Hybrydowość kulturowa w przestrzeniach wielokulturowych

Historie kultury galicyjskiej

Abstraktus

CULTURAL HYBRIDITY IN MULTICULTURAL REGIONS: HISTORIES OF GALICIAN CULTURE 

This article investigates the complex interplay of cultures in Habsburg Galicia, a region marked by its diverse linguistic, religious, and ethnic makeup. It focuses on cultural practices and suggests understanding multilingualism, overarching tropes, and intersecting identities as a form of cultural hybridity. As Galician culture was more than agglutinating several national cultures, this article suggests narrating its history as a plurale tantum. Galician cultural histories are manifest in the province’s theatre and music scene, literary production, architecture and fine arts. The paper tackles both the entangled cultural backgrounds and multilingualism of many authors, artists, and cultural entrepreneurs and recurrent topics that appear throughout Galicia’s cultural production like the Carpathian Mountains or the theme of poverty and religiosity. The article further examines the impact of national movements on the cultural landscape of Galicia. The rise of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish nationalisms in the 19th and early 20th centuries led to the formation of distinct cultural institutions and the promotion of specific national narratives. However, the paper argues that these nationalistic projects not only resembled each others in their mechanisms of nationalizing culture, but often coexisted with more cosmopolitan and hybrid cultural practices. This paper argues that despite manifold social, linguistic, religious and national borders and hierarchies being omnipresent, these fractures also interconnected the hybrid cultural space of Galicia.