EN
The essay Black despair, white light. On the monstrosity of metisation in “Dzieje królowej Oceanii” (“The Story of the Queen of Oceania”) by Sygurd Wiśniowski fo-cuses on the way of perceiving the problem of “race mixing” in the post-colonial discourse. The vision of a “half-caste” presented in this discourse is connected with the negative category of hybridity. In that perspective a Metis or Mulatto is a monstrous freak, deprived of a distinct identity. The protagonist of Wiśniowski’s novel, being such a person, is unable to find the original body scheme, and exists only thanks to the “white man’s look” (F. Fanon). As a result of the complex plot the heroine starts to realise, that her subjectivity is in fact established thanks to the system of differences. In the context of her metamorphosis her hybridity transforms its meaning, bringing it closer to the concepts of “synergism” and “syncretism”, which play an important role in the post-colonial theory because of their power to create new cultural values.