(2013) "Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe." In Anthropological Theory 13(4): 394-416 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe
Anthropological Theory, 2013
In this article, I analyse the ways in which coloniality as a racialized and racializing rationality of government and knowledge production shapes political and historical subjects in postsocialist Europe. I analyse Latvian attempts to establish historical presence in European modernity through appropriation of 17th-century colonial pursuits of the Duchy of Courland into Latvian national history, as well as interpretations of this historical appropriation by Western scholars and travellers. I argue that Latvian identification with Europe’s colonial past not only renders visible the continued salience of coloniality in European politics but also illuminates the mechanisms through which Europe attempts to renew its moral superiority in the global arena by relegating colonialism to a past that Europe claims to have overcome and that Latvians are required to overcome to become fully European. I argue that in order to understand how coloniality continues to inform political life in conte...
Post-/De-) Colonial Baltic Shades: The Latvian Case and its Global Breath
eSamizdat 2021 (XIV) - Oltre il “post-”. L’esperienza (post-)sovietica sotto la lente (post-)coloniale, 2021
The Baltic area has always been conceived as experiencing a constant oscillation between the Western European cultural space and the Russian one. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, countries such as the Baltic states had to deal with a history of invasions alongside a present of plural memories, languages and cultures. The article will be committed to analyzing the contemporary Russophone cultural patterns in Latvia departing from the Baltic historical and mnemonic frame followed by a journey into the post-Soviet and postcolonial debate. The last part will disclose the Russophone translingual and transcultural environment of Latvia between hard borders of nationality and soft hybrid subjectivities. Examples of Russophone intellectual, artistic and poetic manifestations will be presented in the light of post-Soviet studies, colonial and (de-)colonial theoretic trajectories, taking into account interviews and field research conducted in Riga. The final purpose will be to understand in which ways certain Latvian Russophone manifestations can be analyzed as postcolonial and decolonial representations, highlighting junctures and fractures in terms of identity, language and national identification.
2020
The recent events unfolding in the United States have called the world’s attention to the intersection of systemic racism and colonial legacies. Recent anti-racist protests sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement in North America and various decolonial movements in the West have significantly expanded into wider debates about colonial legacies in European societies and for first time in Eastern Europe. Voices have joined from various other parts of the world not only to express solidarity, but also to raise similar concerns in their own territories, including from Eastern European countries that did not have a shared historical account of partaking in modern colonialism. This outcome is both problematic and hopeful: it is problematic because western histories, politics and discourses continue to frame public debates around the world regardless of context-specific histories, effectively maintaining Anglo-American epistemological hegemony in the world; it is hopeful because issues of racism, exclusion or ‘othering’ may generate beneficial self-reflective discussions within every country and among every people...
Taking a strikingly interdisciplinary and global approach, Postcolonialism Cross-Examined reflects on the current status of postcolonial studies and attempts to break through traditional boundaries, creating a truly comparative and genuinely global phenomenon. Drawing together the field of mainstream postcolonial studies with post-Soviet postcolonial studies and studies of the late Ottoman Empire, the contributors in this volume question many of the concepts and assumptions we have become accustomed to in postcolonial studies, creating a fresh new version of the field. The volume calls the merits of the field into question, investigating how postcolonial studies may have perpetuated and normalized colonialism as an issue exclusive to Western colonial and imperial powers. The volume is the first to open a dialogue between three different areas of postcolonial scholarship that previously developed independently from one another: • the wide field of postcolonial studies working on European colonialism, • the growing field of post-Soviet postcolonial/post-imperial studies, • the still fledgling field of post-Ottoman postcolonial/post-imperial studies, supported by sideways glances at the multidirectional conditions of interaction in East Africa and the East and West Indies. Postcolonialism Cross-Examined looks at topics such as humanism, nationalism, multiculturalism, nostalgia, and the Anthropocene in order to piece together a new, broader vision for postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century. By including territories other than those covered by the postcolonial mainstream, the book strives to reframe the "postcolonial" as a genuinely global phenomenon and develop multidirectional postcolonial perspectives. Monika Albrecht is Professor of literary and cultural studies (apl. Prof.) at
The paper defends the useful- ness of the postcolonial approach to the study of various processes in the postcommunist coun- tries that belonged, for decades, to the inner and outer parts of the Soviet empire. The paper shows, in particular, how some developments in post-Soviet Ukraine can be better understood in the context of Russo-Soviet internal colonialism, and how Ukraine’s thoroughgoing ambiva- lence and conspicuous regionalism result historically from different types of colonization of different regions. The paper insists, nonetheless, on a clear recognition of intrinsic limitations of the postcolonial approach, determined primarily by the absence of the racist component in Sovi- et imperialism – the component that is crucial for the classical (post)colonial situation and that makes it profoundly different from the Soviet one in terms of the complete exclusion / potential inclusion of subjugated peoples. In sum, all the usefulness of postcolonial theorizing for the analysis of the postcommunist world should not inhibit researchers from the recognition of its only partial and very conditional applicability, and of the need for due reservations, self- reflection and self-restrain.
In the Name of Europe. Introduction to special issue on Postcolonial Europe
year 2011…, 2011
Though that [imperial and colonial] history remains marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing only in the service of nostalgia and melancholia, it represents a store of unlikely connections and complex interpretative resources. The imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer-imperial countries. (Gilroy, 2004, p. 2) 'Europe' in a sense is a phantom of the past, a name that 'is history' rather than society, political, or economics, since the flow of capitalization, population, communication and political action, cross its territory, invest its cities and workplace, but do not elect it as a permanent of specific site. Europe is not only de-territorialized, but also de-localized, put 'out of itself', and in the end deconstructed. It may be part of an imaginary, but less and