EN
In an introduction to a discussion about Joseph Conrad and colonialism, the authoress proposed a synthetic description of Polish encounters with Africa: from Beniowski. Szolc-Rogozinski, Sienkiewicz, Conrad, Czekanowski and Malinowski to Kapuscinski. She also recalled Poles taking photographs of Africa: starting with Jan Czekanowski, Kazimierz Zagórski and Witold Grzesiewicz, to Ryszard Kapuscinski and Chris Ledóchowski. 'The history of Poland compels her to oscillate between methods deployed by the colonialists and those of the colonised. This past is the reason why Polish encounters with exotic cultures were rarely devoid of intermediaries. The third link, a combination of a matchmaker and a duenna, were usually West European institutions. Conrad and Malinowski arrived from the peripheries and, as writers, were condemned to cosmopolitan European identity and a Polish cultural distance; they examined the world from positions which enabled them to apply encounters with the Other for creating new paradigms of ethnographic subjectivity and self-creation'.