The articles introduced here are the result of the work of a research team on marginalization and minorities in literature and film at the Faculty of Philology, University of Gdańsk, Poland.

This work reflects upon the philosophical origins and literary consequences of Theodor Adorno’s thesis “the whole is false” (das Ganze ist das Unwahre), as it greatly influenced the literary and philosophical practice of modernity. In investigating this problem, the paper attempts to approach the vital question of whether thinking from the standpoint of margins in terms of philosophy is possible and what is the nature of truth that such a philosophical project reveals.

The thesis that underlies this paper is comprised of a paradox. Although, as modern literature discloses, death has been marginalized in our public life and awareness as well as in humanist discourse, simultaneously, according to Theodor Adorno, it “has become something which has never yet been so feared.” The paradox leads us to a philosophical re-evaluation of the existential meaning of death after Martin Heidegger and to an investigation not only of the consequences of the marginalization of death but also of the roots of this phenomenon. Our investigation will trace the presence of the phenomenon in selected works of modern literature and philosophy, e.g., Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which purposely venture into the margins of public discourse and culture.

Muriel Spark, in her works, drew heavily on her lifetime experience, especially that gained in exile while she was living in Africa (1937–1944). This influence is particularly visible in the cycle of her short stories, including “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” “The Pawnbroker’s Wife,” “The Portabello Road,” “The Go-Away Bird,” “Bang-Bang You’re Dead,” and “The Curtain Blown by the Breeze.” In all of these works, Spark’s feeling of alienation transcends the pages, as she discusses issues connected with being a minority — a white woman in Africa. She also pays attention to problems of assimilation between and among races. These themes serve not only literary purposes but also enable the writer to confront her past and the feeling of not belonging to the place she inhabits, a problem often shared by her protagonists.

The aim of this article is to discuss the presence of the Other in the most famous Danish polar explorer Knud Rasmussen’s (1879–1933) first expedition account about Northern Greenland and its native people, the Inughuit, entitled “The New People”. Since the account was written during the period of Danish imperialism in the Arctic and Rasmussen was a key agent in the colonization of Northern Greenland, I apply analytic tools within postcolonial critical theory. However, instead of focusing on the oppressive power of colonial discourse in the text, my goal is to examine how native agency and resistance, understood as “counter-colonial properties” (McLeod 158), are manifest in “The New People”. By applying the concepts of heteroglossia and the splitting of the subject, I will show how Rasmussen’s text challenges imperialist ideology and resists Eurocentric textual violence.

The article focuses on the issue of marginalisation in Edward Said’s Out of Place and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. In these autobiographical texts, both writers try to express the process of discovering and naming their identities. It seems that bell hooks’ concept of the privileged position of the margin is applicable to their narrations. Both Satrapi and Said witnessed historical events, and in their texts they try to convey their testimonies. Themes of childhood and memory are explored differently in their stories, but they both underline their significance. The article tries to show in what way the experience of marginalisation affected their emerging individualities, contributed to building their inner freedom and independence, and influenced their notion of identity.

The God of Chance by the Danish author Kirsten Thorup is a novel about a meeting between Africa and Europe that turns into a confrontation. The main characters are a Danish professional woman, Ana, and an African girl from Gambia, Mariama, whom Ana decides to sponsor after meeting her on the beach while on vacation in the African country. The article examines how and why a conflict develops between Ana and Mariama after the young girl comes to London to pursue higher education. Stress at work has caused Ana to become one-sided, limited, and phobic, or xenophobic. She develops an obsession with her own “other,” Mariama, and tries to preserve a fixed image of the girl in her mind, disallowing her to grow and refusing to see her as an independent, grown woman. Ana grows increasingly apprehensive and phobic when faced with the multiethnic urban environment of London. By contrast, Mariama resolves her relationship to her own race and to the white race. A dream sequence epitomizes the transcendence of racial differences, posing the “rainbow” as the multicolored spectrum from which transparency and knowledge emanate. At this point, the narrative likewise erases the border between narrator and character, artist and artwork, utopia and dystopia.

