Search results
Your search found 1 item
Home  / Search Results
Remembering and Belonging: Jewish Heritage and Civic Agency in Poland's Haunted Urban Spaces
Author(s): Cervinkova, Hana; Golden, Juliet D.
Date: 2020
Topics: Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Jewish Heritage, Jewish Culture, Cities and Suburbs, Nationalism
Abstract: In the context of Poland’s recent illiberal turn, large cities have been important stages where the fault lines of the national imaginary that run through Polish society have become apparent. In this article, based on ethnographic research in the Polish city of Wroclaw, we focus on individual cultural agents who have engaged with the marginalised Jewish heritage of the city in constructing diverse imaginaries of urban belonging. Their work, carried out against the backdrop of exclusionary nationalist agenda of the Polish state, illuminates the power of human agency to harness cultural heritage as a social and political resource for the present. We show how through their urban-based practices, these cultural agents challenge the Polish hegemonic heritage discourses that exclude the Other from the national imaginary.