The paper’s main objective is to analyse the visions of an African future in the Polish Socialist Era science fiction. Speculative fiction played an important part in the cultural landscape of socialist Poland, being integral to the popular culture as well as to communist propaganda. The image of a communist future was a major motif in the early Socialist Era science fiction narratives and also the impressive political forecast of the final worldwide triumph of the Communist Party. These narratives also included some interesting examples of the African future and the African people in the futuristic communist world: the Black communist and astronaut, Hannibal Smith, as the main character of The Astronauts [Astronauci, 1951] by Stanisław Lem; the African astronauts in The Magellanic Cloud [Obłok Magellana, 1955] by Stanisław Lem and the story of the African slaves’ rebelion against the capitalists on the space station Celestia in the novel by Krzysztof Boruńand Andrzej Trepka The Lost Future [Zagubiona przyszłość, 1953]. Lem’s novels were also adapter into films: The Magellanic Cloud as The Voyage to the End of the Universe (Ikarie XB-1, 1963, directed by Jindřich Polák), The Astronauts as First Spaceship on Venus (Der schweigende Stern, 1960, directed by Kurt Maetzig) – in which the Nigerian actor, Julius Ongewe, appeared as a very first African astronaut in the history of cinema.

Article translated by Ewa Bodal

Train to the Future – History Lesson with Colson Whitehead

In my article I am going to focus on the innovating way in which Colson Whitehead presents African-American history in his novel The Underground Railroad. Similarly, to the classical texts exposing erased and buried histories in the U.S. such as written by William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, Whitehead proposes a history lesson for Americans and non-Americans, but instead of producing another historical reconstruction, he uses the technique of multisynchronism combining the past, present and future that constantly interplay in his narrative. The plot that binds all other motives together is that of the Underground Railroad which is simultaneously referring us to the historical organization and a secret vehicle that never stops and thus it is a metaphor for actions undertaken to abolish systemic racism that never ends in the U.S. I would like to argue that apart from the above-mentioned literary strategies Whitehead also created timeless language so different from his literary predecessors like Faulkner and Morrison who often relied on modernist history reconstruction and the use of dialects (including AAVE). In my article I will not only attempt to answer the question if Whitehead’s formal achievements are indeed revolutionary, but I will analyse his way of incorporating Black history into fiction, trying to compare his diagnosis of the American society to the conclusions of Faulkner’s Light in August and Morrison’s Beloved. I will focus particularly on the combination of post-racial prose, speculative realism and afrofuturism.

Spaceships and Underwater Tribes – Afrofuturistic Contexts of the Flying Africans Myth

This article’s objective is to compare different afrofuturistic texts containing references to the Flying Africans myth. I am going to analyse Anthony Joseph’s text The African Origins of UFOs and Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The Salt Roads in the musical funk and ambient context. My main focus is the song Star Child from album The Mothership Connection by the American band Parliament-Funkadelic and an electro-ambient album by the American group Drexciya, entitled The Quest, built around a story about an underwater human race living in the bottom of the Atlantic, born of pregnant women thrown overboard by slave ships.

“The Africa That’s Coming”: A Non-utopian Vision of the Future in Léonora Miano’s Rouge impératrice

This article seeks to present the way in which the Afrofuturism as a literary genre can be used to reflect on the potential of the African future. In the novel Rouge impératrice, published in 2019, Cameroonian author Léonora Miano introduces a vision of the future united state of Katiopa which enables her to reconsider some present problems and offered socio-political solutions. The image of the possible future of the African states constitutes a clever and innovative analysis of the current political and cultural issues of the African continent, and its possibilities for a stable and peaceful progress. At the same time, Miano tries to stay clear of the category of Black utopia.

The Future Past. Retrotopia in the Narratives of an Artificial Intelligence by Stanisław Lem and Łukasz Zawada

In Retrotopia, Zygmunt Bauman derives the title phenomenon from the double negation of Thomas More’s utopia and uses it to describe the returns of the imaginary past, whose resurrected potentials make it possible to return to forgotten ideas. This paper examines the relationship between futuristic technology projections and the retrotopian shift taking place in liquid modernity. To this end, the author’s research focuses on the literary narratives of the artificial intelligence in Stanisław Lem’s Golem XIV (1981) and Łukasz Zawada’s Fragmenty dziennika SI (2018). The languages, medium, and stories of the non-human Other illustrate the mechanisms of the modern prophetic fantasies through repetition act and mediating them in the lost/un-dead past. Simultaneously, the (retro)futuristic voices of the superintelligent computers reveal the difficulties of these narratives – trying to slow down Sci-tech progress and embed the past into the future technologies.

