Dark, Almost Night by Joanna Bator as a (hi)story of the peripheral European city of Wałbrzych/Waldenburg

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Wałbrzych (in German, Waldenburg), a city located in Poland, ten kilometres away from the Czech Republic, as a peripheral space within a national and neo-liberal narrative. It looks into the way Joanna Bator’s novel Dark, Almost Night (2012) describes Wałbrzych for her readers, as she conjures up a paradoxical image of a place whose complex past challenges a homogenous vision of the Polish national identity and national history, but which, at the same time, remains deeply anti-liberal, economically backward, and dependent on the country’s economic centre – represented in the novel by Warsaw. It is argued that such discrepancies reflect the subversive status of Poland’s western peripheries as undermining both the foundational myth of the Polish post-war state (1947–89) and the success narrative of the Polish neo-liberal transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Central Europe
• peripheries
• Wałbrzych/Waldenburg
• neo-liberalism
• postcolonialism
• Polish national identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Dark, Almost Night has not yet been translated into English and, therefore, all quotations from the novel have been translated by the author from the 2012 Polish edition. Fragments of the texts have been translated by Maggie Zebracka, who is currently working on a full translation of the text. Selected samples of her translation are available on the website of the journal Asymptote: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/fiction/joanna-bator-dark-almost-night/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska

Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska is an assistant professor at the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. She gained her PhD in postcolonial studies with a thesis on the Anglo Guyanese novel (2015). Her articles have been published in Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Nordic Journal of English Studies, and Studia Anglica Posnaniensia. Her latest chapter is part of the collection entitled The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter (2021).