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Preface and Acknowledgments

During research trips to Germany and Poland in the early 2000s, I was often asked about my personal relationship to my field of studies. The message usually implied in the question was that a scholar needed to be of Polish or German descent to become interested in the history of the region. People were quite puzzled by my presence at the archives since many historians tend to write about their countries, localities, and heritages. It was difficult for me to explain that my connection and preoccupations with the field came through my theoretical lens, a political stance in colonial studies, and my own transnational experience, but not through a Polish or German background.

In the film West Side Story (1961), a Puerto Rican girl, Maria, migrates to the US mainland and falls in love with a young Pole named Anton.¹ This musical adaptation of the classic Romeo and Juliet tells the story of an impossible love between two people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, whose potential crossing could not survive gang subcultures and ethnic alliances of the streets of New York City. For many generations, the film shaped the way Puerto Ricans were portrayed and known throughout the world. For me, West Side Story is the metaphor I used when describing my own academic interests to people during two years of archival research in central Europe. I frequently introduced the project as a product of my intellectual fascination with those Poles that nineteenth-century Germans sought to civilize and Germanize, not knowing if my undertaking would happily survive or fatally die in the streets of academia. I employed the reference to the film to create a space of familiarity for people who had a difficult time imagining why a person from Puerto Rico (with roots in the Dominican Republic) without Polish or German background would ever be interested in studying Polish history and entering into the complicated and politically charged debates regarding Polish-German relations.

Being a lone Caribbean in the field of Polish and German studies has presented me with significant challenges and has, interestingly, made me approach the questions addressed in this book somewhat similarly to the way many of the historical actors in my research were producing knowledge in the nineteenth century. For, although I was not an emissary of an empire, I took up the role of an ethnographer, and it was through traveling, learning the languages, and immersing myself in Polish and German cultures that I was able to develop a feel for the history I write about here.

In contrast, my life history put me exceptionally close to the topics of study, thanks to my experiences coming of age in a territory struggling with consequences of colonialism, and living a life shaped by transnational journeys between the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the United States. Perspectives and experiences from my Caribbean past and culture, shaped through my journey as a migrant from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico and then to mainland United States, provide profound motivations and insights in my research on migration, cultural identifications, and imperial studies.²

The trajectory of my life and research shapes the way I see and do history. My approach is also informed by the cultural turn in history and by increasing considerations of diversity and interdisciplinarity, which have brought a wider range of perspectives into the production of historical knowledge.³ As Johannes Fabian has eloquently put it, “the connection between history and epistemology . . . is perhaps best understood if we accept that a discipline, in order to be critical of itself, needs a history not only of its findings but also of its ways of searching, that is, of the practices of knowledge production and presentation.”⁴ Following Fabian’s call, I consider it necessary to discuss the context in which this work was conceived and the processes through which I searched for and produced a colonial history of Prussian Poland—the lands with an overwhelming population of Polish-speaking subjects that Germany lost in 1918.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920, has benefited from—and advanced—two related movements in the humanities and social sciences. One of them is diversity and the democratization of knowledge. The other one is interdisciplinarity or the creation of new epistemologies across disciplinary boundaries. Diversity is a word I have been encountering the most since I moved to the United States to study under the auspices of affirmative action programs, now endangered. I considered my work as broadening and enriching European history by bringing my Caribbean lens into discussions of a field that, until quite recently, had been dominated by white, male, and ethnically oriented perspectives. This view of my work was partly an outcome of my close reading of postcolonial texts written by Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and the New Left. My choice to study Europe was, at the same time, the result of my desire to move away from the all-too-familiar landscape of Caribbean history.

The work of the Subaltern Studies Collective of the early 1980s, which quickly evolved into so-called Postcolonial Studies, was instrumental in empowering me to write about Europeans and bring the colonial question to the very core of the European continent.⁵ The group challenged the knowledge that both imperialist and nationalist literatures had created about former colonies while providing the tools for people from the “periphery” to question the historical writings produced by scholars identified as First World, Western and European, identifications that seem problematic to me now from an East Europeanist perspective.⁶ Subaltern scholars have been widely and usefully criticized in recent years for implicitly reproducing the dichotomies of power between “West” and “East,” colonizer and colonized, and for rendering a too essentialized picture of Europe, generally linked to the British imperial experience. Yet their works have inspired many to take the legacy of colonialism more critically than ever before. They challenged others to take seriously the cultural projects that Europeans put forward in the colonies and the impact that colonial systems had not only on European and native subjects but also on political imaginations. Moreover, the cultural questions they analyzed had the important effect of making history more receptive to theoretical frameworks used in other disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary movement motivated historians of imperial and colonial societies to rethink their traditional methods of research and had profound impacts on the broadening of archives.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is the result of this (post)colonial turn in German and Polish historiography. The book studies the colonial discourses and imperial practices that the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire used to map out, describe, and regulate Polish-speaking citizens in the nineteenth century. It also explores the cultural and biological definitions of Polish subjects through the scientific works of Germans and Poles in central Europe and Polish experiences with colonial projects in German Africa and southern Brazil.

