Symbols Hope Is of a Different Color Magda Lipska & Monika Talarczyk

Double Exoticism: The Dual Strangeness of Communist Past and Racialized Otherness in Poland

What Is Double Exoticism?

Double exoticism is a concept introduced in Chapter 7 of Hope Is of a Different Color by Magda Lipska and Monika Talarczyk. It describes the simultaneous experience of two layers of strangeness: the foreignness of the communist past (the Polish People’s Republic) and the racialized otherness of Black people in Polish public space. The term emerges from the analysis of a museum portrait pairing: the jazz drummer August Agboola O’Brown next to the Stalinist-era president Bolesław Bierut. The visitor’s surprise at seeing a Black figure in a white museum, combined with the unsettling presence of a once-ubiquitous communist leader, creates a doubled exoticism that reveals how Poland’s socialist and (post)colonial histories have been jointly erased after 1989.

Where Double Exoticism Recurs

The symbol first appears in the Museum of Warsaw’s portrait gallery, but it recurs throughout the historical record of Third World students in state-socialist Poland. In the School of Polish for Foreign Students (SJPdC) in Łódź, the daily encounters between Polish citizens and scholarship holders from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East were framed by both the socialist state’s propaganda of “international friendship” and the persistent racial stereotypes held by locals. After 1989, these contacts were largely forgotten, creating a void that the double exoticism concept helps to fill: the same people who were once visible as instruments of communist foreign policy became invisible in the new national narrative of a Western-oriented, ethnically homogeneous Poland.

The motif recurs in the student films analysed in Chapter 21, such as Djamel Benkhaled’s Anthropology (1982) or Mostafa Derkaoui’s The Adoption (1968). These documentaries capture the lived experience of racialization under state socialism, often showing how the camera’s gaze—and the social gaze—singles out Black bodies as simultaneously representative of distant, “exotic” lands and as uncomfortable reminders of a past that Poland prefers to disown.

How the Meaning of Double Exoticism Changes

Initially, double exoticism describes a visitor’s immediate aesthetic shock at the museum. But as the chapter unfolds, the term gains a broader political and historical weight. It comes to signify the way in which the fall of communism severed the link between Poland’s socialist-era globalization and its current whiteness. The surprise effect of seeing O’Brown next to Bierut is not merely a benign curiosity; it is a symptom of a larger structural amnesia. The first exoticism—the strangeness of the communist past—is explained by the active repression of the PRL’s memory. The second exoticism—the racialized otherness—is compounded by the absence of an overseas colonial past. Poland, as the author Matthieu Gillabert argues, participated in the “imperial cloud” through academic exchanges without direct colonial rule, and this indirect involvement was obscured after 1989.

Thus, double exoticism evolves from an aesthetic observation into a tool for archival recovery. It exposes how the post‑1989 narrative of Poland’s “return to Europe” erased the country’s alternative path to globalization, which had included thousands of students of color. The double exoticism becomes a lens for seeing the racialized and socialist legacies that still shape Polish society today.

Connections to Characters and Themes

Double exoticism is intimately tied to the experience of August Agboola O’Brown, the subject of the museum portrait. O’Brown fought in the Warsaw Uprising and yet remains a marginal figure in Polish historical memory—a Black veteran whose Czechoslovak presence is doubly exoticised. The concept also illuminates the lives of the many filmmakers and intellectuals who studied at the Łódź Film School, such as Mostafa Derkaoui, Abdelkader Lagtaa, and others. Their student shorts, listed in Chapter 32, often directly address the tension between the official ideology of solidarity and the everyday racism they encountered.

Thematically, double exoticism intersects with:

Study Questions

  1. What is the literal scene from which the term “double exoticism” is derived, and why does that scene produce a double effect of strangeness?
    Answer: The term derives from a museum display in which a portrait of August Agboola O’Brown hangs next to one of Bolesław Bierut. The first strangeness comes from the imposing size of Bierut’s portrait, which forces the visitor to confront the largely repressed memory of the Stalinist‑era communist regime. The second strangeness comes from the sight of a Black person in a predominantly white museum and urban environment, an image that violates the visitor’s expectation of Polish public space. Together, these two layers of surprise create a “double exoticism.”

  2. How does double exoticism help explain the post‑1989 erasure of Third World students from Polish historical memory?
    Answer: Double exoticism links the forgetting of the communist past with the forgetting of the racialized Others who were present under state socialism. After 1989, Poland’s new national narrative emphasised a return to Europe and effaced the country’s earlier participation in the socialist bloc’s global exchanges. Because those exchanges had brought thousands of students of colour into Polish cities, their disappearance from public memory becomes a second form of exoticism: the Black presence was once taken for granted, but now it seems alien. The concept thus reveals the structural amnesia that obscures both the PRL and its multi‑ethnic history.

  3. In what ways do the student documentaries discussed in Chapter 21 of the book reflect or complicate double exoticism?
    Answer: Films like Anthropology (1982) and The Adoption (1968) directly thematise the racialised gaze. In Anthropology, the camera dissects Black bodies through a scientific lens, while off‑screen voices question the researchers’ motives—a clear enactment of the subject‑object dynamic inherent in exoticism. In The Adoption, a mixed‑race child is rejected by potential Polish adopters because of her African heritage, revealing the racial hierarchy that coexisted with official anti‑racist ideology. These works show how the double exoticism of past and race played out in everyday life, while also giving agency to the filmed subjects, complicating the simple notion of exoticism as a one‑way projection.

  4. How does the concept of the “imperial cloud” (Kreienbaum and Kamissek) support the argument that Poland participated in colonial relations despite never having formal overseas colonies?
    Answer: The “imperial cloud” refers to the transnational circulation of knowledge, representations, and administrative practices about colonial entities, even among states that were not direct colonisers. Poland, through its academic and cultural ties with the Third World, shared in this cloud by training future elites from decolonised countries, propagating certain stereotypes, and positioning itself as a modernising force. Double exoticism emerges from this specific insertion into imperial networks: the students of colour in Poland were both allies in the socialist project and objects of a distancing, exoticising gaze that had roots in global colonial imaginaries. The “imperial cloud” thus provides a structural explanation for why the presence of Black students was both promoted and simultaneously rendered “strange.”

Conclusion

Double exoticism is a powerful analytical lens for understanding the layered erasure that students of colour experienced in Poland and that their history continues to suffer. By naming the dual strangeness of the communist past and racialised otherness, the concept challenges the comfortable myth of a colour‑blind Eastern Europe and the simplistic post‑1989 forgetting. It turns the museum visitor’s surprise into a starting point for a deeper enquiry into alternative globalisations and the hope that a different, more inclusive memory can be recovered.