This interpretive article relies on insights from three critical literatures -world-systems analysis, postcolonial studies and, to the extent of an extended simile, the economic sociology of flexible global production -to propose a geo-political understanding of what the European Union (EU) is. The authors begin by interrogating the tendency within much of the current research and commentary on the EU to treat it as a state of sorts. They then outline some mechanisms -pertaining to its internal and external linkage structures -that have enabled the EU to perform successfully in a geo-political context where most of the main actors are states. Finally, drawing on critical insights from the sociology of subcontracted production and distributed organization, the authors suggest ways in which the EU, in its current form, might be thought of beyond the constraints of the current theoretical language of statehood.

This contribution interprets the east-central European post-liberal governments’ recent anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-human-rights hysteria in the context of the increasing dependence of the region's societies for livelihood on employment in the western EU, the widespread racialization of east European labor in the western EU, and the refusal of east European political elites and societies at large to consider possible “Left” critiques of the EU. Given those circumstances, and laboring under related anxieties, post-state-socialist political elites and societies have assumed a fundamentalist-racialist posture. They redirect their repressed anger toward incoming refugees, claim an ahistorical, essential kind of Whiteness and contribute to rigidifying European discussions of “race.”

The study of popular memory is necessarily relational. It involves the exploration of two sets of relations: (1) that between dominant memory and oppositional forms across the public field, including academic productions; and (2) the relation between public discourse and a more privatized sense of the past generated within lived culture. 2 This paper is concerned with the second of these two constitutive relations in the study of popular memorythe often vexed but close linkages between public constructions and private reminiscences.The project began with what seemed to be a simple question: what might we learn about the final decades of colonial rule in Bengal, and especially about Acknowledgements: My biggest debt in writing this paper is, of course, to the women I interviewed for generously sharing their experiences with me. Professor Hossenur Rahman and the late Mrs. Gaur Ayub helped me with my first contacts with members of the Muslim middle class in Calcutta. I am deeply indebted to them. Many of my contacts in Bangladesh, in turn, came through the personal networks of the women I interviewed in Calcutta. I am grateful for the hospitality of Mrs.

The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo women writers in this process.

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