Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice ed. by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice ed. by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert P. Watson Koobak, Redi; Tlostanova, Madina and Thapar-Björkert, Suruchi (eds). Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice. Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2021. xvi + 265 pp. Illustrations. Figures. References. Index. £120:00; £36:99; £33:99 (e-book). By bringing together the postcolonial and the postsocialist, until now addressed separately in feminist studies, this anthology aims to open the way to new sets of political questions with the potential for impacting global change. [End Page 591] Postcolonialism is rarely addressed through postsocialist perspectives, which have typically been concentrated on East European and post-Soviet countries. Moreover, as the book observes, after the Cold War feminists in Eastern Europe tend to engage with postcolonial discourse to the extent of describing their location as the internal other of Europe, while feminists from the global south are reluctant to engage in a critical discussion of postsocialism. Instead of abandoning past and present versions of socialism, the book contends, postsocialism should be productively rethought. The book is composed of eighteen chapters ranging from interviews and conversations to straight single author texts. The chapters traverse themes such as disability, gender, sexuality, migration, the EU and racism/whiteness. The diverse group of twenty-eight contributors includes activists, artists and scholars from a range of scholarly backgrounds. Chapters are organized under three headings: intersections/opacities/challenges, which represent broad axes for thinking between the postcolonial and the postsocialist. The first section considers intersections in terms of the interactions of cultures, epistemologies, ideologies and human conditions within modernity/coloniality. The second interrogates normative understandings of opacity with the aim of extracting the idea’s potential for resistance, while the third part grapples with the challenges posed by the complicity of feminisms in upholding a racist European imperial project. In her chapter on postsocialist precarity, Jennifer Suchland explores the ways in which East European and Eurasian postsocialism relate to the history of colonialism. Looking at postsocialism as a global condition, postsocialist precarity involves the defunding of public services, the promotion of austerity and of profit over wellbeing, as well as the criminalization of protest. Suchland encompasses postsocialist and decolonial critiques of power with the aim of exposing the hidden Eurocentrism in critical postsocialist theorizing. She offers a decolonial reading of precarity by analysing two images — Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga and an image of a sex-trafficked person — uncovering how hidden eurocentrism can be carried forward in the discourses around them. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s intention is to bring back socialism as a way of framing analysis. They raise unasked questions such as: how is Eastern Europe racialized in complex ways through the commodification of bodies? How does such racialization complicate notions of US racial formations? What might be the implications for postcolonial theory? In her interview with Manuelā Boatca, Madina Tlostanova notes the way in which a new postsocialist feminist subject is abandoning past and present socialist phenomena, and the scale of the challenge of engaging feminists from the global south regarding this issue. Boatca identifies this as coloniality of knowledge, which produces categories such as Second versus Third World which come to constitute a field [End Page 592] within which competing political interests are played out. Deconstructing colonial categories is prerequisite for making transverse connections. In other chapters, Lidia Zhigunova discusses the racial status of Circassians who have become the epitome of ‘whiteness’ in US racial discourse yet who are branded as ‘Blacks’ in Russia together with other ‘Caucasians’. Tjaša Kancler pushes for a radical approach to analysis that interrogates or leaves behind Western-derived meanings of gender. Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik, writing on post-Maidan Ukraine, argue that ‘uneventful activism’ can help forge futures that can avoid the trap of nationalism, capitalism and colonialism, even at a time of war. Angéla Kóczé in conversation with Petra Bakos reflects on developing a critical race feminist agenda sensitive to the specific characteristics and needs of Eastern European Roma communities. Alyosxa...