The article integrates the 18th century vampire discourse with problems and approaches of postcolonial studies on the one hand, and with the Galicia research in historical and cultural studies on the other hand. For this purpose, vampirism and postcolonial studies are defined at first, while the change of the vampirism discourse – passing from the revenant image to the one of bloodsucker – is analysed in the next step. Finally it is shown how the vampire’s character and discourse have been adjusted and narratively transformed in 18th-century travel literature on Galicia

This paper offers a postcolonial analysis of Ivan Franko’s attack on the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, published as Ein Dichter des Verrathes (A Poet of Treason) in May 1897. Using Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial notion of subalternity, Ivan Franko’s essay is interpreted as an opportunity for Ukrainian (subaltern) culture in Galicia to gain its own voice in opposition to Polish cultural dominance. As a result of this strategy, Franko deliberately wrote his essay in German and published it in Vienna, the political centre of the Habsburg Monarchy.

The article presents the problem of colonial and postcolonial discourse in relation to Eastern Galicia. It discusses the forms of cultural domination existing throughout history in the region and draws attention to their conscious “playing” by successive rulers of this territory, consequently leading to the formation of memory conflicts.

The paper examines Edward Said's critique of Thomas Edward Lawrence view on Arabs and Arabian culture and society. On the one hand some of Said's allegations seems poorly grounded and can be deny with some excerpts from Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. On the other hand Said doesn't remark serious shortcomings of Lawrence's outlook of intercultural relations.

The article applies postcolonial approaches to economic discourses in regard to Habsburg Galicia at the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, focusing on the reform discourses of the state bureaucracy, the Galician landlords and the Polish national movement with regard to serfdom and agrarian reform. Making use of Said’s concept of “orientalism”, the article’s main section is dedicated to the analysis of how the definition and construction of peasants as social actors influenced reforms of serfdom until it was finally abolished in course of the revolution of 1848. Here, several different simultaneous narratives, as well as varying positions in the course of time can be observed, where cultural differences were overlapping with social cleavages. Thus, a polycentric, but not polyvalent approach of power and rule could help deconstructing or at least questioning binary dichotomies, in the way that hegemony is always dependent on a complex web of political, social and economic relations in a spatial context.

In the interview, Dipesh Chakrabarty gives an insight into recent transformations of historical thinking and writing. He discusses various faces of recent democratisation of history, like the proliferation of environmental history and the decolonialisation perspective. He outlines the genealogy of the term “provincializing”, known from his notable work Provincializing Eu-rope. Finally, he elaborates on the emergence of “the planetary” (or “a planetary age”) and recalls the contributions of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt on the conceptualisation of the issue.