•  
  •  
 

Abstract

This article explores cross-cultural encounters and identities discourses in selected Polish and Russian travelogues about the Netherlands East Indies. Poles and Russians could travel to the Netherlands East Indies thanks to advantages afforded Europeans by the colonial system. Their occupations (for example, a privileged tourist, colonial scientist, diplomat) often made them suitable imperial agents. They defined themselves as Europeans but, as Eastern Europeans, they occupied an ambiguous position: Russians came from a land-based, economically backward “empire of the periphery“ (Boris Kagarlitsky 2008); Poles came from a semi-peripheral European nation subjected to foreign rule and, from their common experience of subjugation, some Polish authors were able to sympathize with the colonized peoples. Hence, a comparative approach leads to various insights into representations of colonial Indonesia.

References

Alami, Ahmed Idrissi. 2013. Mutual othering: Islam, modernity, and the politics of cross-cultural encounters in pre-colonial Moroccan and European travel writing. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Alatas, Syed Hussein. 1977. The myth of the lazy native: a study of the image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th century and its function in the ideology of colonial capitalism. London: Frank Cass.

Alekseev, Leonid Vasil’evich, G.A. Beliakova, and V.A. Poddubnaya-Arnol’di. 2001. Vladimir Mitrofanovich Arnol’di: 1871-1924. Moskva: Nauka.

Arnol’di, Vladimir Mitrofanovich. 2014. Po ostrovam Malayskogo Arhipelaga. Vpechatleniya i nablyudeniya naturalista. Moskva: Minuvshee.

Aust, Martin. 2019. “On parallel tracks at different speeds: historiographies of imperial Russia and the globalized world around 1900”, Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 29(2): 78-105.

Bakunin, Modest Modestovich. 2007. Tropicheskaya Gollandiya. Pyat’ let na ostrove Yava. Moskva: Minuvshee.

Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The location of culture. Second edition. London / New York, NY: Routledge.

Bird, Dúnlaith. 2019. “Clothing”, in: Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, and Kathryn Walchester (eds), Keywords for travel writing studies: a critical glossary, pp. 43-44. London: Anthem Press.

Bosma, Ulbe and Remco Raben. 2008. Being “Dutch” in the Indies: a history of creolisation and empire, 1500-1920. Translated by Wendie Shaffer. Singapore: NUS Press.

Clark, Steve and Paul Smethurst (eds). 2008. Asian crossings: travel writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. [DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099142.001.0001.]

Das, Nandini. 2016. “Encounter as process: England and Japan in the late sixteenth century”, Renaissance Quarterly 69(4): 1343-1368. [DOI:10.1086/690315.]

Demin, Lev Mihailovich. 1984. V dal’nih stranstviyah: rasskaz o puteshestvennikah Shcherbatovyh. Moskva: Nauka.

Ellingson, Ter. 2001. The myth of the noble savage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Ewertowski, Tomasz. 2016. “The image of the Chinese in the Southeast Asian contact zone. National comparisons in the travelogues of Milan Jovanović and Władysław Michał Zaleski”, Imagologiya i komparativistika 6(2): 40-57. [DOI: 10.17223/24099554/6/2.]

Ewertowski, Tomasz. 2022a. “The tropics and the East-Central European gaze. The natural world of Southeast Asia in Polish and Serbian travel writings”, Wacana. Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia Vol. 23 No. 1: 1-37. [DOI: 10.17510/wacana.v23i1.1088.]

Ewertowski, Tomasz. 2022b. “Javanese Mosaic: three Polish representations of Java from the second half of the 19th century”, Indonesia and the Malay World 50(147): 211-233. [DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2022.2044659.]

Ewertowski, Tomasz. 2022c. “A scientist’s and tourist’s touch – The Haptic in travelogues about the Island of Java (M. Siedlecki and E.R. Scidmore)”, Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies (39): 34-58. [DOI: 10.15290/CR.2022.39.4.03.]

Fabian, Johannes. 2014. Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. Second edition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Fedorowicz, Zygmunt. 1966. Michał Siedlecki (1873-1940). Wrocław: Ossolineum; Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk.

Forajter, Wacław. 2014. Kolonizator skolonizowany. Przypadek Sygurda Wiśniowskiego. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.

