Tomasz Kamusella
Biographic Data
| ID | 1086701 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tomasz Kamusella |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tomasz |
| FAMILY NAME | Kamusella |
| SIGNATURE | KAMUSELLA T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3484-8352 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Distinguishing Between the Material Reality and Social Reality
In the so-called “post-truth age” that commenced in the mid-2010s, fake news and unsubstantiated claims have gained popularity mostly stemming from the human observer’s confusion between the material reality and social reality. The article proposes a logical grid for testing whether an object or phenomenon under scrutiny belongs to the former or latter type of reality, and whether, from the human observer’s perspective, its existence is objective…
Pogroms Across the Former Poland-Lithuania
Ethnicity and Estate
In national historiography, estate (social) divisions are typically disregarded in favor of supposedly shared ethnicity, which is proposed to have united a given nation for centuries. Hence, the Polish national historiography is unable to account for the Galician Jacquerie (1846), when serfs were killing nobles, despite their (retroactively) assumed shared Polish ethnicity. On the other hand, the 1994 mass massacre of the Tutsis by Hutus is recog…
Languages and Morality in Postwar Europe
In postwar Europe the remembrance of the Holocaust (קאַטאַסטראָפע Katastrofe in Yiddish) endows the continent’s societies and politics with a clear-cut moral dimension. All agree that remembering about and researching the Holocaust is necessary for preventing a repeat of the murderous past in the future. Yet, no reflection is really devoted to the most revealing fact that the wartime genocide’s main victims – Jews – exist no longer in Europe as a…
Yiddish, or Jewish German? The Holocaust, the Goethe-Institut, and Germany’s Neglected Obligation to Peace and the Common European Cultural Heritage
The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe’s moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and univ…
Xenophobia and anti-Semitism in the Concept of Polish Literature
In today’s Central Europe ethnolinguistic nationalism is the region’s standard normative ideology of statehood creation, legitimation and maintenance. This ideology proposes that in spatial terms, the area of the use of national language X should overlap with the territory of nation-state X, in which all members of nation X should reside. In terms of cultural policy, this means that only works written by “indubitable” members of nation X in langu…
Альгерд Бахарэвіч, Сабакі Эўропы, Логвінаў, Вільня-Мінск 2017
Bacharevič is considered to be an enfant terrible or even a 'bad boy' of present-day Belarusian literature.The country's movers and shakers in the world of belles lettres grudgingly take notice of the sheer beauty and innovativeness of his prose and plotlines, but choose to slight the author, for instance, by denying him the ultimate first place in the annual Jerzy Giedroyc Literary Award (Літаратурная прэмія імя Ежы Гедройца Litaraturnaja premij…
Sarmatyja (2018)
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Steven Seegel. Map Men
During the second half of the nineteenth century, geography emerged as an academic discipline, especially in Prussia and the German Empire. Its early practitioners, led by the Saxonian Albrecht Penck, proposed that geography is an exact science. By and large, this view was readily accepted in Europe and North America because it merged with the epoch’s colonial prejudices, racism, antisemitism, and patriarchalism. What’s more, geography’s presumed…
Global Language Politics
Globalization in the early 21st century can be considered as the age of inequality that splits the world into the rich North and the poor South. From the perspective of language politics, only very few discussed the division across the globe, especially, between Eurasia and the “Rest of the world.” In Eurasia, indigenous languages and scripts are used in official capacity, while the same function is fulfilled almost exclusively by non -indigenous…
Between Politics and Objectivity
Cold War Europe’s largest and most intensive act of ethnic cleansing, namely, the 1989 expulsion of Turks from communist Bulgaria, remains a neglected subject three decades on after the event. When it took place, the term “ethnic cleansing” had not been invented yet, so in light of international law this expulsion was a “population transfer.” Population transfers (even unilateral) were deemed legal until the mid-1990s. Subsequently, under the inf…
Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent
Review of: Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent. 2018. The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History (Languages and Culture in History). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 9789462982727 (hardback), 702 pp. €45.00
Brendan Karch, Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland
Peer reviewed
The Social and Political History of Southern Africa's Languages
This book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary and comprehensive reference work on the often-marginalised languages of southern Africa. The authors analyse a range of different concepts and ques
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe
This encyclopedia documents the presence and impact of nationalized cultural consciousness in European nationalism. It tracks how intellectuals, historians, philologists, novelists, poets, painters, folklorists, and composers, in an intensely collaborative transnational network, articulated the national identities and aspirations that would go on to determine European history and politics, with effects that are still felt today. Edited by Joep Le…
Ethnic Cleansing During the Cold War