Phenomenology, Film and the Avant-garde. The Inspirations of Stefan Morawski

The article addresses three key issues that are presented in the section of the “Cultural Studies Review” dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Professor Stefan Morawski. Firstly, the issue of the relationship between Stefan Morawski and Roman Ingarden and his environment, where I draw attention to the role of Roman Ingarden’s phenomenology in building an independent position in Morawski’s aesthetics/philosophy of art. Secondly, in reconstructing Morawski’s aesthetic views on the basis of published film reviews and on the basis of his reflections on film criticism and artistic meta-criticism, I pay attention to the axiological context of the hierarchisation of works of art, which is the basis of this review. Thirdly, I present basic findings on avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art, as well as on avant-garde theory. This provides an opportunity to better recognise what Morawski’s diagnosis of continuity and severance in the historical development of art was in this area. The above three issues are preceded by biographical information, which is continued in the rest of the text. In this way, Morawski’s choices and changes of interests become more understandable and fraught with consequences.

The Syndrome of Continuity and Discontinuity

The article discusses the problem of understanding changes in modern art as “the syndrome of continuity and discontinuity”. The term was used by Stefan Morawski in describing relationships between the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. The author poses the thesis that this model of thinking is characteristic of the history of art in the modern period and analyzes its sources and consequences using the example of Morawski’s concept. The first part of the study discusses selected themes in Morawski’s scholarly achievement that characterize it as the thought entangled in the pitfalls of the discourse of modernity whose weaknesses the esthetician notices or sometimes even stigmatizes but which he does not want or is unable to give up. Both the avant-garde formations and postmodernism were treated as symptoms of the crisis of Western culture, which is why taking a stance on the violation of the existing boundaries of art and on understanding its function was a form of declaration of a world-view attitude. Another part of the article focuses on analytical categories such as ‘boundary’, ‘identity thinking’, ‘space between’, or ‘otherness.’ The reflections are conducted in the context of contemporary theories that point out the weakening of metaphysical thinking.

Stefan Morawski about film and film criticism

The author undertook the task of describing the views of Stefan Morawski as a film critic. Morawski appreciated realistic films the most. He understood realism as a film style that gives an image of the real life of ordinary people. Looking at the film from a Marxist perspective, he described it in a historical context. In his interpretations of the films, Morawski tried to reveal their moral message. He called for the creation of films that would mobilize viewers to work for a better world. In the second part of the article, the considerations concern Morawski’s metacritical publications. Morawski described many types of film criticism. He explained the relationship between film criticism and aesthetics.

From the Correspondence of Scientists: Stefan Morawski and Roman Ingarden

The article is a scientific overview of the preserved correspondence of Stefan Morawski and Roman Witold Ingarden from 1961 to 1969. The 1960s were a period of important events and changes in both the lives of Ingarden and Morawski. In both cases, the background was the political situation in Poland, of which – in a certain sense – both philosophers became victims. Although their attitude and political commitment differed – Ingarden remained indifferent to politics, unlike Morawski, who belonged to the party – it turned out that both of them suffered harassment from state officials. In addition to discussing scientific issues, the letters of both philosophers contain a lot of information on current and important issues for them directly, and indirectly for the Polish scientific community of that time. Therefore, the article discusses publishing issues, organizational and scientific matters related to conference trips, and scientific issues related to the reviews of master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations. The historical background and private fate of both philosophers were also taken into account, which is not insignificant for their scientific work and mutual relations.

This article is a critical reading of the book Une histoire du jeu vidéo en France by Alexis Blanchet and Guillaume Montagnon. The book – divided into five chapters – explains the first three decades (1960–1991) of digital game development in France, stretching from scientific experimentation, through the rise and fall of console and arcade gaming industry, to the rapid increase in microcomputing and the emergence of a French gaming identity. Close to the increasingly popular emancipatory paradigm in historical gaming research, the publication relies on comprehensive and exhaustive material, stretching from the gaming magazines to interviews with French game developers. Even though the book does not delve into the cultural contexts around the popularity of specific games, it remains an essential work for readers willing to understand the processes contributing to the French digital game field’s state.

The review focuses on the analysis of PawełTański’s book Głosy i performanse tekstów. Literatura – piosenki – ciało [Voices and Performances of Texts: Literature – Songs – Body]. Contrary to the title, textual analysis overwhelmingly prevails over performance studies in Tański’s work which also abstains from research into this field. The author carries out a sketchy review of cultural texts – mainly poetry and songs. In my article I examine Tański’s study, with particular attention to his favourite motifs, i.e. self-referentiality, love for poetry and counter-culture. As the author often reduces scientific description to emotional interpretation and expresses personal preferences in an exaggeratedly emotional form, the reader receives a cumulative expression of love for literature in the form of a report from the inside. This is also evidenced by the number of literary references and extensive citations. In my review, I critically follow this affective delight, and recognise Tański’s analyses to not only be personally tinged but also to draw from performative writing.