Being a lone Caribbean in the field of Polish and German studies has presented me with significant challenges and has, interestingly, made me approach the questions addressed in this book somewhat similarly to the way many of the historical actors in my research were producing knowledge in the nineteenth century. For, although I was not an emissary of an empire, I took up the role of an ethnographer, and it was through traveling, learning the languages, and immersing myself in Polish and German cultures that I was able to develop a feel for the history I write about here.
In contrast, my life history put me exceptionally close to the topics of study, thanks to my experiences coming of age in a territory struggling with consequences of colonialism, and living a life shaped by transnational journeys between the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the United States. Perspectives and experiences from my Caribbean past and culture, shaped through my journey as a migrant from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico and then to mainland United States, provide profound motivations and insights in my research on migration, cultural identifications, and imperial studies.2
The trajectory of my life and research shapes the way I see and do history. My approach is also informed by the cultural turn in history and by increasing considerations of diversity and interdisciplinarity, which have brought a wider range of perspectives into the production of historical knowledge.3 As Johannes Fabian has eloquently put it, “the connection between history and epistemology . . . is perhaps best understood if we accept that a discipline, in order to be critical of itself, needs a history not only of its findings but also of its ways of searching, that is, of the practices of knowledge production and presentation.”4 Following Fabian’s call, I consider it necessary to discuss the context in which this work was conceived and the processes through which I searched for and produced a colonial history of Prussian Poland—the lands with an overwhelming population of Polish-speaking subjects that Germany lost in 1918.
Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920, has benefited from—and advanced—two related movements in the humanities and social sciences. One of them is diversity and the democratization of knowledge. The other one is interdisciplinarity or the creation of new epistemologies across disciplinary boundaries. Diversity is a word I have been encountering the most since I moved to the United States to study under the auspices of affirmative action programs, now endangered. I considered my work as broadening and enriching European history by bringing my Caribbean lens into discussions of a field that, until quite recently, had been dominated by white, male, and ethnically oriented perspectives. This view of my work was partly an outcome of my close reading of postcolonial texts written by Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and the New Left. My choice to study Europe was, at the same time, the result of my desire to move away from the all-too-familiar landscape of Caribbean history.
The work of the Subaltern Studies Collective of the early 1980s, which quickly evolved into so-called Postcolonial Studies, was instrumental in empowering me to write about Europeans and bring the colonial question to the very core of the European continent.5 The group challenged the knowledge that both imperialist and nationalist literatures had created about former colonies while providing the tools for people from the “periphery” to question the historical writings produced by scholars identified as First World, Western and European, identifications that seem problematic to me now from an East Europeanist perspective.6 Subaltern scholars have been widely and usefully criticized in recent years for implicitly reproducing the dichotomies of power between “West” and “East,” colonizer and colonized, and for rendering a too essentialized picture of Europe, generally linked to the British imperial experience. Yet their works have inspired many to take the legacy of colonialism more critically than ever before. They challenged others to take seriously the cultural projects that Europeans put forward in the colonies and the impact that colonial systems had not only on European and native subjects but also on political imaginations. Moreover, the cultural questions they analyzed had the important effect of making history more receptive to theoretical frameworks used in other disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary movement motivated historians of imperial and colonial societies to rethink their traditional methods of research and had profound impacts on the broadening of archives.
Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is the result of this (post)colonial turn in German and Polish historiography. The book studies the colonial discourses and imperial practices that the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire used to map out, describe, and regulate Polish-speaking citizens in the nineteenth century. It also explores the cultural and biological definitions of Polish subjects through the scientific works of Germans and Poles in central Europe and Polish experiences with colonial projects in German Africa and southern Brazil.
My interest in the history of public health and colonialism led me to study the German colonies in Africa and analyze their relationship with the Prussian-Polish provinces. When I reached the archives in Poland, I came across a set of Polish travel accounts written from and about overseas colonies. The finding significantly changed the course of my research by giving me the opportunity to explore the dissemination of colonial thought in partitioned Poland and study Polish engagements in colonial projects. I chose to title this book Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities to refer to the constraints that Poles and Germans encountered in their colonial desires when faced with their unique imperial realities in and outside central Europe. The title also represents my humble way of paying homage to the late Susanne Zantop and her groundbreaking book, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Exploring Polish expeditions in Africa and the migration process in Brazil, as well as the Germanization of the eastern borderlands, has provided me with the opportunity to untangle Polish colonial desires and to analyze Polish agency and implication in the colonization of others.
This book has benefited from many extraordinary people who kindly supported me through research and several stages of the writing process. I am most grateful to Geoff Eley and Brian Porter-Szücs for believing in the project from the very beginning and for helping me so much over the years with their generous mentorship. Nancy Rose Hunt and George Steinmetz provided theoretical guidance when I was formulating my research questions. I want to thank them for encouraging me to think outside the box, across regional and disciplinary boundaries. Julia Hell, Frederick Cooper, Jane Burbank, Mamadou Diouf, and David Cohen offered early support and taught me greatly about imperial and colonial studies. Kathleen Canning gave me the opportunity to work under her wing at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, where I was able to collaborate with Bob Bain and Douglas Northrop and expand my research interests into world history and global studies. I am also grateful to numerous colleagues and friends in Ann Arbor for providing me with a nurturing intellectual community, which helped shape my work in significant ways.
After finishing my graduate studies, I was fortunate enough to become the assistant director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) at the University of Michigan (U-M). LACS gave me the chance to work closely with many distinguished scholars whose transregional inquiries motivated me to delve into the study of central European migration to Latin America, particularly the Polish diaspora in Brazil. I am indebted to LACS former directors Alexandra M. Stern, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, and Richard L. Turits for supporting my research and teaching activities. They kindly afforded me multiple professional development opportunities, which were fundamental for my academic growth and the book project. At LACS, I always counted on the assistance and generosity of amazing colleagues and friends. I want to thank particularly Sueann Caulfield, Rebecca J. Scott, Paulina Alberto, and visiting scholars Keila Grinberg and Flávio Limoncic for their encouragement and for teaching me so much about Brazilian culture and history. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude to Bebete Martins and Howard I. Tsai, my writing companions during the completion of the manuscript. I especially thank them for being a major support throughout the process and for all the fond times we shared at LACS and beyond.
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