Dystopia's Provocateurs

Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands

Edyta Materka (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

248 Seiten

2017
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
9780253028969 (ISBN)

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Toward the end of the Second World War, Poland's annexation of eastern German lands precipitated one of the largest demographic upheavals in European history. Edyta Materka travels to her native village in these "Recovered Territories," where she listens carefully to rich oral histories told by original postwar Slavic settlers and remaining ethnic Germans who witnessed the metamorphosis of eastern Germany into western Poland. She discovers that peasants, workers, and elites adapted war-honed informal strategies they called "kombinacja" to preserve a modicum of local agency while surviving the vicissitudes of policy formulated elsewhere, from Stalinist collectivization to the shock doctrine of neoliberalism. Informality has taken many forms: as a way of life, a world view, an alternate historical text, a border memory, and a means of magical transformation during times of crisis. Materka ventures beyond conventional ethnography to trace the diverse historical, literary, and psychological dimensions of kombinacja. Grappling with the legacies of informality in her own transnational family, Materka searches for the "kombinator within" on the borderlands and shares her own memories of how the Polish diaspora found new uses for kombinacja in America.

Edyta Materka received her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London.

Acknowledgements
Note on Pronunciation and Translation
Acronyms
Introduction
1. History's Ghosts
2. Kombinacja's Histories
3. Recovering Territories
4. Magical Stalinism
5. Proletarian Memories
6. Kombinacja's Ghosts
7. Border Memories
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	14.10.2017
Zusatzinfo	9 b&w illus., 1 map
Verlagsort	Bloomington, IN
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	367 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Zeitgeschichte
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-13	9780253028969 / 9780253028969
Zustand	Neuware