Praktyka Teoretyczna (Jun 2020)
Exercises in expansion. Colonial threads in the National Democracy’s turn toward discipline
Abstract
1895 was the first year of the “Brazilian fever” in Galicia, i.e. a migration wave of peasant masses from Galicia to Brazil. In my article, I analyze the content of the 1895 “transitional” volume of Przegląd Wszechpolski (“All-Polish Review”), previously called Przegląd Emigracyjny (Migration Review), when the Lviv journal passed into the hands of the National League. I shall discuss the ways in which folk masses were presented in particular articles, and reflect on the meaning of the concept of colonization used there. In the articles of Przegląd Wszechpolski, the idea of Polish colonization (i.e. the settlement in Brazil and the United States of the peasant masses expelled by poverty from their home villages in partitioned Poland) began to intertwine with the idea of the colonization of these masses – attempts to ensure that they would remain Polish and Catholic, and with the idea of the expansion of Polish national body, so that it takes its proper place in the global capitalist economy. I argue that dealing with Polish colonisation played significant role in the National Democracy’s “turn toward discipline,” usually associated with another example of spontaneous mobilization of the masses – the 1905 revolution.
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