ZAMEK Culture Centre

Meeting with Oliwia Bosomtwe and Margaret Ohia-Nowak, authors of books that encourage asking questions about our attitude towards racism. Do we harbour latent, culturally burdened notions that enable us to condone the often unwanted, racist mindset?

The meeting will be translated into Polish Sign Language.

Jak biały człowiek. Opowieść o Polakach i innych (Like a White Person: A Story About Poles and Others) by Oliwia Bosomtwe is a book about people of African descent in Poland. It tells the stories of people living there now and the figures whose lives may be reconstructed thanks to recollections and documents. Her protagonists were born in Poland, some chose it as their homeland while others visited it only briefly. The author describes the stereotypes and fantasies that fuelled perceptions of others during the period of transformation, in the Polish People’s Republic, the interwar period and during the partitions, weaving her personal experience into the narrative.

Antyczarny rasizm. Język – dyskurs – komunikacja (Anti-Black Racism: Language, Discourse, Communication) by Margaret Ohia-Nowak is the first study to describe the most important categories, concepts, and mechanisms of anti-Black racism in Poland. The author explains how race and blackness are conceived in Polish language and how the processes of anti-Blackness, anti-Black racism, and the racialization of Black persons of African descent unfold. Margaret Ohia-Nowak examines those processes using a semantic, pragmatic, and multimodal analysis of linguistic and discursive mechanisms of racialization in contemporary Polish public and private communication.

MONIKA BOBAKO is a philosopher, professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University, graduate of the Adam Mickiewicz University and the Central European University in Budapest. Author of Islamofobia jako technologia władzy. Studium z antropologii politycznej (Universitas, 2017) and Demokracja wobec różnicy. Multikulturalizm i feminizm w perspektywie polityki uznania, as well as editor of two collective works: Teologie emancypacyjne and Islamofobia. Konteksty. Bobako engages with the issues of race and racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, as well the problems of the postcolonial world, notably in the Muslim societies. The interests also include feminist issues, particularly in the context of political theory and philosophy of religion. Bobako’s current research project, funded by the National Science Centre, is entitled Genealogie peryferyjnej białości. Polskie tożsamości w perspektywie teorii urasawiania.