Over the past decade, there has been a growing call for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to reconsider its deep rooted ties to colonialism and imperialism. Since 2015, the migration crisis has sparked debates about the long term causes of these issues and the complicity of European states that did not engage in overseas colonisation in establishing the hierarchies of power and patterns of exclusion. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought the notion of CEE as a contested space to the fore once again, but has also revealed the persistence of exploitative and racialised ideologies. Although CEE has long been perceived as a region without colonies and peripheral to global colonial histories, it has nevertheless been implicated in colonial structures, material networks, and ongoing imaginaries. This panel investigates the region’s often overlooked bystander position — neither fully coloniser nor colonised — revealing its participation, complicity and subjugation across multiple historical moments. While the region was often regarded as standing on the margins of global colonialism, its involvement was tangible. Central and Eastern Europeans engaged in overseas expansion and consumed goods and ideas shaped by colonial encounters, traces of which remain in public spaces and culture. After 1918, new states pursued modernization and influence through colonial imaginaries of “Europeanness.” The communist era’s anti-imperialist stance coexisted with Soviet domination, while after 1989, post socialist societies revisited their histories through postcolonial and decolonial lenses. By uncovering these multifaceted entanglements, the panel aims to redefine Eastern Europe's role in global memory debates — not as an impartial observer of the colonial era, but as a region involved in processes of exploitation, racialisation, and extractivism. Conversely, we seek to understand how the region's experiences of subjugation, complicity and semi colonial status continue to shape its collective memory and identity.
Markéta Křížová, Charles University, "Imageries of Empire: Public Spaces of Prague and the Legacies of Colonialism"
The fact that colonial entanglements stretched far beyond direct overseas territorial holdings is easily demonstrated by taking a closer look at public spaces in Central European cities and the imprint that colonial fantasies and discourses of colonial complicity have left on them. This presentation will explore several public monuments in Prague, examining their histories and how they are perceived by the city's inhabitants today. It will also demonstrate how the past continues to be contested. There is no shared vision of the colonial past today; conflicting memories and narratives divide not just scholars, but also the general public. As with other CEE nations, the Czech people do not see themselves as colonisers today, but rather as the victims of imperial ambitions and conquest by more powerful neighbours. However, they were actually involved in, and benefited from, the complex web of economic, political and cultural processes brought about by overseas colonisation. Moreover, symbolically, they sought to align themselves with the most powerful Western European nations and assert their right to rule over others through dehumanising imagery of non-Europeans. Colonialist discourses have also left material traces in public spaces. These demonstrate the specifics of Czech 'colonialism without colonies' and how it remains present to this day.
Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, University of New Mexico
"From Partitioned Poland to Brazil: Land, Labor, and Rural Communities in Southern Brazil, 1871–1914"
In 1871, the first Polish colony was founded in Paraná, when peasants from Upper Silesia—then under German rule—left behind poverty and assimilation pressures to settle near Curitiba. Granted land in the new settlement of Pilarzinho, they became participants in Brazil’s late-nineteenth-century colonization drive in the southern frontier. Yet a paradox emerges: how could Poles, themselves subjects of imperial domination in Europe, become beneficiaries of colonial policies abroad?
This paper examines Polish migration to Brazil between 1871 and 1914 to interrogate the entanglements of empire, labor, and nation-building in a transatlantic context. Recruited by Brazilian officials eager to modernize the nation through European agricultural labor on the eve of abolition, Polish settlers arrived not merely as laborers seeking opportunity but as agents—conscious or not—of a colonial enterprise that reconfigured rural Brazil.
By tracing these intersecting histories, the paper reconsiders Polish migration as part of the transnational circulation of imperial imaginaries that linked Central and Eastern Europe to the Global South. It argues that this movement from partitioned Poland to southern Brazil illuminates how CEE’s own semi-colonial pasts were mutually constituted with, and complicit in, broader racial and settler-colonial expansions abroad.
