ABSTRACT

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 Chapter 1|10 pages

Introduction

Uneasy affinities between the postcolonial and the postsocialist

part I|79 pages

Intersections

chapter Chapter 2|15 pages

Locating postsocialist precarity in global coloniality

A decolonial frame for 1989?

chapter Chapter 3|11 pages

A conversation on imperial legacies and postsocialist contexts

Notes from a US-based feminist collaboration

chapter Chapter 4|13 pages

Bridging postcoloniality, postsocialism, and “race” in the age of Brexit

An interview with Catherine Baker

chapter Chapter 5|16 pages

Queering "Postsocialist Coloniality"

Decolonising queer fluidity and Postsocialist postcolonial China

part II|80 pages

Opacities

chapter Chapter 7|15 pages

Opacity as a feminist strategy

Postcolonial and postsocialist entanglements with neoliberalism

chapter Chapter 8|12 pages

Anti-colonial struggles, postcolonial subversions

An interview with Nivedita Menon

chapter Chapter 9|17 pages

Uneventful feminist protest in post-Maidan Ukraine

Nation and colonialism revisited

chapter Chapter 10|17 pages

Postsocialist poetics

Interview with Krëlex zentr1

chapter Chapter 11|16 pages

Speaking against the void

Decolonial transfeminist relations and radical potentialities

part III|88 pages

Challenges

chapter Chapter 12|10 pages

How to See the Spots of the Leopard

An interview with Quinsy Gario and Jörgen Gario

chapter Chapter 13|8 pages

Uneasy "posts" and unmarked categories

Politics of positionality between and beyond the Global South and the European East. An interview with Manuela Boatcă

chapter Chapter 15|7 pages

“We need to learn about each other and unlearn patterns of racism”

A conversation with Angéla Kóczé

chapter Chapter 16|11 pages

Cripping postsocialist chronicity

A conversation with Kateřina Kolářová

chapter Chapter 17|16 pages

Grappling with the "China crisis"

Positionality, impasse, and potential breakthrough of Chinese feminist diaspora in post-Cold War North America

chapter Chapter 18|16 pages

Gendered nationalism in India and Poland

Postcolonial and postsocialist conditions in times of populism