Forsdick, Charles. 2009. “Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart in China: travel writing as stereoscopic and polygraphic form”, Studies in Travel Writing 13(4): 293-303. [DOI: 10.1080/13645140903257507.]

Gaibulina, Karina. 2023. “The role of the ‘frontier’ in conceptualising the Russian imperial identity: a study based on Polish political prisoners”, HYBRIDA. Revue scientifique sur les hybridations culturelles et les identités migrantes (6): 179-198. [DOI:10.7203/HYBRIDA.6.26243.]

Gnevusheva, E.I. 1962. V strane treh tysyach ostrovov (Russkie uchenye v Indonezii). Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoy Literatury.

Goss, Andrew. 2011. The floracrats: state-sponsored science and the failure of the englightenment in Indonesia. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Gregory, Derek. 1995. “Between the book and the lamp: imaginative geographies of Egypt, 1849-50”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20(1): 29-57.

Gvozden, Vladimir. 2011. Srpska putopisna kultura 1914-1940. Studija o hronotopičnosti susreta. Beograd: Službeni glasnik.

Honings, Rick. 2021. “Guardians of the colony: nineteenth-century military travellers in the Dutch East Indies”, Studies in Travel Writing 25(4): 461-486. [DOI:10.1080/13645145.2022.2143995.]

Honings, Rick. 2022a. “A preacher’s perspective: Sytze Roorda van Eysinga’s representation of the Dutch East Indies”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 178(1): 38-66. [DOI: 10.1163/22134379-bja10033.]

Honings, Rick. 2022b. “’Kampong smells’, guna-guna and ‘indigenous perkaras’: the representation of Indonesians in the work of P.A. Daum”, Dutch Crossing 46(2): 115-132. [DOI: 10.1080/03096564.2020.1777810.]

Honings, Rick. 2023. “Indigenous eyes. Javanese colonial travel texts as autoethnographic expressions: the case of Purwalelana and Suparta”, in: Doris Jedamski and Rick Honings (eds), Travelling the Dutch East Indies. Historical perspectives and literary representations, pp. 138-168. Hilversum: Verloren.

Huigen, Siegfried. 2009. Knowledge and colonialism: eighteenth-century travellers in South Africa. Leiden: Brill.

Jedamski, Doris and Rick Honings (eds). 2023. Travelling the Dutch East Indies. Historical perspectives and literary representations. Hilversum: Verloren.

Kagarlitsky, Boris. 2008. Empire of the periphery: Russia and the world system. Translated by Renfrey Clarke. London: Pluto Press. [DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt18fs32g.]

Kalinowska, Izabela. 2004. Between East and West: Polish and Russian nineteenth-century travel to the Orient. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

Kołodziejczyk, Dorota and Siegfried Huigen. 2023. “East Central Europe between the colonial and the postcolonial: a critical introduction”, in: Siegfried Huigen and Dorota Kołodziejczyk (eds), East Central Europe

between the colonial and the postcolonial in the twentieth century, pp. 1-32. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-17487-2_1.]

Kołos, Anna. 2011. “’Wildness’ as a metaphor for self-definition of the colonised subject in the Positivist period in Poland”, Journal of Education Culture and Society 3(1): 81-95. [DOI: 10.15503/jecs20111-81-95.]

Kraan, Alfons van der. 1980. Lombok: conquest, colonization, and underdevelopment, 1870-1940. Singapore: Asian Studies Association of Australia. [Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/205896.]

Kulczyński, Stanisław. 1977. “Korespondencja między Marianem Raciborskim a Władysławem Kulczyńskim z lat 1895-1917”, Studia i Materiały z Dziejów Nauki Polskiej. Seria B(27): 19-45.

Lingelbach, Jochen. 2020. On the edges of whiteness: Polish refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War. Oxford: Berghahn Books. [DOI:10.3167/9781789204445.]

Maier, Albert. 2007. “Travel writing”, in: Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (eds), Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. A critical survey, pp. 446-450. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Marcinowska, Jadwiga. 1925. W upalnem sercu Wschodu. Wrażenia z podróży po Egipcie, Indjach, Cejlonie i Jawie. Lwów / Warszawa: Książnica / Atlas.

