Review of ‘Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution’, Social Identities 24 (2) 2018, Routledge/Taylor & Francis. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Postsocialist politics and the ends of revolution
The introduction to this special issue offers a theorization of postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist–socialist dynamic to think about how political action need not take shape in ways that are familiar as revolutionary, or oppositional. We argue that postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order even as its revolutionary antithesis. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, postsocialism creates space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present. Secondly, we assert the need for pluralizing postsocialisms as a method, which brings to the fore current practices, imaginaries, and actions that insist on political change at a variety of scales, including local, state, and transnational ones. Pluralizing postsocialisms as a method and considering it necessary for analysis of a global postsocialist condition can provide a crucial analytic through which to assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate-based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War.
(Re)Thinking Postsocialism: Interview with Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora
(Re)thinking Postsocialism: Interview with Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, 2019
What is the place of postsocialist studies in the conversations about global coloniality of power? The term “postsocialism” is often used solely in relation to the specific former state socialist spaces and is rarely included in the scholarly discussions about colonialism and imperialism. This approach narrows the possibilities of other interpretations and analytic potential of postsocialism. Also, the predominance of “racelessness” and the idea of the inapplicability of “race” to the former state socialist region reinforces hierarchical scripts that lead to the exclusion of non-Slavic people and perpetuates racialization in the regions. In the interview, we are searching for the forms of thinking that allow a disruptive potential of knowledge production and radical thinking that counteracts the standardized, simplified and one-dimensional interpretation of postsocialism. Can postsocialism simultaneously be a critique of coloniality of knowledge, of imperial and colonial difference, and a theory of political action, ethical solidarity, and coalitions? The interview with Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora pushes the bounds and definition of postsocialism by freeing it from a homogenized history tied to state socialism and European thought of traditional Marxian teleologies. Atanasoski and Vora make a powerful intervention into conceptualizations of postsocialism, focusing on the legacies of a plurality of socialisms and postsocialism as a global condition and a temporal analytic that questions the very forms of established thinking and paradigms of epistemological genealogies. The interview aims to contemplate on radical possibilities of postsocialisms and to situate the former state socialist regions, such as Balkans and Eastern Europe, in the conversations about global coloniality.
Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent
This article examines postsocialism as an emerging theoretical concept to assess the contestations of liberalism and fascism in public spaces. Focusing on recent political events in Romania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, we address how post-Cold War figurations and erasures of socialism circulate in both expected and unexpected ways in recent instances of protest. Rather than fall into stereotypical invocations of Eastern Europe as a historical and geopolitical site from which to theorize the prefiguration of illiberalism and totalitarianism in a post-Brexit and post-Trump era West, we instead ask, what can Eastern European postsocialist politics teach us about the perils of liberalism? We highlight how the reorganization of public space undergirds the conditions of forgetting that enable postsocialist disaster capitalism, which, as we contend , speaks not only about Eastern European specificity, but also more broadly about the contradictions of Euro-American liberalism made apparent in its recent crises.
The Postcolonial and the Postsocialist: A Deferred Coalition?
2018
The article addresses the reasons for the asymmetrical relations that have emerged between the postcolonial and the postsocialist researchers and sensibilities. The author argues that this asymmetry should be seen as a deferred but potentially possible coalition whose realization is prevented by the contrapuntal temporal-spatial co-positionality of the two discourses. The article tackles the more pronounced interest of the postsocialist scholars and activists in the postcolonial paradigm and the relative lack of a reciprocal interest on the part of their postcolonial peers who refuse to see any affinities between these two human conditions. Among the reasons discussed in the article the most important are the successful Soviet internationalist rhetoric hiding the colonialist logic, the propagandistic representation of the soviet empire as a decolonizing state, the nostalgia of the global south for the unrealized socialist ideals, the crucial differences in the interpretations of rac...
Europe-Asia Studies, 2019
This article assesses the trajectory of postsocialism as a concept and mounts a fivefold critique of postsocialism as: referring to a vanishing object; emphasising rupture over continuity; falling into a territorial trap; issuing from orientalising knowledge construction; and constraining political futures. This critique serves to sketch the contours of an alternative project that still recognises difference but foregrounds links and continuities, develops a political edge, and theorises not just about but with and from this part of the world.
(2013) “Postcommunism’s Discursive Distinction”
Multilingua: A Journal of Cross-Cultural and Inter-Language Communication 32:4:547-52
A review essay concerning Galasińska, Aleksandra and Dariusz Galasiński (eds.) 2010. The Post-Communist Condition: Public and Private Discourses of Transformation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Company. ""
Chasing the Meaning of ‘Post-communism’: a Transitional Phenomenon or Something to Stay?
Contemporary European History, 2000
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