In mid-1989, the Bulgarian communist regime seeking to prop up its legitimacy played the ethnonational card by expelling 360,000 Turks and Muslims across the Iron Curtain to neighboring Turkey. It was the single largest ethnic cleansing during the Cold War in Europe after the wrapping up of the postwar expulsions (‘population transfers’) of ethnic Germans from Central Europe in the latter half of the 1940s. Furthermore, this expulsion of Turks an…
The Russian Okrainy (Oкраины) and the Polish Kresy
The Russian term okrainy and the Polish concept of kresy tend to refer to the same spatial area, or the non-Russian and non-Polish nation-states that after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union extend between the Russian Federation and Poland. From the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, both the terms okrainy and kresy underwrote the Russian and Polish territorial expansion and the mission civilisatrice in these areas, most visib…
Grzegorz Strauchold and Rafał Eysymontt, Wrocław / Breslau
The Arabic Language
Standard Arabic is directly derived from the language of the Quran. The Arabic language of the holy book of Islam is seen as the prescriptive benchmark of correctness for the use and standardization of Arabic. As such, this standard language is removed from the vernaculars over a millennium years, which Arabic-speakers employ nowadays in everyday life. Furthermore, standard Arabic is used for written purposes but very rarely spoken, which implies…
The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders
This book analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. It offers perspectives from
Silesian
In the past, Silesian was treated as a subdialect of the Polish language (and sometimes of Czech). During the 1990s, following the fall of communism and the establishment of democracy in Poland, most Silesian-speakers decided to treat Silesian as a language in its own right. It became part and parcel of their effort to shed the status of second-class citizens that had been imposed on them in the interwar and communist Poland. Warsaw has not recog…
Gerald Stone, Slav Outposts in Central European History
The idea of a Kosovan language in Yugoslavia's language politics
Not only are nations invented (imagined) into and out of existence, but languages and states are as well. Decisions on how to construct, change or obliterate a language are essentially arbitrary, and as such dictated by political considerations. The entailed language of politics (often accompanied by the closely related politics of script) is of more immediate significance in Central Europe than elsewhere in the world, because in this region lang…
Purging the Empire
Journal Article Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914 Get access Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914 . By Matthew P. Fitzpatrick . Oxford : Oxford University Press . 2015 . x + 298 pp. £60.00 (hardback). Tomasz Kamusella Tomasz Kamusella University of St Andrews Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 33, Issue 4, December 2015, Pages 665–668, https:…
Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners
Language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe
This article presents a brief survey and analysis of the most intimate coupling of culture and national projects that occurred in Central Europe following the success of the Italian and German nation‐states established in this manner during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Language is the very ‘stuff’ of culture as well as the instrument of communicating and reaffirming cultural difference vis‐à‐vis other cultures. As such, language b…
Ethnic Cleansing in Silesia 1950-89 and the Ennationalizing Policies of Poland and Germany
The rise of nationalism in Central Europe in the nineteenth century had dire consequences for Silesia, the far-flung, multi-ethnic frontier region of Prussia/Germany, bordering on Austria-Hungary and Russia. The dividing up in 1921 of Upper Silesia between Germany and the newly established Polish nation-state, and the ensuing ennationalization of both regions, triggered off population movements of 300,000 persons before 1939, when Berlin seized t…
Silesian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
A probe into the changing perceptions and classifications of Silesian (i.e. the Slavic dialect and the Slavic-Germanic creole of Upper Silesia, or both construed as the ethnolect of the Silesians) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as most saliently influenced by the mutually nullifying competition of German and Polish ethnolinguistic nationalisms. This competition opened the space for the rise of the Silesian national-cum-regional mo…
Germanization, Polonization, and Russification in the partitioned lands of Poland-Lithuania
Two main myths constitute the founding basis of popular Polish ethnic nationalism: first, that Poland-Lithuania was an early Poland, and second, that the partitioning powers at all times unwaveringly pursued policies of Germanization and Russification. In the former case, the myth appropriates a common past today shared by Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. In the latter case, Polonization is written out of the picture entirely, as …
The global regime of language recognition
There is no universally accepted working linguistic definition of a language; the distinction between a dialect and a language is a political question. On the basis of a discussion of this problem, the article proposes that the ISO 639 family of standards, issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), amounts to the backbone of an emerging global regime of language recognition. This regime is being rapidly coaxed into being …
The twentieth anniversary of the German‐polish border treaty of 1990
The Potsdam Protocol provisionally recognized Poland's new western border subject to final confirmation at a future peace conference. This conference never took place. Poland (under the Kremlin's tutelage) emphasized the finality of its western border and castigated West Germany and the Western Allies as ‘revisionists’ for sticking to the letter of the Potsdam Protocol. The policy of détente brought Bonn's tentative acceptance of this border in t…
