Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters-soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters-who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders.
The 14 chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia. Some essays directly engage with post-colonial studies, contributing to an ongoing critical re-evaluation of eastern European "semi-peripheral" (non-)involvement in colonialism. Other chapters disclose a range of perspectives and narratives that illuminate the plurality of the travelers' positions while reflecting on the specificity of the eastern European experience.
The travellers moved-as do the chapter authors-between two regions that are off-centre, in-between, shiftingly "Eastern," and disorientingly heterogeneous, thus complicating colonial and postcolonial notions of "Europe," "East," and East-West distinctions. Both at home and overseas, they navigated among a multiplicity of peoples, "races," and empires, Occidents and Orients, fantasies of the Self and the Other, adopting/adapting/mimicking/rejecting colonialist identities and ideologies. They saw both eastern Europe and southeast Asia in a distinctive light, as if through each other-and so will the readers of Escaping Kakania.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Fadenheftung
Gewebe-Einband
Maße
Höhe: 235 mm
Breite: 157 mm
Dicke: 25 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-963-386-665-8 (9789633866658)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Jan Mrazek grew up in Czechoslovakia and lives in Singapore. He is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He has published widely on Southeast Asia as well as Czech travel writing. His latest book is titled On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle: Tropics, Travel and Colonialism in Czech Poetry (Karolinum Press, 2022)
Introductory (Dis)Orientation: A View from Singapore
Jan Mrazek
1. The Dutch East Indies in the Eyes of a Pole: Teodor Anzelm Dzwonkowski and his Memoirs from the Service in the Dutch Navy in the Years 1788-1793
Dariusz Kolodziejczyk
2. A Czech Army Doctor in Sumatra: Native Soil, Miasmatic Mud, Russian Hallucinations, All The Empires
Jan Mrazek
3. The First Impressions of Singapore in Serbian Literature
Nada Savkovic
4. Julian Falat in Southeast Asia: Hybridity and Mimicry in the Memoirs of a Polish/Kakanian/European Painter
Grzegorz Moroz
5. Colonialism, Freedom Fighters and the Polish Ambiguity: How Jozef Conrad Korzeniowski and Bronislaw Pilsudski (Almost) Met in Singapore
Rafal Pankowski
6. The Fate of the Birds of Paradise: Enrique Stanko Vraz in Southeast Asia
Iveta Nakladalova
7. Ethnic Comparisons in Travelogues about Southeast Asia by Poles and Serbs of Austro-Hungarian Background, 1869-1914
Tomasz Ewertowski
8. The Polish Botanist Marian Raciborski and his 1901 Wayang Kulit Performance: Images and Encounters
Marianna Lis
9. The Identity of the Strange: The (Post)colonial Perspective in the Texts and Pictures of Laszlo Szekely
Gabor Pusztai
10. Islands of Paradise? Java and Bali Through a Woman's Eyes: The Journey of Ilona Zboray
Vera Brittig
11. Indochina's Deadly Sun: Polish Maritime and Colonial League's Depictions of Southeast Asia
Marta Grzechnik
12. Czechoslovaks in Singapore and Malaya in the Interwar Period
Jan Beranek
13. Unaware Colonialism Meets Empathy and Insightfulness: Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski's Travel Diary to Burma
Michal Lubina
14. Double vision: Yugoslav Travellers and the Conflicting Images of Southeast Asia in the Era of Late Colonialism
Nemanja Radonjic
Index
