Racialisation of the Nation and Transmutation of Race: Two-Way Transformation in Polish Romantic Writing

Abstract

This article outlines Poland’s two-way conceptual transformation from nation to race and race to nation in selected texts by authors writing in the inter-insurrectional period. This period was dominated by the Romantic movement, where the concept of nation overshadowed the discourse on human divisions. The latter included the notion of race reduced to a national or ethnic group with fixed characteristics. While the nation’s racialisation was purposefully initiated by Polish political and intellectual elites, outside of these circles, writers racialised the nation by superimposing characteristics recognised as typical of the races they were describing onto the nation’s cultural template.