Discourses of Blackness and Anti-Blackness in Poland

Discourses of Blackness and Anti-Blackness in Poland critically examines anti-Black racism and racial discourse in Poland, exploring how Blackness operates in spaces untethered from colonial histories yet entangled in the global racial order.

The volume challenges scholars in this space to extend their focus to Central and Eastern Europe, a region historically underrepresented in mainstream European discussions of race. Ohia-Nowak explores the mechanisms of anti-Black racism in Poland, a country without a colonial history in Africa, and the historical trajectories of how it has absorbed anti-Black and colonial discourses from the West. The book draws on ethnographic interviews, autoethnographic reflections, and media reports to examine the impact of these discourses on Black Poles, with Ohia-Nowak also drawing on her own unique researcher positionality as an educator, activist, and Black Polish woman living and working in the country. The volume foregrounds the importance of looking at how lived experience is shaped by racialised discourses rooted in colonial imaginaries toward pushing scholars to rethink their understandings of the intersection of race, Blackness, discourse, and national identity through a regional lens.

This book will appeal to researchers interested in sociolinguistics, critical discourse studies, and media studies, as well as interdisciplinary scholars interested in race and racism in Europe.