Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia

Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The 14 chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia. Some essays directly engage with post-colonial studies, contributing to an ongoing critical re-evaluation of eastern European “semi-peripheral” (non-)involvement in colonialism. Other chapters disclose a range of perspectives and narratives that illuminate the plurality of the travelers’ positions while reflecting on the specificity of the eastern European experience. The travellers moved—as do the chapter authors—between two regions that are off-centre, in-between, shiftingly “Eastern,” and disorientingly heterogeneous, thus complicating colonial and postcolonial notions of “Europe,” “East,” and East-West distinctions. Both at home and overseas, they navigated among a multiplicity of peoples, “races,” and empires, Occidents and Orients, fantasies of the Self and the Other, adopting/adapting/mimicking/rejecting colonialist identities and ideologies. They saw both eastern Europe and southeast Asia in a distinctive light, as if through each other—and so will the readers of Escaping Kakania.

Table of Contents:
Introductory (Dis)Orientation: A View from Singapore Jan Mrázek 1. The Dutch East Indies in the Eyes of a Pole: Teodor Anzelm Dzwonkowski and his Memoirs from the Service in the Dutch Navy in the Years 1788–1793 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk 2. A Czech Army Doctor in Sumatra: Native Soil, Miasmatic Mud, Russian Hallucinations, All The Empires Jan Mrázek 3. The First Impressions of Singapore in Serbian Literature Nada Savković 4. Julian Fałat in Southeast Asia: Hybridity and Mimicry in the Memoirs of a Polish/Kakanian/European Painter Grzegorz Moroz 5. Colonialism, Freedom Fighters and the Polish Ambiguity: How Józef Conrad Korzeniowski and Bronisław Piłsudski (Almost) Met in Singapore Rafal Pankowski 6. The Fate of the Birds of Paradise: Enrique Stanko Vráz in Southeast Asia Iveta Nakládalová 7. Ethnic Comparisons in Travelogues about Southeast Asia by Poles and Serbs of Austro-Hungarian Background, 1869–1914 Tomasz Ewertowski 8. The Polish Botanist Marian Raciborski and his 1901 Wayang Kulit Performance: Images and Encounters Marianna Lis 9. The Identity of the Strange: The (Post)colonial Perspective in the Texts and Pictures of László Székely Gábor Pusztai 10. Islands of Paradise? Java and Bali Through a Woman’s Eyes: The Journey of Ilona Zboray Vera Brittig 11. Indochina’s Deadly Sun: Polish Maritime and Colonial League’s Depictions of Southeast Asia Marta Grzechnik 12. Czechoslovaks in Singapore and Malaya in the Interwar Period Jan Beránek 13. Unaware Colonialism Meets Empathy and Insightfulness: Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s Travel Diary to Burma Michał Lubina 14. Double vision: Yugoslav Travellers and the Conflicting Images of Southeast Asia in the Era of Late Colonialism Nemanja Radonjić Index

About the Author :
Jan Mrázek grew up in Czechoslovakia and lives in Singapore. He is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He has published widely on Southeast Asia as well as Czech travel writing. His latest book is titled On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle: Tropics, Travel and Colonialism in Czech Poetry (Karolinum Press, 2022)