Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues

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

• 1. Introduction: Uneasy Affinities between the Postcolonial and the PostsocialistPART I: Intersections2. Locating Postsocialist Precarity in Global Coloniality: A Decolonial Frame for 1989?3. A Conversation on Imperial Legacies and Postsocialist Contexts: Notes from a US-Based Feminist Collaboration4. Bridging Postcoloniality, Postsocialism, and "Race" in the Age of Brexit: An Interview with Catherine Baker 5. Queering "Postsocialist Coloniality": Decolonizing Queer Fluidity and Postsocialist Postcolonial China6. Circassian Trajectories between Post-Soviet Neocolonialism, Indigeneity, and Diasporic Dispersions: A ConversationPART II: Opacities7. Opacity as a Feminist Strategy: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Entanglements with Neoliberalism8. Anti-colonial Struggles, Postcolonial Subversions: An Interview with Nivedita Menon9. Uneventful Feminist Protest in Post-Maidan Ukraine: Nation and Colonialism Revisited 10. Postsocialist Poetics: Interview with Krёlex Zentr11. Speaking Against the Void: Decolonial Transfeminist Relations and Radical PotentialitiesPART III: Challenges12. How to See the Spots of the Leopard: An Interview with Quinsy Gario and Jörgen Gario13. Uneasy "Posts" and Unmarked Categories: Politics of Positionality between and beyond the Global South and the European East. An Interview with Manuela Boatcă14. Connecting the "Posts" to Confront Racial Capitalism’s Coloniality15. "We need to learn about each other and unlearn patterns of racism.": A Conversation with Angéla Kóczé16. Cripping Postsocialist Chronicity: A Conversation with Kateřina Kolářová17. Grappling with the "China Crisis": Positionality, Impasse, and Potential Breakthrough of Chinese Feminist Diaspora in Post-Cold War North America18. Gendered Nationalism in India and Poland: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Conditions in Times of Populism