Ewa Stańczyk wins Blazyca Prize for Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland

Ewa Stańczyk, Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022).

Exploring Poland’s century long love-hate relationship with the global comic book industry, Ewa Stańczyk’s Comics and Nation captures the myriad ways in which the medium interacted with and shaped Polish society, from the establishment of the Second Polish Republic in 1918 to the post-socialist contemporary state. The extent of interaction between this ‘peripheral’ outpost and the transnational comic book phenomenon has ebbed and flowed, from the largely ‘rhetorical’ engagement of Stalinist era isolationism, when the state dismissed comics as an imperialist threat, via the socialist-era exports to the West of the 1970s, to the rampant free market conditions of the 1990s, when many in the Polish scene felt flooded with ‘foreign junk’. Yet, regardless of the prevailing domestic political situation, Polish comic book producers, publishers, readers, critics, and state officials have always been active participants on the global stage. Stańczyk’s ambitious, carefully researched, and highly accessible account foregrounds a medium long dismissed as marginal to Polish culture. This enables her to provide the reader with an innovative new perspective on modern Polish history in transnational context.  

Honorable mention: Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022)

A remarkable collaborative experiment between a literary critic and a sociologist, Creolizing the Modern casts Transylvania as an inter-imperial and multilingual semiperiphery. Taking one of world literature’s numerous ‘great unread’ novels as its point of departure, this boldly interdisciplinary and methodologically stimulating monograph contributes to and problematises a wide range of theoretical debates. In part, it does so by posing an intriguing question: ‘What does the world look like from the standpoint of a small village in Transylvania, a region in East-Central Europe?’