Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues

Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice

Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000361520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Frauenrechtlerische Literaturkritik

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.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Uneasy affinities between the postcolonial and the postsocialist

Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova, and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

We are writing this introduction in the midst of the unprecedented crisis linked to the Covid-19 expansion that has substantially shifted the political agendas locally, nationally, and globally while foregrounding the inadequacy of politics and political institutions. Collectively, we are at crossroads which can lead us either to an ultra-right, nationalist, homophobic, and racist future of biopolitical control and new high-tech slavery, or a rebirth of social equality, solidarity, and largely socialist values that have so far not been implemented in any nation-state forms. We believe that in this historical conjuncture, it is crucial to revisit the socialist and postsocialist feminist trajectories, agendas, concerns, and narratives vis-à-vis the postcolonial and post-Fordist models and conditions. Suddenly, what seemed to be a matter of the past – the shameful and defeated socialist history, the forgotten utopia – calls for realigning with the present and projecting into the future if it is ever to happen. However, the neo-socialist tendencies that are unfolding in these times of corona crisis are very different from the state socialist regimes of the past, but close enough to various anarcha-feminist and autonomous feminist as well as broader social movements that react proactively to the inadequacy of the state and the crisis of legitimacy that neoliberal global “capitalocene” has imposed on us all.

In this volume, we begin from the idea that the postsocialist frame, rejected by many as outdated and obsolete (Müller 2019), should not be discarded yet. Postsocialism is not only about a certain time after socialism and not just about people living in former state socialist spaces. It is also a characteristic of the world in its globality after the end of the Cold War (Suchland 2015; Atanasoski and Vora 2018). As human conditions, postcolonialism and postsocialism are more closely connected than is generally imagined, as they reflect the larger geopolitical shifts that mobilise people to react to the ontological designs imposed by modernity and coloniality. While the whole world has become post/neo-colonial after the massive colonisations of the mid 20th century, it has also been marked by discrediting socialism as the last grand social utopia of a just world, including the welfare state, equal opportunities, social mobility, negative discrimination, and internationalism. Never fully realised in any of the spaces that claimed to be socialist, the state socialist utopia is still crucial as a dream, as an alternative to the capitalist liberal or neoliberal model. In this capacity it has been helpful for the leftist and anti-colonial movements both in the West and in the global South. Thus, exploring the connections between the postcolonial and the postsocialist human experiences (as descriptive terms) becomes all the more urgent. It can create a powerful force of global insurgency because the postcolonial and postsocialist conditions are shared by the majority of the people in the world. This is the rationale from where the volume unfolds.

The emergence of the presently powerful critical theories of modernity, particularly its latest phase, was an immediate response to the end of the global socialist utopia. A good example of this is decolonial thought which can be seen as a bitter reflection on the dismantling of the bipolar system, a reaction to the enforced neoliberal modernity, and a realisation that the state cannot be democratised or decolonised (Walsh and Mignolo 2018). Anibal Quijano’s idea of “coloniality” and later Walter Mignolo’s concept of “decoloniality” have reframed “decolonisation” as a term from the Cold War era. Coloniality is different from colonialism and decolonisation is different from decoloniality. This rethinking happened at the point when Fukuyama infamously announced the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992) and the arrival of western neoliberalism as the final destination of humanity. The announcement of the eternal present of the consumer paradise and the cancellation of the course of time launched a chronophobic mechanism (Fry and Tlostanova 2020) whose results are clearly seen today – three decades after the closing of the socialist utopia.

The postsocialist temporality starts with this negation of history and an abrupt historical rupture with the “wrong” socialist modernity. It takes place at the point when the postcolonial model has already been in place for several decades and most importantly, has stayed firmly within the logic of the same western capitalist modernity. Therefore, the postcolonial trajectory is that of a slow successive progress whereas the postsocialist path is a belated break and a start from scratch. The two discourses shared many beliefs and disillusionments but being historically and politically non-synchronous they were not always able to detect these intersections or hear each other’s voices. While the early postcolonial discourses were leftist, anti-capitalist, and progressivist, the postsocialist discourses were marked by a visceral rejection of everything socialist and a fascination with Western knowledge. By the early 2000s, however, a more critical stance began to gradually emerge among postsocialist activists and scholars.