Ethnicity and Estate
In national historiography, estate (social) divisions are typically disregarded in favor of supposedly shared ethnicity, which is proposed to have united a given nation for centuries. Hence, the Polish national historiography is unable to account for the Galician Jacquerie (1846), when serfs were killing nobles, despite their (retroactively) assumed shared Polish ethnicity. On the other hand, the 1994 mass massacre of the Tutsis by Hutus is recog…
The Arabic Language
Standard Arabic is directly derived from the language of the Quran. The Arabic language of the holy book of Islam is seen as the prescriptive benchmark of correctness for the use and standardization of Arabic. As such, this standard language is removed from the vernaculars over a millennium years, which Arabic-speakers employ nowadays in everyday life. Furthermore, standard Arabic is used for written purposes but very rarely spoken, which implies…
The Szlonzokian Ethnolect in the Context of German and Polish Nationalisms1
This article analyzes the emergence of the Szlonzokian ethnic group or proto‐nation in the context of the use of language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe. When language was legislated into the statistical measure of nationality in the second half of the nineteenth century, Berlin pressured the Slavophone Catholic peasant‐cum‐worker population of Upper Silesia to become ‘proper Germans’. Polish ennationalizing pressure was added …
Nation-Building and the Linguistic Situation in Upper Silesia
Language became the basis of nation-building in Central Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the same period Czech, German and Polish nationalists had contested Upper Silesia as a multilingual region before the nation-states of Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland took over this role. In the first half of the twentieth century, this land was divided and redivided among these nation-states. Each change entailed an alt…
Ethnic Cleansing in Silesia 1950-89 and the Ennationalizing Policies of Poland and Germany
The rise of nationalism in Central Europe in the nineteenth century had dire consequences for Silesia, the far-flung, multi-ethnic frontier region of Prussia/Germany, bordering on Austria-Hungary and Russia. The dividing up in 1921 of Upper Silesia between Germany and the newly established Polish nation-state, and the ensuing ennationalization of both regions, triggered off population movements of 300,000 persons before 1939, when Berlin seized t…
Nations and their Borders
Journal Article Nations and their Borders: Changing Identities in Upper Silesia in the Modern Age: Marburg, Germany, 27–28 October 2000 Get access Tomasz Kamusella Tomasz Kamusella Opole University, Opole Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 19, Issue 3, July 2001, Pages 400–407, https://doi.org/10.1191/026635501680193924 Published: 01 July 2001
Language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe
This article presents a brief survey and analysis of the most intimate coupling of culture and national projects that occurred in Central Europe following the success of the Italian and German nation‐states established in this manner during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Language is the very ‘stuff’ of culture as well as the instrument of communicating and reaffirming cultural difference vis‐à‐vis other cultures. As such, language b…
Nation-Building and the Linguistic Situation in Upper Silesia
Language became the basis of nation-building in Central Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the same period Czech, German and Polish nationalists had contested Upper Silesia as a multilingual region before the nation-states of Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland took over this role. In the first half of the twentieth century, this land was divided and redivided among these nation-states. Each change entailed an alt…
The Szlonzokian Ethnolect in the Context of German and Polish Nationalisms1
This article analyzes the emergence of the Szlonzokian ethnic group or proto‐nation in the context of the use of language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe. When language was legislated into the statistical measure of nationality in the second half of the nineteenth century, Berlin pressured the Slavophone Catholic peasant‐cum‐worker population of Upper Silesia to become ‘proper Germans’. Polish ennationalizing pressure was added …
The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe
This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier polit
The twentieth anniversary of the German‐polish border treaty of 1990
The Potsdam Protocol provisionally recognized Poland's new western border subject to final confirmation at a future peace conference. This conference never took place. Poland (under the Kremlin's tutelage) emphasized the finality of its western border and castigated West Germany and the Western Allies as ‘revisionists’ for sticking to the letter of the Potsdam Protocol. The policy of détente brought Bonn's tentative acceptance of this border in t…
Language
In the 19th century, in the eastern half of Prussia's region of Upper Silesia, continental Europe's second largest industrial basin emerged. In the course of the accelerated urbanization that followed, an increasing number of German- and Germanic-speakers arrived in this overwhelmingly Slavophone area that historically skirted the Germanic dialect continuum to the west. The resultant dynamic interaction between Slavicand German/ic-speakers led to…
Silesian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
A probe into the changing perceptions and classifications of Silesian (i.e. the Slavic dialect and the Slavic-Germanic creole of Upper Silesia, or both construed as the ethnolect of the Silesians) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as most saliently influenced by the mutually nullifying competition of German and Polish ethnolinguistic nationalisms. This competition opened the space for the rise of the Silesian national-cum-regional mo…
