Contact and conflict: Polish-Jewish contact zone

Abstract

This article suggests using the category of contact zone taken from the postcolonial studies in the research on borderland, which allows to describe frontier phenomena and processes in their complexity, multi-dimensionality and ambiguity. Following M. L. Pratt contact zone is understood as the space of cooperation and competition, coexistence and antagonism, contact and conflict of groups. The subject of analysis are the representations of borderland in Polish-Jewish in the prose of 1930s (including the serialized novels published in mass-circulation press). In the centre of interest there is the motive of conflict communication. In the literary renditions interactions between Poles and Jews easily transform into conflict communication and focus on indicating group differences and borders, defining collective identities and their positioning. Conflictive communication appears in various places (school, street, neighbourhood), in various forms (nick-names, arguments, pogrom cries) and functions (from initiating and escalating tensions to inspiring riots and murders), adding to the transformation of a contact zone into a conflict zone.