My interest in the history of public health and colonialism led me to study the German colonies in Africa and analyze their relationship with the Prussian-Polish provinces. When I reached the archives in Poland, I came across a set of Polish travel accounts written from and about overseas colonies. The finding significantly changed the course of my research by giving me the opportunity to explore the dissemination of colonial thought in partitioned Poland and study Polish engagements in colonial projects. I chose to title this book Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities to refer to the constraints that Poles and Germans encountered in their colonial desires when faced with their unique imperial realities in and outside central Europe. The title also represents my humble way of paying homage to the late Susanne Zantop and her groundbreaking book, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Exploring Polish expeditions in Africa and the migration process in Brazil, as well as the Germanization of the eastern borderlands, has provided me with the opportunity to untangle Polish colonial desires and to analyze Polish agency and implication in the colonization of others.

This book has benefited from many extraordinary people who kindly supported me through research and several stages of the writing process. I am most grateful to Geoff Eley and Brian Porter-Szücs for believing in the project from the very beginning and for helping me so much over the years with their generous mentorship. Nancy Rose Hunt and George Steinmetz provided theoretical guidance when I was formulating my research questions. I want to thank them for encouraging me to think outside the box, across regional and disciplinary boundaries. Julia Hell, Frederick Cooper, Jane Burbank, Mamadou Diouf, and David Cohen offered early support and taught me greatly about imperial and colonial studies. Kathleen Canning gave me the opportunity to work under her wing at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, where I was able to collaborate with Bob Bain and Douglas Northrop and expand my research interests into world history and global studies. I am also grateful to numerous colleagues and friends in Ann Arbor for providing me with a nurturing intellectual community, which helped shape my work in significant ways.

After finishing my graduate studies, I was fortunate enough to become the assistant director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) at the University of Michigan (U-M). LACS gave me the chance to work closely with many distinguished scholars whose transregional inquiries motivated me to delve into the study of central European migration to Latin America, particularly the Polish diaspora in Brazil. I am indebted to LACS former directors Alexandra M. Stern, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, and Richard L. Turits for supporting my research and teaching activities. They kindly afforded me multiple professional development opportunities, which were fundamental for my academic growth and the book project. At LACS, I always counted on the assistance and generosity of amazing colleagues and friends. I want to thank particularly Sueann Caulfield, Rebecca J. Scott, Paulina Alberto, and visiting scholars Keila Grinberg and Flávio Limoncic for their encouragement and for teaching me so much about Brazilian culture and history. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude to Bebete Martins and Howard I. Tsai, my writing companions during the completion of the manuscript. I especially thank them for being a major support throughout the process and for all the fond times we shared at LACS and beyond.

I also want to acknowledge the contribution that my current home institution, the Center for Latin American Studies (LAS) at the University of Florida, has made to the project. The Center funded a research trip to Rio de Janeiro, where I was able to gather key sources regarding the establishment of Polish colonies in Brazil. LAS has been quite supportive of my academic endeavors and has quickly turned into my second home. I would like to thank LAS faculty, staff, and students for welcoming me into the family and for making my transition to Florida a smooth one. I am particularly grateful to LAS director Philip J. Williams for his assistance and guidance. Susan Paulson, Efraín Barradas, Rosana Resende, Catherine Tucker, Mary Risner, Glenn Galloway, Nicholas Vargas, Welson Tremura, and Paul Losch have all been exceptional colleagues. My graduate assistants, Lisa Krause and Anna Rodell, have also been a great support and source of inspiration.

