Bziki tropikalne „białych mużynów”: (anty)kolonialne fantazje międzywojennej awangardy. Casus Witkacego

Abstract

The Polish avant-garde, as is well known, was eager to activate colonial and racial fantasies. For example, the figure of the “white Negro” was used by the Futurists as a figure signaling – at first glance invisible, but real – foreignness, non-privilegedness and anti-systemicity. “The Negro” in the Futurist narrative was an unidentified Other. His only distinguishing feature was his racial identity associated with a state of uncivilization. From the perspective of today’s sensibilities, shaped by years of development and application of postcolonial theories, this was an ambiguous figure: politically and ethically suspect. In this text, I argue that in order to understand it well and avoid presentist readings, it is necessary to see, if only in a brief and selective approximation, the discursive field of the scientific press and journalism of the time. The avant-garde and, more specifically, Witkacy’s tropical fantasies were provocations whose scale and nature may escape the modern viewer. Therefore, based on the sketchily reconstructed discursive background of the Polish interwar period, and the issues of race and European colonialism present in it, I will attempt to reach the meaning of these provocations at that time and understand the perverse game that the Polish avant-garde undertook with these themes. And against this background – to show the uniqueness of Witkacy, who, unlike his avant-garde contemporaries, showed the political nature of the opposition of civilization and savagery, complicating the colonial imaginary of his own era and formulating catastrophic predictions for the European future.