1st Edition
Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice
Through staging dialogues between scholars, activists, and artists from a variety of disciplinary, geographical, and historical specializations, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues explores the possible resonances and dissonances between the postcolonial and the postsocialist in feminist theorizing and practice.
While postcolonial and postsocialist perspectives have been explored in feminist studies, the two analytics tend to be viewed separately. This volume brings together attempts to understand if and how postcolonial and postsocialist dimensions of the human condition - historical, existential, political, and ideological - intersect and correlate in feminist experiences, identities, and struggles. In the three sections that probe the intersections, opacities, and challenges between the two discourses, the authors put under pressure what postcolonialism and postsocialism mean for feminist scholarship and activism.
The contributions address the emergence of new political and cultural formations as well as circuits of bodies and capital in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era in currently re-emerging neo-colonial and imperial conflicts. They engage with issues of gender, sexuality, race, migration, diasporas, indigeneity, and disability, while also developing new analytical tools such as postsocialist precarity, queer postsocialist coloniality, uneventful feminism, feminist opacity, feminist queer crip epistemologies. The collection will be of interest for postcolonial and postsocialist researchers, students of gender studies, feminist activists and scholars.
1. Introduction: Uneasy Affinities between the Postcolonial and the Postsocialist
Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova, and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert
PART I: Intersections
2. Locating Postsocialist Precarity in Global Coloniality: A Decolonial Frame for 1989?
Jennifer Suchland
3. A Conversation on Imperial Legacies and Postsocialist Contexts: Notes from a US-Based Feminist Collaboration
Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora
4. Bridging Postcoloniality, Postsocialism and "Race" in the Age of Brexit: An Interview with Catherine Baker
Catherine Baker and Redi Koobak
5. Queering "Postsocialist Coloniality": Decolonizing Queer Fluidity and Postsocialist Postcolonial China
Shana Ye
6. Circassian Trajectories between Post-Soviet Neocolonialism, Indigeneity, and Diasporic Dispersions: A Conversation
Lidia Zhigunova and Madina Tlostanova
PART II: Opacities
7. Opacity as a Feminist Strategy: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Entanglements with Neoliberalism
Raili Marling
8. Anti-colonial Struggles, Postcolonial Subversions: An Interview with Nivedita Menon
Nivedita Menon, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert and Madina Tlostanova
9. Uneventful Feminist Protest in Post-Maidan Ukraine: Nation and Colonialism Revisited
Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik
10. Postsocialist Poetics: Interview with Krёlex Zentr
Krёlex Zentr, Lesia Pagulich and Tatsiana Shchurko
11. Speaking Against the Void: Decolonial Transfeminist Relations and Radical Potentialities
Tjaša Kancler
PART III: Challenges
12. How to See the Spots of the Leopard: An Interview with Quinsy Gario and Jörgen Gario
Quinsy Gario, Jörgen Gario and Redi Koobak
13. Uneasy "Posts" and Unmarked Categories: Politics of Positionality between and beyond the Global South and the European East. An Interview with Manuela Boatcă
Manuela Boatcă and Madina Tlostanova
14. Connecting the "Posts" to Confront Racial Capitalism’s Coloniality
Alyosxa Tudor and Piro Rexhepi
15. "We need to learn about each other and unlearn patterns of racism.": A Conversation with Angéla Kóczé
Angéla Kóczé and Petra Bakos
16. Cripping Postsocialist Chronicity: A Conversation with Kateřina Kolářová
Kateřina Kolářová and Redi Koobak
17. Grappling with the "China Crisis": Positionality, Impasse, and Potential Breakthrough of Chinese Feminist Diaspora in Post-Cold War North America
Weiling Deng
18. Gendered Nationalism in India and Poland: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Conditions in Times of Populism
Kasia Narkowicz and Mithilesh Kumar
Biography
Redi Koobak is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen, Norway.
Madina Tlostanova is Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University, Sweden.
Suruchi Thapar-Björkert is Docent and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Government, University of Uppsala, Sweden.
"This timely anthology comes together at the generative intersections of the asynchronous and sometimes contradictory struggles of postcolonial and postsocialist feminisms. Boldly confronting the race-blindness of postsocialism, and the overwhelming preoccupation with the capitalist West in postcolonialism, the contributions tackle the delicate challenge of theorizing from non-dominant locations—beyond complicity, and with a sensitive regard for difference. The collection highlights "uneventful activism" and especially "opacity" as resources for feminist resistance that confound easy legibility and cooptation by neoliberal recognition and success. The aim here is to safeguard "spaces of re-existence and change" and a politics of post-colonial/socialist coalitions against racial capitalism."
Mahua Sarkar, Professor, Binghampton University, SUNY
"To understand our current complicated and tantalizing geopolitical and corpopolitical situation, feminist scholarship needs to engage with positive meaning making as a way of fine-tuning the researcher’s lens. This exemplary and diverse group of authors correlates postcolonial and postsocialist dimensions with feminist experiences in order to offer concepts and enlighten connections, and to combat "global white ignorance" with much needed innovative politics of knowledge, activism and organizing that may give the world its future dimension back."
Andrea Pető, Professor, Central European University, Budapest-Vienna
"This collection will be of great interest to researchers, students, and general readers interested in contemporary women and feminist writing across the geopolitical East, West, North and South. It illuminates powerfully how people in different locales theorize, argue and negotiate the meanings of postcolonialism, postsocialism and their own role as intellectuals, educators and activists in the making or unmaking of the oppressive historical systems and relations underlining these phenomena. Yet the volume articulates the contributors’ desire for new epistemologies and conceptual constructs that could better capture the complexity and globality especially of postsocialism as a condition, marking important theoretical and political debates about postcoloniality, globalization, political economy, race, and power in transnational feminism, postcolonial studies, and women, gender and sexuality studies."
Miglena Todorova, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
