Practices and Discourses of Uneven Development: The Role of Border in Cultural Politics of the Identity of the Belarusian Community in Warsaw
Abstract
This paper analyses two aspects of Belarusian minority in Warsaw, which can be reframed with reference to the concept of border as a certain spatial configuration, articulating the essence of the uneven socio-geographical development. These two aspects are the contraband of alcohol and cigarettes from Belarus to Poland and the Warsaw concerts of Belarusian rock bands, which are banned or persecuted in different ways in their homeland. Both illicit import and concerts are read as strategies of different subgroups of Belarusians to locate themselves in the Polish social landscape, inevitably implying the encounters with rather repressive dimensions of the frontier. It is precisely regional configuration of uneven development that differentiates the specificity of the functioning of Polish-Belarusian border and therefore differentiates the practices crystallized as the responses to this border. In the case of alcohol and cigarettes, this unevenness is grasped in economic terms and in the case of concerts it is saturated with political meaning.
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