In addition, Western thought has interpreted the concept of postsocialism in exclusively temporal terms (as a period after socialism) ignoring its spatial and human dimensions. Furthermore, just like the global North appropriates or ignores the knowledge from the global South, it also tends to dismiss postsocialist epistemologies, seeing them as a part of the local history of a particular region rather than viewing postsocialism as a global human condition. This bias has often been criticised (Tlostanova 2018; Nowicka 1995), yet mainly by scholars from postsocialist countries. At the same time, decolonial thought, even if it started as a response to the end of the Cold War, also ignored – at least in the beginning – both the experience of state socialism and what followed in East Europe, the former USSR, South East Asia, or Cuba. For decolonial as well as postcolonial thinkers, the postsocialist people have remained a homogenised and opaque group, counted as irrelevant in both of the equations, the post/decolonial and the (neo) liberal. Socialist modernity acted as a trigger for the lighter (end of history) and darker (coloniality) interpretations of the present. Yet the postsocialist countries and people became the proverbial elephant in the room.

As many scholars have emphasised, it makes more sense to regard “post-socialism”, like the related term “postcolonialism”, as an analytic rather than a fixed time period or locality (Chari and Verdery 2009; Dunn and Verdery 2015; Atanasoski and Vora 2018). For instance, Nina Lykke notes that post-socialism, when “unmoored from a limited geopolitical understanding as spatially and temporally linked to former socialist countries in East and Central Europe, can address imaginaries of protest in a broad anti-capitalist sense” (Lykke 2020, 12). As analytical terms, both postcolonialism and postsocialism are concerned with legacies of imperial power, dependence, resistance, and hybridity, therefore pointing to multiple productive convergences between the two. Yet, postcolonialism is commonly equated with the global South, rarely addressed through postsocialist perspectives, while at the same time postsocialism is often only associated with Central and East Europe, post-Soviet countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and China – sites that are always already interwoven with a (post)colonial world order and almost never seen as decolonising. In the context where the false geopolitical universals and stereotypes such as West versus East, North versus South, and the reliance on a first-second-third world model continue to operate in full force, we need new models and concepts in order to challenge hegemonic discourses and undermine the problematic expectation to subscribe to the unifying Euro-American intellectual traditions.

In this volume, even as we attempt to question the attachment of the term to a particular time period or to specific geopolitical places, we often use the term “postsocialist” to refer specifically to the post-Soviet countries, Central and East European countries in the former Soviet sphere of influence, and a number of countries in the global South that for several decades joined the state socialist model, whereas the term “post-Soviet” refers exclusively to the former republics of the USSR. The Cold War era term “second world” is problematic due to its latent ideology of a universal modernisation narrative and its elevation of the “first world” (cf. Chari and Verdery 2009, 18). Moreover, for a number of countries in East Asia the Cold War is still an ongoing experience, and scholars and activists from these countries, referring to a different (from East European) temporality, would be very uneasy about using the term “postsocialist”. Their anti-capitalist stance includes a critique of feminism that is largely interpreted as a product of the Cold War logic of knowledge production (Kim 2020). We are aware of this and other important differences between the countries in the East European region, Africa, East Asia, and Central and South America, but we also acknowledge the need for some overarching term to refer to the shared legacy of socialist influence across the world.