Bernadette Biedermann, University of Gratz, "Central European universities and colonialism"
Museum and university collections from a postcolonial perspective. - Museum experiences and shaping identity
Museum experiences are memory-shaping, therefore museum collections serve an important role in shaping the identity of a society. Against this background the paper traces back the history of collections using Austria as a case study by focusing on the question how to deal with museum and university collections from a postcolonial perspective. Therefore, it takes recent legal and ethical standards into consideration and tries to understand the relevance and meaning of objects not only for today's museum visitors but also for the source community.
Tina Palaić, Slovene Ethnographic Museum, "Between Non Aligned Solidarity and the 'Civilised West': Dissecting the Practices and Narratives of the Museum of Non European Cultures"
Decolonisation poses a challenge for museums in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, as these regions have historically found themselves in a double bind: experiencing imperial oppression while also contributing to the colonial enterprise. Although the region was long considered peripheral to global colonial histories, it is the museum collections themselves that reveal how deeply embedded this part of Europe was in colonialism. The acquisition of objects for museum collections and their interpretation were influenced by Western thought, which legitimised the colonial project. Collectors and museum professionals in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe (CEE) encountered this influence through the circulation of literature and connections among museum workers. Using the dislocated unit of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, the Museum of Non European Cultures, as a case study, this paper dissects the ambivalences in museum practices and exhibition narratives. The author analyses exhibition narratives on non European cultures during the Yugoslav era, when state foreign policy was oriented towards the Non Aligned Movement, and juxtaposes these with collaborative museum practices involving students from non aligned and other Global South nations who studied at Yugoslav universities. While these narratives sought to build solidarity with other cultures, they simultaneously worked to create distance and reinforce a national identity aligned with the 'civilised West'. Contemporary academic interpretations of Yugoslavia's connections with the Global South span a broad spectrum. The way in which museums in this region will remember this period and use it for contemporary interpretations is still open and evolving, as they are only to grapple with the issue of decolonisation.
Magdalena Buchczyk, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Magdalena Buchczyk will comment and respond to all papers.
20260729T140020260729T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires2.13. Central and Eastern Europe Bystanding to Colonialism: Entanglements, Legacies, and Decolonial ReconsiderationsSV401 (ART)MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
‘Peasant epic’ in the decolonial context. Remembering 19th-century economic migration to Brazil in the communist Poland
Individual paperArt, Literature, Film, Media, and Other Representations02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/29 17:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/29 18:30:00 UTC
The recently published book Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920, has changed the way I understand Polish migration to Brazil in the 19th century. To answer the question of Polish self awareness of the colonial nature of settlement at that time, I suggest taking a look at Maria Konopnicka's book length epic poem Pan Balcer w Brazylii (Mr Balcer in Brazil), as well as examining how the reception of this book and its subsequent editions were linked to the changing geopolitical context of the interwar and Cold War periods. Based on the memoirs of a Polish peasant who emigrated to Brazil for economic reasons and then returned, the aforementioned epic poem was first published in 1910 and republished in 1945 as one of the first post war Polish books. As modern genre studies has demonstrated, epic poetry is especially popular in periods of transition. The volume was prefaced by a foreword from the political activist Michał Rękas, who refers to it as 'a magnificent monument to peasant power'. The decision to publish Konopnicka's epic can be interpreted as a form of anti German propaganda or as an attempt to replace the prevailing national epic, Pan Tadeusz, with a peasant epic promoting the socialist concept of class equality. In addition to these interpretations, this paper discusses the anti colonial overtones of the work in the context of 1945, as well as the other meanings this 'progressive' Polish literary text acquired at the time. Consistent with Ariela Azulay's approach, the proposed article emphasises the infrastructural, political, and cultural potential inherent in the publishing scene of 1945 while avoiding teleological interpretations of the period as a phase in the establishment of totalitarian power in Poland.
