Book Discussion: Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory and Jews, Poles and Communists in Twenty-First Century Poland, by Kate Korycki

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

“Weaponizing the Past” explains why and how political elites in post-regime transition spaces narrate the past for political gain and what effects are produced by their preoccupation with collective remembering. First presenting a new theory of politicized memory and then telling the story of post-transition Poland, in which major political actors narrate communism as evil and connected with Jewishness, “Weaponizing the Past” shows how democracy, progressive ideals, and notions of national belonging are narrowed and constricted.
In tracing how Polish elites engage the narratives of the past, “Weaponizing the Past” engages two conceptual fields. First, it shows how political competition is structured through a resource called mnemonic capital. In a clear breach of expectations, local actors compete fiercely but instead of using platforms to do so, they use differentiated stories of the communist past. Second, the book shows that in weaving the stories of the past, the parties reinvent the nation in race-like terms. Contrary, again, to mainstream literatures, which see nations as historical and static—invented in their generality about two hundred years ago, implemented in their particularity and plurality since then, and simply persisting by the force of their normativity—political elites in Poland show active engagement with (re)shaping the nation, or who is “we” to what “them.” “They,” in Poland, are narrated as hostile and ethnically (as if racially) coded, and “they” are narrated in the past. Even though “they” are narrated in the past, the way “they” are imagined shapes and constricts the notions of the present-day “we.”

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Kate Korycki, Western U (Canada)

Roundtable Members

• Zsuzsa Csergo, Queen's U (Canada)

• Kate Korycki, Western U (Canada)

• Juliet Johnson, McGill U (Canada)

• Lidia Zessin-Jurek, Stockton U