The aim of this article is to delineate racialized discourse in two canonical American novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which are regaining popularity in the 21st century. The timeliness of this analysis is marked by the continued discussion of race in the United States, particularly oscillating around Black and white dynamics, resurfacing, for instance, through the reported increase of inter-racial hate crimes. The chosen novels offer information regarding the genesis and nature of racial bifurcation endemic to the nation’s historically evolving conceptions of white superiority and Black inferiority. The marginalization of Black males bears particular significance in that this phenomenon enunciates the gendered politics of race.

This article examines the way in which Jewish soldiers are portrayed in American war fiction, on the basis of four texts by authors William Wharton, Winston Groom, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. It depicts the situations in which Jewish soldiers find themselves, their fears, convictions, and objections, as well as the prejudice they face. It also shows the scale of complexity with which this issue is presented, depending on the work and the author.

After World War II, Count Leon Skórzewski settled in Australia. He is a unique Pole living on this distant continent. Born in 1933 in Czerniejewo into a family of landowners, his parents were Count Zygmunt Skórzewski and Princess Leontyna of Radziwill. In 1940 they fled from the occupied country. During World War II, Count Skórzewski stayed in Romania, France, Spain, and Italy, where his parents were arrested. In 1945, landowners in Poland were destroyed as a result of political and structural changes. After the war, the Skórzewski family’s extensive fortune, including palaces in Czerniejewo and Lubostroń, was nationalized. Leon Skórzewski remained in exile, working in Corsica, Canada, Singapore, and Australia. He has never ceased to be a Pole, though he neither maintained contacts with the Polish community nor gave interviews; he has never contacted the media. In Australia, he belongs to a small group of people from the European aristocracy. This paper is based on historical and library research, connected with access to the private family archive conducted by the author in 2008 in Australia, and a series of extensive interviews with Count Skórzewski.

John Berger’s Into Their Labours (1992) was written “in a spirit of solidarity with the so-called ‘backward,’ whether they live in villages or have been forced to emigrate to a metropolis” (xxix). This paper examines the semantics of such a literary strategy by analyzing, first, the narrative voice and, second, narrative techniques of embedding and metalepsis, in order to argue that Berger’s approach to the “backward” bestows a false narrative coherence on a much more complex and intrinsically unrepresentable experience of (French) peasantry. Two key notions to help understand my argument are betweenness and subaltern. The former stands for the misunderstood boundary between the narrator of the trilogy and his protagonist(s). The latter refers to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous thesis on the impossibility and/or limitation of representing the marginalized and disempowered group of people, the “backward” in Berger’s sense.

This article discusses the problem of discrimination against minorities, i.e., homosexuals and people suffering from AIDS, in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), illustrated by various instances from the film. The introduction presents a general cultural context and is followed by a detailed description of the characters and their attitudes toward the protagonist, a homosexual dying of AIDS who sues his superiors for discrimination. What follows are basic data concerning the disease and its historical background. The conclusion confronts critical reviews and discusses the cultural impact of the film.

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of the Other in the highly acclaimed American television series True Blood and points out that popular culture, despite its obvious entertainment value, can be used to display a deep and serious context. True Blood’s plot focuses on the civil rights movement’s political fight to become equal citizens of the United States, using the allegory of the vampire. HBO’s production, being very successful around the world, has made an important contribution to raising awareness of minorities’ rights and is a perfect example of a commercially successful work of art that has the ability to change the situation of minorities worldwide. The article explains the idea of the Other and provides a general description of the phenomenon of popular culture.

The article compares the depiction of the disabled minority in selected South Korean and Japanese movies to the general image of disabled protagonists in Western cinematography. It also focuses on legal regulations intended to change the inferior position of the disabled, a position based on prejudice, fear, and negligence. The article presents different ways of showing disabilities, both from the “outside” and from the perspective of a disabled hero, which appears to be quite an achievement when it comes to the mentally challenged and their recognition of outer reality. It also describes the methods of assistance presented in the movies, both on the side of society and the side of the family of the disabled, in comparison with their treatment in the real world, where the adaptive process of disabled people turns out to be a tough and slow one; generally, it is depicted this way in the South Korean productions chosen for this article. What distinguishes the Asian movies’ depictions from the mass productions of the West is the attempt to present the inner world of the differently abled and, by doing so, to gain the viewers’ understanding of their perception of surrounding reality. This results in evoking the viewers’ sympathy and their will to help the suppressed and marginalized group forbidden to coexist in society on equal terms.

