PoSoCoMeS Seminar #30. Weaponizing the Past: Kate Korycki in conversation with Brian Porter-Szűcs

At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Kate Korycki discusses her book “Weaponizing the Past Collective Memory and Jews, Poles, and Communists in Twenty-First Century Poland” (2023) with Brian Porter-Szűcs. About the Book: Kate’s first book (Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory, and Jews, Poles, and communists in 21st Century Poland, Berghahn Books 2023) explores how collective remembering of communism in Poland hallows democracy and progressive politics, and how it constricts the imaginary of the nation. More specifically, Weaponizing the Past explains why and how political elites in post-regime transition spaces narrate the past for political gain and what effects are produced by their preoccupation with collective remembering. First presenting a theory of politicized memory and then telling the story of post-transition Poland, in which many different political actors narrate communism as evil and connected with Jewishness, Korycki shows how democracy, progressive ideals, and notions of national belonging are narrowed and constricted. By exploring the contours of present-day anti-communism the book traces the operation of contemporary nation-making as well as its most recent implication with right-wing populism. Author: Kate Korycki is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Western University in Canada. Focusing on the meaning and productivity of stories, Kate tracks how narratives of the past are creatively manipulated, how they constitute collective imaginaries, and how those imaginaries structure and justify stratified subject positions in the present. Her research concerns the processes by which group or national identities are imagined and reimagined, and how they implicate gender, race and class in the creation of powerful, benefiting yet oblivious, majorities. Discussant: Brian Porter-Szűcs is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His current work focuses on the history of economic thought in post-WWII Poland, and his newest book (forthcoming in 2025) is Commodified Communism: Socialist Values and Capitalist Prices in the Polish People’s Republic. Prior to that, he published Wiara i Ojczyzna: Katolicyzm, Nowoczesność, i Polska (Wydawnictwo Filtry, 2022), which is a updated and translated version of Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is also the author of Całkiem zwyczajny kraj: Historia Polski bez martyrologii (Wydawnictwo Filtry, 2021), a revised and expanded edition of Poland and the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), as well as When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in 19th Century Poland (Oxford University Press, 2000), which was translated into Polish as Gdy nacjonalizm zaczął nienawidzić: Wyobrażenia nowoczesnej polityki w dziewiętnastowiecznej Polsce (Pogranicze, 2011). Together with Bruce Berglund, he co-edited Christianity and Modernity in East-Central Europe (Central European University Press, 2010). Porter-Szűcs has been a professor at the University of Michigan since 1994, where he teaches classes on the history of the economy, the intellectual history of capitalism and socialism, the history of Roman Catholicism, and the history of Poland. He maintains a blog called “Polish Polemics” (https://porterszucs.substack.com) which features weekly essays in both Polish and English.