Crossroads of Liberty. Asian, African and European Literature Towards Freedom and Oppression

This volume is a selection of papers originally read in English at the fifth edition of the International Conference on “Orient in Literature – Literature of the Orient” (OLLO), which took place from 28 March to 29 March 2019 at the Faculty of Languages of the Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) in Torun.

The present volume consists of 20 articles that cover a wide range of perspectives and approaches. This book is alphabetically arranged1, not least because of the disparity of material and the depth of individual analyses. The majority of the contributions deal with contemporary literature written from the mid-19th century to the present by writers from different countries and regions of Africa (Egypt, Nigeria and Somalia) and, above all, Asia (Kuwait, Qatar, Iranian Azerbaijan, India, China and Japan). Only two articles explore ancient and early medieval texts (Iwona Milewska on stories in the Indian epic Mahābhārata and Arzu A. Sadykhova on Arabic poetry). Four articles focus on the perception and representation of “the Orient” through “Western” eyes; one of these studies (by Zofia Litwinowicz-Krutnik) is exclusively devoted to film material, while another article (by Maria Szafrańska-Chmielarz) takes also films into consideration. Rare, ephemeral exceptions notwithstanding, these contributions generally demonstrate the extent to which their sources reproduce the stereotypical, distorted images of “the Orient” as outlined in Edward Said’s seminal work and in more recent postcolonial studies on (Neo-)Orientalism, Exotism and/or (Ethno-Racial) Othering. However, it is noteworthy that even the wife of a French colonial servant in Morocco (see Małgorzata Sokołowicz’s article on the French painter and writer A.-R. de Lens), and even more so Polish travellers to the Orient (though Poland did not belong to the European colonial powers; see the article by Anna Kołos) adopted such a clichéd, one-sided, dichotomous worldview