Martyna Bryla
Martyna Bryla holds an MA in English Philology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, and a PhD in English Studies from the University of Málaga in Spain, where she works as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer. Her research interests include literary imagology, particularly in relation to East-Central Europe, and the construction of selfhood and otherness in multinational contexts. She has published on the European connections in the fiction of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates. She has also written about migrant experience in Gary Shteyngart’s fiction and the representation and enactment of selfhood and otherness in literary and social spaces of contemporary Europe.
Beyond Identity? Mapping Polishness in Contemporary Migrant Fiction Written in Europe
What is identity? It is common academic practice to qualify this term with epithets to make the task of explaining what it stands for more feasible: “national identity”
or “migrant identity” conveniently reduce the realm of academic speculation to specific coordinates which promise conceptual clarity, but do not guarantee definitive
answers. One of the reasons for this may be, as Zygmunt Bauman (2013) posited, that identity is not cast in stone but undergoes modifications, along with life itself,
through external circumstances and personal choices. In this sense, it involves negotiations between who we are (by birth or ethnic/cultural/religious allegiances) and whom we feel we are by virtue of the above but also our own choices, values, and beliefs. The situation of migration, perhaps more than any other life condition, brings such negotiations to the fore, because it always entails a change to the self. Therefore, in this paper I propose to explore identity through contemporary migrant fiction written by Polish female authors who live and work in other European countries: Grażyna Plebanek, Agnieszka Dale, and A.M. Bakalar. Drawing on theoretical premises of postcolonial theory and post-dependence studies, I wish to unpack what identity means for Polish female nomads moving through contemporary European spaces, and ascertain whether it is possible for them to move beyond identity in its national-cultural dimension. Works cited Bauman, Zygmunt. Identity. Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2013.