Tash Aw, a Malaysian Chinese author who resides in England, won the Whitbread First Novel Award with his monograph The Harmony Silk Factory, also known as The Mystery of Silk. Through intricate story plots, Aw aptly presents the mysterious past of an emerging Chinese merchant. The novel also portrays the great perversion of human nature as well as the generally unpredictable fate of common people during the time of British colonialism and Japanese imperialism. With puzzle-like narration, the author likely assumes the role of a spokesperson on behalf of his ethnic group, revealing through his novel certain historical truths that have long been denied by the Malaysian government and hidden away in the course of history.

Map of the Invisible World, the fiction by Tash Aw, depicting the fusion and division of a country, contradictions and conflicts between ethnic groups during the 1960’s in Indonesia. The concept of “Love” and the others as Tenor and Vehicle were related under same context. Tash Aw tried to ponder the meaning of love and “historical” in his works. He displayed his ambitions and attempts to historical narrative on Southeast Asia, convert a macro-narrative into a short story. This paper is attempting to analyze the metaphor of “love” and figure out the possibility of the hidden meaning.

The names of some palace entertainment institutions of the Tang Dynasty often appeared in the Tang’s poems, such as Nei Jiaofang, Liyuan, Xuanhui Yuan and Zhangnei Jiaofang, which had no clear descriptions before. This paper not only introduces those related institutions but also explains Diyi Bu that was a title of a kind of members in the institutions and Faqu that was a type of music to help readers to understand the poetries meanings correctly. With these institutions’ information, the readers can understand the Tang’s poetries well.

This paper centers around the question: What does the term “dialectic” mean to Brecht in the constant flux of his ideas and opinions? I argue for the connection between Daoism and Brecht’s specific version of dialectics in his theatre. While my aim is not to claim that Brecht depends on Chinese thought to formulate his theoretical statements about theatre, I attempt to demonstrate that certain Daoist ideas were central to Brecht’s very concept of contradiction. Furthermore, I suggest that Brecht’s notion of “dialectic” acquires a full meaning and function in Brecht’s combination, appropriation, interpretation and use of the Daoist and Marxist concepts of dialectics from his own perspective.

Inspired by Nationalism which is embraced by the Black Power Movement in the 1960s, Gwendolyn Brooks shows the tendency to nationalist stance. “In the Mecca” demonstrates the interactions between her ideological position and her aesthetic one. Nationalism enhanced her critical consciousness toward the racial society and her eager to unify the black community. The poem refocuses on black ghetto which has been foregrounded by the dominant discourses and examines Mecca’s decline caused by racism and Mecca’s resistance guided by nationalism as well. Thus, this article examines Brooks’s peculiar aesthetic dynamics which transforms her nationalist position into aesthetic features of polyphony.

War ethics are a manifestation of general ethics in war-time. War ethics in Trojan War includes the ethics of jungle principle; a warrior culture of war-like people; humanity, integrity and honesty in fighting. Those ethics are the soft power which could influence fighters’ emotions and spirits, and to some extent, the situation of war. For Trojan War happened in the end of primitive society, Trojan War ethics mainly reflect the concepts of war ethics in a primitive society, and also smack of war ethics in a slave society.

In my interview with him, Professor Jerry Ward admits that he may be the only person in the United States of America who thinks that no writer is more forceful than Richard Wright in exposing the wounds of history that will not heal. We study Richard Wright, according to Ward, in order to become more honest, to become brave and critical thinkers. Now that his papers are housed and almost completely cataloged at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ward’s life and work become a special legacy that will be treasured by present and future generations in special ways. As a bridge between Chinese and American academic circles, he tries to promote cross-cultural discussions that are very necessary in the twenty-first century. He urges younger scholars to remember that cultural expressions and everyday life exist in symbiotic relationships, to remember that we are dealing with literary or intellectual ecology.