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No matter how one defines its extent and borders, Eastern Europe has long been understood as a liminal space, one whose undeniable cultural and historical continuities with Western Europe have been belied by its status as an “Other” in the Western imagination. Across illuminating and provocative case studies, The World beyond the West focuses on the region’s ambiguous relationship to historical processes of colonialism and Orientalism. In exploring encounters with distant lands through politics, travel, migration, and exchange, it places Eastern Europe at the heart of its analysis while decentering the most familiar narratives and recasting the history of the region.
“The volume is an important, high-quality and easy-to-read building block on the global history of Eastern Europe.” • Sehepunkte
“This collection is a timely addition to emerging scholarship on Eastern European participation in the Othering and Orientalizing of the non-European world throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” • Epp Annus, Ohio State University
“The World Beyond the West makes valuable contributions to the fast-growing international interest in and research on Eastern Europe and its global and transregional contexts.” • Frank Hadler, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe
Mariusz Kałczewiak is Senior Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and at the University of Warsaw, Poland. His first book, Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2020) won the 2020 Best Book Award of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.
Part I: Affirming and Contesting the Empire
Chapter 1. Constructing Aziatchina: An Apology for Perceived Own “Emptiness” in Russian National and Imperial Discourses, 1828-1918
Batir Xasanov
Chapter 2. Involuntary Orientalists: Polish Exiles and Adventurers as Observers of the Kazakh Steppe and the Caucasus
Curtis G. Murphy
Chapter 3. “These Sufferers, Constantly Lamenting Their Bitter Fate”: The Image of the Mountain Jews in the Writings of Joseph Judah Chorny and Ilya Anisimov
Mateusz Majman
Part II: Creating the Other: Travel and Migration
Chapter 4. The East-West Dichotomy Disrupted: Triangulation and Reflections on the Imperial View in Hungarian Perceptions of North America
Balázs Venkovits
Chapter 5. Negogiating Empires: Eastern European Jewish Responses to the Expulsion of Jews from Palestine to Egypt in 1914–1915
Jonathan Hirsch
Chapter 6. From Exotic Adventure to Victimization to Estrangement: Imagining “Africa” through the Eyes of Czechoslovak Travel Writers (1950s–1980s)
Barbora Buzássyová
Part III: Representations and Fantasies
Chapter 7. Land Flowing with Milk and Honey. Polish Maritime and River/Colonial League’s Depictions of South America
Marta Grzechnik
Chapter 8. Between Postimperial Expansion and Promethean Mission: Africa and Africans in Interwar Polish Colonial Discourse
Piotr Puchalski
Chapter 9. Eastern Promises: Romanian Responses to the War in Vietnam
Jill Massino
Afterword
Magdalena Kozłowska and Mariusz Kałczewiak
Index