Writing this book would not have been possible without the financial contribution received from the University of Michigan, mainly from the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Department of History, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the International Institute, LACS, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Grant and a Rackham Merit Fellowship helped me conduct research in Germany and Poland from 2003 to 2005. LACS supported my first research trip to Brazil in 2012 and the University of Florida funded a second one in 2016. The generous support provided by these and other institutions allowed me to disseminate the ideas presented in this book in workshops, conferences, and annual meetings organized by prestigious entities such as the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; the American Historical Association; the German Historical Institute; the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; the São Paulo School of Advanced Studies on the Globalization of Culture in the Nineteenth Century; and the Polish Emigration Museum (Gdynia).

Parts of the preface and introduction of this book were presented in the conference “Thinking through the Cultural Turn—A Generation Reflects: Writing Histories in an Interdisciplinary and Transnational Age,” which I organized in Puerto Rico in 2007 with colleagues from U-M and the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). The conference paper titled “An Ethnography of Knowledge: Doctors in Motion, Imperial Agendas, and the Study of Polish and German Subjectivities from a (Post) Colonial Perspective” was included in one of the numbers of Historia y Sociedad (published by UPR), which commemorated the event and a follow-up workshop held in Michigan in 2009. An earlier version of the first chapter and parts of the conclusion were published as “An Empire of Scientific Experts: Polish Physicians and the Medicalization of the German Borderlands, 1880–1918,” in Liberal Imperialism in Europe: An Anthology, edited by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick. I want to thank the editorial board of Historia y Sociedad and Palgrave Macmillan for allowing me to include these works in this book.

My editors at Ohio University Press, John J. Bukowczyk and Gillian Berchowitz, have been truly amazing throughout the process of shaping my ideas into a coherent book. I thank them wholeheartedly for their encouragement and guidance and for their infinite patience. John has become a true mentor to me. His perceptive remarks helped me improve the manuscript in so many ways. I also want to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and copyeditor Ed Vesneske Jr. for their useful and insightful comments. Their questions and assessments allowed me to enrich the analysis and take my ideas in new directions.

During the time I did my main research work in Europe, I felt incredibly at home in Poland, and both Warsaw and Poznań became treasured cities to me. People were generally open and curious to learn about my project, which greatly helped improve my Polish and made the research process less lonely. I want to thank Tomasz Kizwalter (University of Warsaw), Magdalena Gawin (then at the Polish Academy of Sciences), Roman Meissner (Poznań University of Medical Sciences), Marek Czapliński (University of Wrocław), and Antoni Kuczyński (University of Wrocław) for taking the time to meet and share with me their work and expertise. I am also grateful to the many archivists and librarians in Germany, Poland, and Brazil who kindly assisted me in my research. Teodoro Alves and Maureen Elina Javorski at the Public Archives of Paraná (Arquivo Público do Paraná) were fundamental in providing me with key sources and materials about the Polish colonies in Brazil. I want to thank them for their great generosity and for the sources they sent me upon my return from the archives. I am also grateful to José Juan Pérez Meléndez at UC Davis for sharing with me his ideas on colonization policies in Brazil and pointing me towards the Brazilian National Archives in Rio de Janeiro.

This project also benefited from the conversations I have maintained throughout all these years with advisers and professors from my alma mater, the University of Puerto Rico. Carlos Pabón, Luis E. Agrait, Astrid Cubano Iguina, María del Carmen Baerga, Mayra Rosario Urrutia, and Carlos Ramos inspired me to become a historian and pursue my PhD degree. As a first-generation college graduate, I want to thank them for always being supportive of my academic pursuits.

I reserve my final thanks to my friends and family. I am deeply grateful to Juan R. Hernández García and Marie Cruz Soto for their love and continuous support. They have been my accomplices in most of my academic and personal adventures. My heartfelt thanks also go to many friends from my Ann Arbor years who offered me their assistance in varied ways. Among them, I want to thank Katie Wroblewski, Asli Gur, Rose Peruski, Emil Kerenji, Edin Hajdarpašić, Olivera Jokić, Rebecca Pite, Alice Weinreb, You-Sun Crystal Chung, Rebecca Grapevine, Emily Klencher, Susan Hwang, Yan Long, Dáša Frančíková, Alice Huang, Cheryl Israel, and Tae Woolfort.

Over the course of my academic journey, my family has been my refuge and major source of inspiration. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, who worked extremely hard to give me an education. My siblings Rosa Elena, José Reynaldo, María Estela, and Yessenia Mercedes made me immensely happy growing up. Without their love, and my mother’s sense of humor, I would have never made it this far.