Dear all,
you are most welcome so submit the subjects of your articles for the new volume of “Porównania” (2025/2). This issue will be a monograph whose main theme will be REFUGEEISM and its literary testimonies, definitions, representations and consequences.
The current social significance of this issue is clear. The sources of subsequent waves of refugees are military conflicts, ecological catastrophes and economic inequalities, and the history of Europe and the world is full of examples of such events at smaller or larger scales that found their way into literary and artistic creation.
The refugee experience is often the source of traumatic events, but sometimes it also happens to be – as testified by those who have been exiled and refugees – the beginning of artistic creation (or its significant evolution), or of reconfiguration of old and assimilation of new cultural codes and aesthetics. It is not a coincidence that Józef Wittlin wrote in 1959 about Nędze i blaski wygnania (Misery and glory of exile).
There are also other approaches at play, built on myths or – quite the contrary – on anti-myths; factographical and counter-factual narratives; stories focusing on the collective fate or individual biographies. Some of the narratives come together to form the founding myths of imagined communities, others exemplify critical conversations with the old myths. All of these decontextualisations and recontextualisations of plots that create a symbolic universe are initiated as a result of “relocation” of their authors into new cultural spaces.
It is also of interest how subsequent generations discover and confront the refugee experience of their parents and grandparents; how the assimilation processes go and how a certain refugee “isolationism” develops and consolidates.
No less important is the issue of the relationship between the refugees and the hosts of the countries, regions and local places where they seek either temporary or permanent shelter. The influx of people from either alien cultures or related ones forces the natives to reconfigure the notions of hospitality and the established approaches to the other. The societies of migration destinations, their literature and book markets open up towards and close themselves to refugees in multiple ways.
In this volume of “Porównania”, we aim to create something out of a number of case studies that would resemble a map of the refugee experience which could perform well in terms of history, society and politics, existentialism, anthropology, philosophy and, above all, art.
Please send the propositions for your articles to agata.stankowska@amu.edu.pl or emilia.kledzik@amu.edu.pl by August 31, 2024. By September 30, 2024, we will notify you whether your application has been accepted. The final due date for text submissions will be February 28, 2025. Tips on how to prepare the text for printing can be found at www.porownania.amu.edu.pl.
Articles and their subjects may be written in Polish, English or German.
On behalf of the “Porównania” editorial team
Agata Stankowska (science editor of the volume)