Abstract
This article is a reading of The Witcher 3 in relation to postcolonial approaches to Polish culture. It departs from an analysis of an online debate on racial representation in the game as a possible act of epistemic disobedience, and moves on to a consideration of three narrative aspects of the game itself: its representation of political struggle, the ideological stance of the protagonist, and ethnic inspirations in worldbuilding. By referring those three issues to postcolonial analyses of Polish culture, as well as Walter D. Mignolo’s concept of decolonization through epistemic disobedience, this article aims to demonstrate paradoxical qualities of the game, which tries to simultaneously distance itself from the established, West-oriented ways of knowledge production and gain recognition as an artifact of modern Western pop culture. Moreover, it employs the tradition of Polish Romanticism to establish itself as a bridge between Slavdom and Western culture, and strengthen the colonial idea of Poland being the proper ruler over Slavs.
Highlights
Mignolo’s concepts of epistemic disobedience and oppressive modernity, as well as some of the existent postcolonial approaches to Polish culture, in order to explore the phenomenon of an internationally recognized game set during the Second World
I address the two competing stands taken by participants of an online debate over the racial representation within the game, one group claiming that Witcher lacks diversity and and that this is a problem; and the other arguing that Slavic people have a right to create an exclusively white digital world
I aim to grasp the character of both the importance of The Witcher 3 for the contemporary Polish culture and its relation to dominant Western discourse
Summary
Geralt of Poland: The Witcher 3 Between Epistemic Disobedience and Imperial Nostalgia. This article is a reading of The Witcher 3 in relation to postcolonial approaches to Polish culture It departs from an analysis of an online debate on racial representation in the game as a possible act of epistemic disobedience, and moves on to a consideration of three narrative aspects of the game itself: its representation of political struggle, the ideological stance of the protagonist, and ethnic inspirations in worldbuilding. Mignolo’s concepts of epistemic disobedience and oppressive modernity, as well as some of the existent postcolonial approaches to Polish culture, in order to explore the phenomenon of an internationally recognized game set during the Second World In this way, I will address the issues of a Central European country’s right to tell its own stories, and the problematic relation between the concepts of ‘Polishness’ and ‘Slavicness’ within Polish national discourse as a source of ideology in Witcher 3. The strong and complicated connection between the Witcher and the Polono-Slavic cultures that constitutes the context of my analysis is created mostly by the video game itself, and will be regarded as such
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