The World beyond the West: Perspectives from Eastern Europe

The World beyond the West: Perspectives from Eastern Europe, edited by Mariusz Kałczewiak and Magdalena Kozłowska is a timely contribution to the fast-growing historiography of Eastern Europe's relations with the non-Western world. The overarching theme of this volume is Eastern Europeans’ attitudes towards “the world beyond the West” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The authors argue that Eastern Europeans were not solely targets of Western Europeans’ Orientalization and Othering. They demonstrate that various actors from Eastern Europe including travelers, activists, businesspeople, and lobbyist groups were also agents in these processes and produced their own Others. Overall, the volume argues that the Eastern European condition shaped by its self-perceived and externally attributed peripherality, in-betweenness, and Otherness defined how the region shaped its relations with lands and people outside Europe (p. 2).The authors understand Eastern Europe broadly. It comprises today's Russia and some of its former Cold War satellites including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The contributions also include voices of minority groups within these larger political entities and focus on Eastern Europeans’ encounters with the lands and peoples of the Middle East, Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa (p. 2). Chronologically the contributions go beyond the “hyper-Orientalist” period of the fin-de-siecle (p. 7) and stretch from the 1830s to the 1980s.The papers are grouped into three thematic parts. The first part, “Contesting and Affirming the Empire” includes contributions that evolve around the nineteenth century Russian Empire. It discusses how the Tsarist Empire, with its politics and institutions, saw the world. The papers in this section lend a voice to the Empire's “peoples on the margin,” especially the Poles and Jews, who played a role in adopting an Orientalist gaze toward the groups regarded as being even further from the imperial center.Batir Xasanov examines the concept of “Aziatchina,” which originated in the early nineteenth century when the Russian Empire's intellectual circles sought to position their homeland versus Europe. “Aziatchina” implied a lack of certain qualities including “culture, progress, compassion, independent thinking, freedom of choice, rationalism” (p. 23) and suggested physical emptiness. Xasanov demonstrates the importance of “Aziatchina” and of concepts relating to “emptiness” as components of Russian imperial and national thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Curtis G. Murphy engages with the activism and ideas of nineteenth century Polish revolutionaries turned exiles. In analyzing their encounters with local populations of the Caucasus and the Kazakh Steppe in the mid-nineteenth century, he argues that Polish exiles viewed these Russian Imperial subjects in unequal terms, sometimes advocating for one group's resistance to Russia while welcoming an imperial civilizing mission of the other. Murphy explores how assumptions about race played a key role in this process. Accordingly, while the Caucasian highlanders often featured in Polish exiles’ ethnographic accounts as collaborators in a common fight against Russian imperialism, the anti-imperial revolts of the nomad Kazakhs usually evoked little sympathy (p. 45).Mateusz Majman analyzes the image of Mountain Jews in the works of nineteenth century emancipated Russian Jews. As he argues, works by both Joseph Judah Chorny and Ilya Anisimov constituted pioneering contributions to the emerging discipline of Oriental Studies in Russia (p. 71). Although neither was an example of classical Orientalization, both were significant to the development of the image of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus in late nineteenth century Russian society (pp. 84–85).The second part “Creating the Other: Travel and Migration” focuses on accounts of Eastern European travelers, journalists, and activists. The authors demonstrate that these accounts both provide insights into how Eastern Europeans viewed the lands they visited but also allow us to comprehend the complexities of their self-understanding. The papers present Eastern Europeans as producers and reproducers of Orientalist images.Balázs Venkovits shows that nineteenth century perceptions of America in Hungarian travelogues were shaped by the specific positioning of Hungary in the West-East dichotomy, on the one hand, and by the dominant image of the USA in the Western hemisphere, on the other. Both served as filters through which the remaining countries of the area were perceived (p. 97). By focusing on Mexico, Venkovits demonstrates that although the first significant group of travelers to Mexico consisted of former 1848–1849 revolutionaries, most would neither sympathize with Mexico nor draw any parallels between the condition of Hungarians and Mexicans (pp. 106, 110). Instead, they embraced the vocabulary typical of Western travel writing that reflected an imperial gaze and colonial discourse (pp. 100, 106).Jonathan Hirsch discusses Eastern European Jews’ perspectives on the refugee crisis that occurred at the outset of World War I in the Middle East. The expulsion of Eastern European Jewish settlers from Palestine to Egypt strengthened Western cultural supremacy among some leading Zionist activists, especially Vladimir Jabotinsky. Hirsch demonstrates that Jabotinsky positioned Eastern European Jews as actors in the British colonial project in Egypt. He also evaluates the division Jabotinsky drew between Jewish exiles from the Russian Empire and Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs (pp. 124–125).Barbora Buzássyová examines representations of “Africa” in Czechoslovak travel accounts from the 1950s to the 1980s. She assesses how literary representations of Africa in socialist settings were “decolonized” from stereotypical images imposed by nineteenth century Western imagery based on the dichotomy of “white saviors” and “helpless black victims” (p. 145). Buzássyová argues that these representations of Africa and Africans allowed Czechoslovak policymakers to “perceive their own socialist culture as superior to the ‘developing’ South but at the same time equally superior to the morally corrupted West” (p. 145).The third part, “Representations and Fantasies,” concentrates on Eastern Europeans’ colonial aspirations and political ambitions toward parts of Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia from the interwar period to the 1960s. The contributions explore various forms of colonial discourses produced by Eastern European state and non-state actors ranging from voicing one's own colonial claims through championing Western imperialism to supporting local anti-colonial struggles.Marta Grzechnik studies Polish colonial fantasies toward Latin America in the interwar period as expressed by the Maritime and River League (the Maritime and Colonial League after 1930) and its collaborators. She focuses on the conceptualizations of South America and its inhabitants, and of Poles in relation to them. Exploring three case studies, the paper examines “discursive practices that were adopted to help construct the envisaged colonial empire and more importantly the image of Pole as a pioneer and explorer that would support such imperial ambitions” (p. 174).Piotr Puchalski considers different forms of colonial discourse that accompanied—and sometimes contradicted—Poland's interwar policies in Africa. He shows that Polish colonial fantasies stemmed from the understanding that a European state had to possess colonies as a prerequisite for modernity, but that this perceived need for colonies was conditioned by the newly independent country's socioeconomic backwardness (pp. 198–199). He demonstrates that according to changing geopolitical circumstances and domestic political prerogatives, discourse ranged from advocating Western imperialism to supporting local anti-imperialist independence movements. Puchalski concludes that these changing attitudes reveal the Polish interwar psyche and reflect a simultaneous condition of “coloniality” and “postcoloniality” (p. 209).Finally, Jill Massino's paper moves to 1960s South-East Asia. It examines the complex relationship between socialist ideology and images of the Other by focusing on official representations and popular perceptions of the Vietnam War in Romania. Massino also discusses the ways the conflict in Vietnam became part of Romanians’ everyday imaginary reflecting on the role of media in this process.One weakness of this otherwise inspiring volume arises. While the introduction opens with an account of a Russian-Jewish female doctor employed in a 1930s French Moroccan public hospital, there are few voices of Eastern European women in this volume. Only Buzássyová’s paper discusses travel accounts of two female Czechoslovak journalists. Since the book spans two centuries when women also travelled beyond Europe's borders, one expects that female voices would be more prominent.Overall, The World beyond the West is captivating and answers the call to introduce Eastern Europe to the field of global history. The contributors splendidly explore the region's position within transregional entanglements during the dynamic nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume will be of relevance to all interested in the history of Eastern Europe as well as practitioners of global history. It provides a fresh perspective on the history of the region and its connections with other parts of the world.