Marinova, Margarita. 2012. Transnational Russian-American travel writing. New York, NY: Routledge. [DOI: 10.4324/9780203807033.]

Mee, Catherine. 2014. Interpersonal encounters in contemporary travel writing. French and Italian perspectives. London: Anthem Press.

Morgan, Susan. 1996. Place matters: gendered geography in Victorian women’s travel books about Southeast Asia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Mrázek, Jan. 2013. “Czech tropics”, Archipel 86: 155-190.

Mrázek, Jan. 2017. “Returns to the wide world: errant Bohemian images of race and colonialism”, Studies in Travel Writing 21(2): 135-155. [DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2017.1328015.]

Mrázek, Jan. 2022. On this modern highway, lost in the jungle. Tropics, travel, and colonialism in Czech poetry. Prague: Karolinum Press.

Mrázek, Jan (ed.). 2024. Escaping Kakania; Eastern European travels in colonial Southeast Asia. Vienna: Central European University Press.

Ng, Maria Noëlle. 2002. Three exotic views of Southeast Asia: the travel narratives of Isabella Bird, Max Dauthendey, and Ai Wu, 1850-1930. White Plains, NY: EastBridge.

Patton, Raymond A. 2022. “The ‘vanishing Indian’ and the vanishing Pole: from a middle ground to a logic of elimination in the European and global periphery, 1840-1880”, Slavic Review 81(3): 609-630. [DOI: 10.1017/slr.2022.225.]

Peleggi, Maurizio. 2012. “The social and material life of colonial hotels: comfort zones as contact zones in British Colombo and Singapore, ca. 1870-1930”, Journal of Social History 46(1): 124-153.

Pettinger, Alasdair and Tim Youngs (eds). 2020. The Routledge research companion to travel writing. New York, NY: Routledge.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 2008. Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. Second edition. London / New York, NY: Routledge. [DOI: 10.4324/9780203932933.]

Raciborski, Marian. “Listy oraz rękopisy prac przyklejone do kart, w tym do Alfreda Albinowskiego z l. 1893-1907 i do Stefana Stobieckiego z lat 1909-1911”, Unpublished manuscript: Przyb. 810/76. Jagiellonian Library in Kraków.

Ricklefs, Merle Calvin. 2007. Polarising Javanese society: Islamic and other visions (c. 1830-1930). Singapore: NUS Press.

Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books.

Savage, Victor R. 1984. Western impressions of nature and landscape in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Singapore University Press.

Savitskiy, Evgeny. 2019a. “Dekadentskaya estetika i imperskie identichnosti: niderlandskaya Indiya 1890-h godov glazami russkogo konsula”, Rossiya i sovremennyj mir (4): 171-185. [DOI: 10.31249/rsm/2019.04.10.]

Savitskiy, Evgeny. 2019b. “Botanicheskiy sad kak kolonial’naya instituciya: V.M. Arnol’di o poezdke v Beytenzorg v 1909 godu”, Novaya i Novejshaya Istoriya 63(6): 49-64. [DOI: 10.31857/S013038640007609-7.]

Savitskiy, Evgeny. 2020. “Byli li kolonial’nye gostinicy forpostami evropejskoy kul’tury? Svidetel’stva russkih puteshestvennikov po niderlandskoj Indii konca XIX - nachala XX v”, Rossiya i sovremennyj mir (4): 23-37. [DOI: 10.31249/rsm/2020.04.02.]

Shcherbatova. 2019. V strane vulkanov. Moskva: Rugram.

Siedlecki, Michał. 1913. Jawa — przyroda i sztuka. Uwagi z podróży. Kraków: Wydawnictwo J. Mortkowicza.

Siedlecki, Michał. 1927. Opowieści malajskie. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo J. Mortkowicza.

Snow, Karen A. 2004. “A Russian consul in the Dutch Indies (1894-1899): Southeast Asia through Russian eyes”, Russian History 31(1-2): 61-82. [DOI: 10.1163/187633104X00025.]

Spurr, David. 1993. The rhetoric of empire. Colonial discourse in journalism, travel

writing, and imperial administration. Durham / London: Duke University Press.

