18 October 2025, Research Centre for Transnational Literary Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow

Taking Coetzee’s The Pole as the seminar’s major point of interest and analysis, the event is to investigate South Africa’s multifaceted engagement and dialogue with Poland – its history, culture, literary production, and heritage. What are the genealogies of this dialogue and what parallels (political, affective, identity-related) between Poland and South Africa do they reveal? What were (and are) the effects and motives for establishing transnational artistic and cultural alliances across the north-south/east-west divide? How have South Africans understood, perceived, and conceptualised Poland over the decades? How did the immigrants from the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Second Polish Republic, and People’s Poland contribute to South African cultural, social, and political life? What kind of role has Poland played in South African cultural production and how to explain its appeal to a number of iconic South African writers and artists? How have the dominant and discourse-generating power centres mediated in establishing and sustaining the South African-Polish creative conversation? Finally, has the South African-Polish dialogue been a properly reciprocal relationship?

Proposals for 20-minute presentations, consisting of a brief biographical note (including academic title and institutional affiliation) and a 150-word abstract, should be sent to robert.kusek@uj.edu.pl no later than 15 June 2025.

Selected papers delivered at the research seminar will be published in the monograph The Pole(s): Coetzee and Others (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage, Brill). Deadline for the submission of book chapters is 30 November 2025.