New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages, a seminar organised by Academia Europaea Wrocław Knowledge Hub, the University of Wrocław and the Lower Silesian University, on 25–27 September 2017, inquired into the problem of the rise of right-wing populism in Central Europe. Manifest in responses to the refugee crisis of 2015 and to the Brexit referendum in 2016 across Europe, the populists successfully mobilised constituencies with anti-EU and anti-immigration sentiments. These attitudes, in turn, stimulated the emergence of nationalist agendas on an unexpected scale, moving radical right-wing parties with a pronounced nationalist programme from the margins, much closer to real political power. As part of the Relocating Central Europe seminar series, our reflection focused on that region, attempting to answer fundamental questions about the sources, purposes and modes of operation of the new nationalist impetus in political programmes, including those fostered at government level.

A defining feature of new nationalisms, with their right-wing populist rhetoric, is the way they exploit the regime of truth prevalent in liberal democratic societies. Their use of the language of democracy, human rights and identity is sometimes hard to differentiate from the mainstream convention. Despite being majoritarian in the way it seeks democratic legitimacy, new nationalist discourse consistently advances demands framed in terms of minority protection. This is done by presenting the existence of ‘our’ nation as threatened by overwhelming forces of neo-liberal globalisation (embodied in the EU, the West or even in ‘the Washington establishment’). By using the Pussy Riot case as an empirical example, this article argues that there is no way of preventing the language of minority protection from being hijacked by ‘predatory identities’ unless one foregrounds the universal dimension of equality and emancipation, as opposed to rights and entitlements associated with particular identities. The key political question today, as always, is how to navigate between the totalitarian disregard of the local and the parochialist concentration on the particular.

In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted on the national imaginaries over the past few decades? This article discusses what happens with the social imaginaries when national(ist) symbols are reproduced through the medium of PowerPoint, as one of the main tools for constructing images of the nation in nation-branding campaigns, i.e. promotional campaigns initiated by governments in conjunction with corporate actors with the aim of producing an attractive image of a country for foreign investors and tourists. It is concluded that the representational technology of PowerPoint produces a nation as an imagined commodity rather than an imagined community.

In early 2018, the Polish parliament adopted controversial legislation criminalising assertions regarding the complicity of the ‘Polish Nation’ and the ‘Polish State’ in the Holocaust. The so-called Polish Holocaust Law provoked not only a heated debate in Poland, but also serious international tensions. As a result, it was amended only five months after its adoption. The reason why it is worth taking a closer look at the socio-cultural foundations and political functions of the short-lived legislation is twofold. Empirically, the short history of the Law reveals a great deal about the long-term role of Jews in the Polish collective memory as an unmatched Significant Other. Conceptually, the short life of the Law, along with its afterlife, helps capture poll-driven, manifestly moralistic and anti-pluralist imaginings of the past, which I refer to as ‘mnemonic populism’. By exploring the relationship between popular and political images of the past in contemporary Poland, this article argues for joining memory and populism studies in order to better understand what can happen to history in illiberal surroundings.

This article explores the relevance of economic and cultural (identity-based) factors in the emergence of nationalist sentiments among young people in Poland. It discusses the changing labour market situation of young workers, involving their precarisation and critically reviews existing accounts of new nationalism in Poland. In the body of the article, based on the analysis of biographical narrative interviews with young nationalist activists and right-wing supporters, the subjective justifications of their far-right views are analysed. It is concluded that the central motives for supporting the agenda of the nationalist movement by our informants are not directly connected with their economic situation, but related to their search for solid, clear and unambiguous foundations of social order and their biographical identities.

In this contribution the focus is on nationalism, i.e. the view that one’s own country and people are unique and superior, implying a negative comparison with regard to other national groups and countries. The research questions we set out to answer are: (1) what are the cross-national differences and trends in nationalism across Europe? (2) Which individual and national characteristics can explain these differences and changes in nationalism in European countries? We use high-quality cross-national data from 20 countries from the ‘National Identity’ modules of the International Social Survey Programme, collected in 1995, 2003 and 2013. Considerable differences between countries were found; however, within countries the level of nationalism remained rather stable over the period from 1995 to 2013.