Steenis-Kruseman, M.J. van and C.G.G.J. van Steenis. 1950. Malaysian plant collectors and collections being a cyclopaedia of botanical exploration in Malaysia and a guide to the concerned literature up to the year 1950. Jakarta: Noordhoff-Kolff. [Flora Malesiana series.] [Retrieved from https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/105781.]

Taylor, Jean Gelman. 2009. The social world of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in colonial Indonesia. Second edition. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Thompson, Carl. 2011. Travel writing. London / New York, NY: Routledge.

Thompson, Ewa. 2000. Trubadurzy imperium. Literatura rosyjska i projekt kolonialny. Translated by Agnieszka Sieroszulska. Kraków: Universitas.

Toivanen, Mikko Samuli. 2019. Colonial tours: the leisure and anxiety of empire in travel writing from Java, Ceylon and the straits settlements, 1840-1875. PhD thesis, European University Institute.

Tomberge, Nick. 2023. “’An evocation of our colonies for the Western eye’. Louis Couperus’ aestheticising gaze from the car”, in: Doris Jedamski and Rick Honings (eds), Travelling the Dutch East Indies. Historical perspectives and literary representations, pp. 201-227. Hilversum: Verloren.

Tyson, Adam. 2013. “Vigilantism and violence in decentralized Indonesia: the case of Lombok”, Critical Asian Studies 45(2): 201-230. [DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2013.792570.]

Ureña Valerio, Lenny A. 2019. Colonial fantasies, imperial realities: race science and the making of Polishness on the fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Veer, Coen van ‘t. 2020a. “The sea voyage as a marriage snare: gender in novels about the passage between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies (1869-1891)”, Dutch Crossing 44(3): 257-269. [DOI: 10.1080/03096564.2018.1512255.]

Veer, Coen van ‘t. 2020b. De kolonie op drift: de representatie en constructie van koloniale identiteit in fictie over de zeereis tussen Nederland en Nederlands-Indië (1850-1940). Hilversum: Verloren. [Retrieved from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/85449.]

Veer, Coen van ‘t. 2023. “Thrilling fiction, travel guides and spaces of identity. Sea voyages between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies in novels and short stories, 1850-1940”, in: Doris Jedamski and Rick Honings (eds), Travelling the Dutch East Indies. Historical perspectives and literary representations, pp. 111-138. Hilversum: Verloren.

Wacławek, Joanna. 2014. “Latające żaby i batiki krakowskie. Jawajska podróż profesora Michała Siedleckiego i jej znaczenie dla poznania kultury i sztuki Indonezji w Polsce”, in: Renata Lesner-Szwarc (ed.), Odcienie Indonezji, pp. 15-29. Toruń: Oficyna Wydawnicza Kucharski.

Wagner, Florian. 2022. Colonial internationalism and the governmentality of empire, 1893-1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [DOI: 10.1017/9781009072229.]

Wiatrowski, Przemysław. 2014. “Profesora Michała Siedleckiego Jawa – przyroda i sztuka. Uwagi z podróży okiem językoznawcy – w stulecie wydania”, in: Renata Lesner-Szwarc (ed.), Odcienie Indonezji, pp. 31-48. Toruń: Oficyna Wydawnicza Kucharski.

Wolska, Krystyna and Joanna Lidacka. 2000. Strącamy pył czasu. Rzecz o Jadwidze Marcinowskiej. Puławy: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Muzeum Oświatowego w Puławach.

Zajas, Paweł. 2012. “Polacy jako Burowie. Imagologia pomiędzy auto- i heterostereotypem”, in: Jerzy Axer and Tadeusz Bujnicki (eds), Wokół “W pustyni i w puszczy”. W stulecie pierwodruku powieści, pp. 29-52. Kraków: Universitas.

Zaleski, Władysław Michał. 1898. Podróż po Indo-Chinach r. 1897 i 1898. Kraków: Printed by author.

Zarycki, Tomasz. 2023. “Polish stereotypes of the East: old and new mechanisms of orientalisation in the regional and transnational dimensions”, in:

Siegfried Huigen and Dorota Kołodziejczyk (eds), East Central Europe between the colonial and the postcolonial in the twentieth century, pp. 57-85. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [DOI:10.1007/978-3-031-17487-2_3.]

Download

Share

COinS