The contributors to this volume pick up the term postsocialist in very different ways. On the one hand, some of them regard the term postsocialism as an improved and updated version of socialism, attempting to add critical vigour to it. On the other hand, there are those who see it as a human condition of limitation, enslavement, recolonisation presented as decolonisation and also further, as grounds for racialisation and exclusion. Yet all of them continue to find it useful. Similarly, the term postcolonial is open for discussion. Is it a human condition or a set of beliefs? Are scholars postcolonial because they come from postcolonial countries or because they share the postcolonial theoretical and political agenda?

Positionality and the politics of knowledge production

This volume grows out of conversations that started at a conference we organised in April 2015 at Linköping University, Sweden. These exchanges revealed that the intersections between the postcolonial and the postsocialist surface in feminist studies in a similar way as in many other disciplines. For example, despite the shift of focus towards intersecting differences and the local within feminist studies, Western feminist theorising has remained hegemonic, and entanglements of geopolitical differences are largely understudied.

As feminist scholars from Estonia, non-European Russian/former Soviet colonies, and India, living and working, at the time, in Sweden as “non-Swedes” (Koobak and Thapar-Björkert 2012), we often found ourselves disidentifying with Western feminist academia through our specific overlapping and unfixed postcolonial and postsocialist positions. Our shared experiences as well as our previous and on-going work on the intersections of the postcolonial and the postsocialist (Koobak and Thapar-Björkert 2014; Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert, and Koobak 2016, 2019), inspired us to open up space for discussions around the overlaps, divergences, and relevance of the postcolonial and the postsocialist sensibilities for feminist theory and praxis.

We are not arguing for or holding on to any kind of fixed positions of postcolonial and postsocialist feminisms because we know from our personal and research experience that there are always overlaps and border spaces between these positionalities. As a feminist scholar from postsocialist Estonia, Redi Koobak grew into feminism through the English language and Western academic contexts where she couldn’t quite place herself. Often feeling slightly off or out of sync because her positionality read as similar to the West but not similar enough, while it also registered as different but somehow not different enough, Redi turned to challenging the limits of the “field imaginary” of feminist studies by paying careful attention to the affinities between the postcolonial and the postsocialist. Madina Tlostanova combines post-Soviet and postcolonial sensibilities and originations related to her mixed Circassian (North Caucasus) and Uzbek (Central Asia) ancestry as the two Russian/Soviet colonial spaces that shared many features and experiences with the colonies of the modern Western capitalist empires as they were copied and distorted by the Czarist and later Soviet empires. Madina’s internal difference (as a racialised postcolonial other within the Russian Federation) and her external difference (as a foreigner with a Russian passport working in Sweden) merge in a specific invisibilising/hyper-visibilising pattern that erases crucial elements of her dynamic intersectional subjectivity and positionality (which sees her as “black” – in Moscow, or as “Russian” – in Sweden). Suruchi Thapar-Björkert’s postcolonial positionality was shaped through the legacy of her parents’ anti-colonial activism during the 1940s against British rule in India. The spatial-colonial contexts of academic institutions in the UK, together with the domestic genealogies as a daughter of a nationalist household, gave postcoloniality an emotional and political salience. Our respective academic journeys made us realise that there were important conversations that needed to be forged between feminists who consider themselves as postcolonial and/or postsocialist.

While preparing for the conference, we realised that the topic spoke mostly to scholars from postsocialist Eastern Europe who are often well-versed in postcolonial feminist theory and who engage with it productively to analyse postsocialist contexts. It was a great challenge to find scholars who would fit under the term postcolonial feminist and who would, at the same time, be keen on exploring the convergences and divergences between the postcolonial and the postsocialist discourses. In the course of the conference, we understood that the postcolonial feminist scholars who did attend the event struggled to engage with the particularities of postsocialist contexts. Partly, we thought, this may have been because postcolonialism still tends to be associated with the global South and postsocialism with the former “second world”, and in feminist studies much of the focus has been on the relation between the “first world” and the “third world” women and the first and the “second world” women but not so much between the “second” and the “third world” women (see also Suchland 2011). In addition, it could well be that from the perspective of many ...