articles, chapters in edited volume)
Book:
1. Cindy Bylander, Engaging Cultural Ideologies: Classical Composers and Musical Life in Poland 1918–1956. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2022. ISBN 9798887190211
Abstract: Engaging Cultural Ideologies offers a recontextualization of the effects of Poland's cultural practices, especially those concerning issues such as nationalism, elitism, and race, on the genesis and performance of contemporary Polish compositions from 1918 to 1956. Based on extensive archival research that includes the first comprehensive examination of concert programs in Poland as well as a series of case studies focused on composers' challenges in the midst of nearly constant turmoil, Bylander brings fresh insights into the public and private power struggles concerning artistic freedom that were animated by similar points of contention across seemingly diverse historical eras.
https://www.academicstudiespress.com/polishstudies/9798887190211
Articles:
2. Magdalena Baran-Szołtys, “To Where Joseph Roth Came From, or Travels Based on a Historical-Literary Archive,” in: Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne 2022, no. 1 (19), pp. 1-15.
Memory Studies, Austrian Galicia, mnemonics, archives, Polish Literature, German Literature, Comparative Literature
The article discusses contemporary travels to Galicia in German language literature from 1989 to 2016 and presents its thematic and focal development. After an excursus into the meaning and history of travel texts to Galicia, which were crucial in constituting the province, the article, through drawing on the relation between mnemonics theory and archives, attempts to demonstrate how travels to historical spaces function. The following analysis is carried out on the basis of texts that draw on the historical-literary archive, which is one of three archival types the author developed in her research.
https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP/article/view/13223/10703
3. J. Mackenzie Pierce, "Global Chopin: The 1949 Centenary and Polish Internationalism during the Early Cold War," Journal of the American Musicological Society 75, no. 3 (2022): 487–545.https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.3.487.
Keywords: Fryderyk Chopin, music diplomacy, commemoration, Poland, Communism, Chopin Piano Competition
Abstract: The 1949 Chopin Year was a large-scale cultural mobilization whose purpose was to bring Chopin's music to hundreds of thousands of Poles and to promote it around the world, all funded and overseen by Poland's newly established Communist state. Among the most striking aspects of the Chopin Year was its extensive international programming: not only did Polish diplomatic missions convince around thirty countries to organize Chopin celebrations that paralleled those in Poland, but they targeted countries outside the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc, despite the strictures of Stalinist-era anti-Westernism then growing across Eastern Europe. This article draws on unstudied archival sources from Polish ministries, musical institutions, and diplomatic missions to explore the historical and political forces at play in Poland's Chopin-centered internationalism during the early Cold War. I demonstrate that cultural officials, composers, diplomats, and performers—all with varying stakes in state socialism—competed over the meaning of Chopin and his accomplishments when planning the Chopin Year. These various factions often agreed, however, on a decades-old view of the composer as both a national and an international figure, whose legacy was uniquely capable of promoting Polish causes on the global stage. By showing how the Chopin Year drew on and perpetuated a longue durée of Polish transnational contacts and discourse about the global Chopin, the article places Cold War internationalism within a longer lineage of border-crossing that had been a central aspect of European musical culture since at least Chopin's lifetime.
Chapters in Edited Volume:
4. Jerome Krase, "How do Wars become Unknown? A Brief Personal Reflection," Unknown Wars, Edited by Vitalii Lunov and Maxim Lepskiy, 2022: 10-27.
Keywords: War, Propaganda, Ukraine, Russia
Abstract: In the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine international conference to discuss Unknown Wars in which I participated, one would be correct in expecting that the distinguished guests would be speaking about wars that took place without anyone, especially the general public, knowing about them as in "hidden" or "secret" wars which may of course abound undetected. From the perspective of someone like Juergen Habermas however the unknown label might also be applied to those conflicts which are misunderstood or incorrectly defined as in the accumulated mass media universe of contradictory statements claiming to be truthful. As we claim to live in relatively free societies in which communication is ubiquitous, we might consider some of his remarks. As truthful information is so well connected to the notion of freedom, we might consider Juergen Habermas' ideal speech acts. Social structures are free from constraint only when for all participants there is a symmetrical distribution of chances to select and employ speech acts which have no distortion, coercion, or barriers to communication. In ideal speech acts, participants desire only shared rational conclusions, and an effective equality of chances to assume dialogue roles. "Truth," therefore, cannot be analyzed independently of "freedom" and "justice." (Habermas, 1975: xvii, See also Krase 2021, 2021) For those like myself have who taken up space at the lower strata of society, from both my personal experience and scholarly pursuits, I would argue that all wars are unknown in this regard.
https://unknownwars.euasu.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/collected-papers-book.-unknown-wars.-2022.pdf
5. Bastiaan Willems and Michał Adam Palacz, "Polish refugees and East Prussian expellees: Applying the four-dimensional model", in Bastiaan Willems and Michał Adam Palacz (eds.), A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of the Two World Wars (Bloomsbury Academic, 2002), pp. 245-260. Chapter DOI: 10.5040/9781350281110.0027
Keywords: Diaspora; conceptual model; forced migration; transnational history; Polish refugees; East Prussian expellees; Britain; post-war Germany
Abstract: The concluding essay by Willems and Palacz demonstrates the full potential of the proposed conceptual model of diaspora by presenting Polish wartime refugees in Britain and East Prussian expellees in post-war Germany as objects of study independent of national histories. While the historiographies of both Polish and East Prussian diasporas have largely been shaped by collective memories of victimhood and politically-charged narratives of 'integration', Willems and Palacz reinterpret the experiences of Polish refugees and East Prussian expellees through the lens of their four-dimensional relationship with the host society, homeland, own diaspora and other migrant communities. The two case studies reveal that forced migration should be seen as a transnational and de-homogenised experience which offers new perspectives on the developments that spurred European history in the first half of the twentieth century.
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