The modern Polish–Ukrainian dialogue is the second interstate dialogue of the twentieth century, in the development of which the historical and political discourses have played an important role. The so-called Volhynia discourse poses the most serious challenge in this dialogue, while at the same time being its main component. The article claims the Volhynia discourse plays a major role in bringing about the asymmetry of historical memory between the two states. The events of Volhynia-43 have remained in Polish historical memory as an act of genocide perpetrated in 1941–1943 by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), on over 100,000 Poles and citizens of the Polish state inhabiting Galicia and Eastern Małopolska, including Volhynia. These territories, considered by the Ukrainian nationalist party OUN as indigenously Ukrainian, were to be included in the future independent Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian historiography, apart from sparse exceptions, avoids the term ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ in reference to the events in Volhynia, defining them as a conflict or a Polish–Ukrainian war with a comparable number of casualties on both sides. The article, analysing speeches and announcements by political leaders of Poland and Ukraine, focuses on explaining the causes and effects of this shift in accentuation in the Ukrainian discourse on Volhynia, and, broadly, in Ukraine working through its past.

In this FOCUS, eight contemporary Chinese literature scholars, in four articles, give their view of (some aspects of) the reception of Chinese literature and theory in Europe during the twentieth century. In the first article, Shunqing Cao and Zhoukun Han discuss how Chinese literature has been read and misread in Europe, but also how it has given rise to literary innovations in European literature and theory. Peina Zhuang and Yina Cao detail how the earliest English-language history of Chinese literature at the turn of the twentieth century presented a very one-sided perspective of its subject. Qilin Fu and Shubo Gao trace the reception of Maoist Marxism in European literature and philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. Yirong Hu and Lin Mei, finally, hold a plea for a redefinition of imagology to better account for the image of China in Europe and the West in an age of new global media.

In this article, it is argued that in the process of cultural transfer, literary translation and reception, the recipient will often transform the cultural rules and literary discourse in the original texts to make them fit the rules and discourse of the recipient reader/audience to target the taste of new readers. This phenomenon, which we call literary ‘domestic appropriation’, is a kind of transformation on a deeper level. Domestic appropriation is what can we get from literary variation, and it is the core part of variation studies. In cultural and literary exchange and dialogue between Chinese and European cultures, it occurs in both literary works and literary theory. History has witnessed how Chinese literary works are translated and introduced to Europe, in the process becoming an integral part of the canon of European literature. Chinese literary theory, when interpreted by European theorists, blends with local theory and furnishes new perspectives.

The writing of literary history, generally speaking, is a matter of selecting and organizing literary works according to aesthetic judgement and historical values. If one writes the literary history of a foreign culture, however, at least if one wants to include samples of literary works, one must contend with the issue of translation, not only in the sense of having to choose which source texts to translate but also in that of choosing among existing translations or of translating oneself. The dual role of a historian and a translator is a challenging and complicated balancing act, as proven in the case of H.A. Giles (1845–1935), whose 1901A History of Chinese Literature is the first Chinese literary history ever written in English. As one of the then leading sinologists in Europe, Giles had contributed tremendously to the dissemination of Chinese literature by way of smooth translations that appealed to his English readers, but which also formed an obstacle for the reader’s proper understanding of the history of Chinese literature. The evidence for this comes from his misguided take on the dual aspects of visibility and invisibility of the translator’s identity in writing about a foreign literature.

In Europe there have appeared several important collections on Marxist literary theory, such as Francis Mulhern’s Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992) and Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). However, Chinese voices are not included at all in these volumes. Maybe this lacuna results from a lack of awareness of Chinese Marxist aesthetics on the part of most European literary historians and critics. In this article, we seek to discuss the circumstances of European scholars’ contacts with Chinese Marxist aesthetics, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting from the variation theory perspective proposed by Shunqing Cao we will discuss how European scholars read and misread what they perceived as the meaning and universal applicability of what was happening in China at the time. The discussion is divided into three parts: the utopian interpretation of the Chinese theory of revolution in France, the critical reception by Eastern European Marxists, and the sympathetic interpretation by sinologists such as the Dutch diplomat and literary scholar Douwe Fokkema.

In the pre-globalization era, when communication between nations was difficult and infrequent, and direct (experiential) or indirect (textual-descriptive) knowledge was scant, images of ‘foreign countries’ were frequently constructions based on inadequate information. As a result, fictional descriptions and images were the primary source for people to gain some knowledge of other nations. However, beginning with the great voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we began to step into an age of globalization, which generated the diversification of ‘source texts’ in this regard. Today, the emergence of new media has accelerated and proliferated such diversity. These new media texts now play a dominant role in forming the image of other countries, to some degree replacing traditional fictional texts. The basic presuppositions of comparative literature imagology have changed accordingly. Starting from the core concept of ‘images’, this paper discusses why it is necessary to integrate imagology, with ‘semiotic images’ as core concept, and ‘communications research’.