ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates of rhetorical claims and argumentative practices of “re-nationalization”—in postcolonially informed debates. It aims to conceptualize postcolonial theory itself, or rather certain modes of appropriation of it, as programmatic promotion or subcutaneous practice of exclusive ethno-cultural nationalism. The chapter argues that ethno-cultural nationalist trends, as they were falsely identified by Hans Kohn as essentially linked with the East, have happened to re-emerge in post-communist Eastern and East Central Europe; more specifically, in Polish and Russian postcolonially inspired debates. It plans to detect a peculiar sort of simultaneously post-colonial and postcolonialist nationalism—encapsulated in nationalist appropriations of postcolonial theory. According to the Warsaw-based scholar, post-dependence studies is a “discourse imitative in relation to the Polish Romantic discourse whose main feature is a national martyrology combined with a peculiarly comprehended heroism”. Being a negative notion, it prevents direct positive affirmation of something valuable and national.
