The article integrates the 18th century vampire discourse with problems and approaches of postcolonial studies on the one hand, and with the Galicia research in historical and cultural studies on the other hand. For this purpose, vampirism and postcolonial studies are defined at first, while the change of the vampirism discourse – passing from the revenant image to the one of bloodsucker – is analysed in the next step. Finally it is shown how the vampire’s character and discourse have been adjusted and narratively transformed in 18th-century travel literature on Galicia
This paper offers a postcolonial analysis of Ivan Franko’s attack on the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, published as Ein Dichter des Verrathes (A Poet of Treason) in May 1897. Using Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial notion of subalternity, Ivan Franko’s essay is interpreted as an opportunity for Ukrainian (subaltern) culture in Galicia to gain its own voice in opposition to Polish cultural dominance. As a result of this strategy, Franko deliberately wrote his essay in German and published it in Vienna, the political centre of the Habsburg Monarchy.
The article presents the problem of colonial and postcolonial discourse in relation to Eastern Galicia. It discusses the forms of cultural domination existing throughout history in the region and draws attention to their conscious “playing” by successive rulers of this territory, consequently leading to the formation of memory conflicts.
The article applies postcolonial approaches to economic discourses in regard to Habsburg Galicia at the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, focusing on the reform discourses of the state bureaucracy, the Galician landlords and the Polish national movement with regard to serfdom and agrarian reform. Making use of Said’s concept of “orientalism”, the article’s main section is dedicated to the analysis of how the definition and construction of peasants as social actors influenced reforms of serfdom until it was finally abolished in course of the revolution of 1848. Here, several different simultaneous narratives, as well as varying positions in the course of time can be observed, where cultural differences were overlapping with social cleavages. Thus, a polycentric, but not polyvalent approach of power and rule could help deconstructing or at least questioning binary dichotomies, in the way that hegemony is always dependent on a complex web of political, social and economic relations in a spatial context.