Spaces of Nomadic Figurations in Izabela Filipiak and Olga Tokarczuk’s Prose
Monika Świerkosz
Uniwersytet w BiałymstokuAbstract
The article in an attempt at reading two contemporary Polish women’s texts (Olga Tokarczuk’s Historie ostatnie [Last Histories] and Izabela Filipiak’s stories Korzenie [Roots]) in the perspective of Rosi Brai- dotti’s nomadic theory. As analytical instruments there appear such notions as: rooting/uprooting, settling in/homelessness, desire/longing, kinship/affinity, and foremost genealogy. That last category, which, after Foucault (and Nitzsche) Braidotti perceives as a negative discourse (“continuity in discontinuity”), turns out to be a key to understanding the sense of the project of women’s cultural nomadism. The trope of the mother’s relation, which is here a metaphor of the past, with her daughter, explains in the text the ambivalence inscribed in the process of transfiguration of “a migrant” or “an outlaw” into a “nomad”. A condition of transforming a negative sense of uprooting into a positive feeling (possible but not forced) of rooting is the persona’s creation of his/her own genealogy. It takes a form of a retrospective map of the places where we are not any more.Keywords:
space, nomadism, figuration, Izabela Filipiak, Olga TokarczukUniwersytet w Białymstoku
License
Articles published on the platform of Białostockie Studia Literaturoznawcze are available under the license CC-BY-SA 4.0 (CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0).
All interested parties have access to the published articles under the following conditions:
1.They must acknowledge authorship, which means crediting the author, title, source, together with the disseminated work (including the hyperlinks to the original work and doi) as well as the same license under the same conditions.
2. Derivative works can be distributed only under the same license as the original work.
The University of Białystok retains the right to the entire journal (layout, graphic design, title, cover design, logo, etc.).
The author retains the property right but confers on the University of Białystok the right to use the work.
