National Demons
My book project examines some of the major fears and anxieties in the Polish national imagination.
In this project, I examine how the ongoing debate on Silesian identity in contemporary Poland reveals key ideas about the nation’s presumed enemies, both internal and external. As I study examples of bottom-up and top-down political discourse from the 2010s, I argue that the national imagination is dominated by powerful narratives about the country’s enemies, which continue to shape the Polish political discourse. These narratives, as I show, contribute to the discursive construction of Poland as a besieged fortress, and explain the country’s reactionary turn to conservatism in the second decade of the twenty-first century.