Our Blackface Sounds Familiar: Historical Imitations of Blackness in Poland

Although blackface minstrelsy is considered to be one of the first American pop culture products, its circulation in central and eastern Europe is relatively unknown. This article engages with the history of blackface performance and imagery in Poland, treating it as a lens granting insight into ways of imagining blackness in the region. It focuses on the interwar period as a time of rapid adaptation of colonial imagination with its global racial hierarchies in the public sphere of the newly independent country. Against the ideology of “colonial exceptionalism” and “white innocence” based on an assumption that Poland—as a state with no history of overseas colonies and Black slavery—is free of anti-black racism, we describe the active involvement of large groups of society in transnational colonial imagination, developed especially in the sphere of entertainment. The article not only demonstrates the existence of the tradition of blackface in Poland and reconstructs its distinct character but also suggests structural determinants that continue to affect ideas about blackness in Poland today.