A Novel Approach to the Study of Nationalism in Poland
Book Review| October 01 2011 A NOVEL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF NATIONALISM IN POLAND? Nacjonalizm bez narodów. Nacjonalizm w koncepcjach anglosaskich nauk społecznych [Nationalism without nations: nationalism and anglophone social science], (From the series: Monografie Fundacji na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej [Monographs of the Polish Science Foundation]), Krzysztof Jaskułowski. TOMASZ KAMUSELLA TOMASZ KAMUSELLA Search for other works by this author on: T…
Central Europe in the Distorting Mirror of Maps, Languages and Ideas
Central Europe is as much invented as the continent of Europe, and as any human concept for that matter. But when people subscribe to and act in accordance with a concept of this kind, it becomes reality, that is, part of social reality. This essay, in an interdisciplinary manner, traces the origins and the functioning of Central Europe as a concept through the lens of cartography, history and culture. From the vantage of intellectual and politic…
The global regime of language recognition
There is no universally accepted working linguistic definition of a language; the distinction between a dialect and a language is a political question. On the basis of a discussion of this problem, the article proposes that the ISO 639 family of standards, issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), amounts to the backbone of an emerging global regime of language recognition. This regime is being rapidly coaxed into being …
William Jay Risch, The Ukrainian West
Germanization, Polonization, and Russification in the partitioned lands of Poland-Lithuania
Two main myths constitute the founding basis of popular Polish ethnic nationalism: first, that Poland-Lithuania was an early Poland, and second, that the partitioning powers at all times unwaveringly pursued policies of Germanization and Russification. In the former case, the myth appropriates a common past today shared by Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. In the latter case, Polonization is written out of the picture entirely, as …
Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners
Purging the Empire
Journal Article Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914 Get access Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914 . By Matthew P. Fitzpatrick . Oxford : Oxford University Press . 2015 . x + 298 pp. £60.00 (hardback). Tomasz Kamusella Tomasz Kamusella University of St Andrews Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 33, Issue 4, December 2015, Pages 665–668, https:…
The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders
This book analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. It offers perspectives from
Silesian
In the past, Silesian was treated as a subdialect of the Polish language (and sometimes of Czech). During the 1990s, following the fall of communism and the establishment of democracy in Poland, most Silesian-speakers decided to treat Silesian as a language in its own right. It became part and parcel of their effort to shed the status of second-class citizens that had been imposed on them in the interwar and communist Poland. Warsaw has not recog…
Gerald Stone, Slav Outposts in Central European History
The idea of a Kosovan language in Yugoslavia's language politics
Not only are nations invented (imagined) into and out of existence, but languages and states are as well. Decisions on how to construct, change or obliterate a language are essentially arbitrary, and as such dictated by political considerations. The entailed language of politics (often accompanied by the closely related politics of script) is of more immediate significance in Central Europe than elsewhere in the world, because in this region lang…
Grzegorz Strauchold and Rafał Eysymontt, Wrocław / Breslau
The Arabic Language
Standard Arabic is directly derived from the language of the Quran. The Arabic language of the holy book of Islam is seen as the prescriptive benchmark of correctness for the use and standardization of Arabic. As such, this standard language is removed from the vernaculars over a millennium years, which Arabic-speakers employ nowadays in everyday life. Furthermore, standard Arabic is used for written purposes but very rarely spoken, which implies…
The Social and Political History of Southern Africa's Languages
This book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary and comprehensive reference work on the often-marginalised languages of southern Africa. The authors analyse a range of different concepts and ques
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe
This encyclopedia documents the presence and impact of nationalized cultural consciousness in European nationalism. It tracks how intellectuals, historians, philologists, novelists, poets, painters, folklorists, and composers, in an intensely collaborative transnational network, articulated the national identities and aspirations that would go on to determine European history and politics, with effects that are still felt today. Edited by Joep Le…
Ethnic Cleansing During the Cold War
In mid-1989, the Bulgarian communist regime seeking to prop up its legitimacy played the ethnonational card by expelling 360,000 Turks and Muslims across the Iron Curtain to neighboring Turkey. It was the single largest ethnic cleansing during the Cold War in Europe after the wrapping up of the postwar expulsions (‘population transfers’) of ethnic Germans from Central Europe in the latter half of the 1940s. Furthermore, this expulsion of Turks an…
Political science (33 works) · History (28 works) · Law (27 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Politics (18 works) · History (17 works) · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies (14 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (13 works)