No abstract

In this introduction to special issue 'After Utopia: Leftist Imaginaries and Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World', we explore the theoretical implications for thinking about activism as a form of historically situated practice in the former socialist world. Building on insights from the papers included in this issue, which draw on ethnographic research in Ukraine, Armenia, Bosnia and along the Balkan refugee route, our introduction considers both the fragility and resilience of leftist imaginaries in the aftermath of lost utopian dreams of socialism and the betrayed promises of post 1989 democratic transformation. We do so in four moves, (i) by offering a reframing of postsocialism as a problem-space of historical and political consciousness; (ii) by interrogating the figure of the activist in its self-conscious and ethnographically embedded guises; (iii) by heeding Sherry Ortner's call to think beyond 'dark anthropology' and finally, (iv) by considering what it might mean to imagine, and model, political alternatives in both activist and scholarly work.

No abstract

No abstract

The ongoing feminist struggle in post-Soviet Armenia to imagine a world without patriarchal social arrangements, militarization, and capitalism is multidirectional, involving intimate relations at home, with fellow leftists, and in public political life. Instead of divesting from afforded systemic privileges, both material and representational, leftist men often extend patriarchal power relations to their political work, creating what I call civic patriarchy, an extension of patriarchal power relations leftist men-comrades practice within feminine-designated civic work. To the extent that leftist men are invested in patriarchal sociopolitical arrangements, they remain in stronger solidarity with those upholding the existing social order than with their leftist feminist comrades committed to upending it. Drawing on a collaborative project on leftist activism in Armenia today, I examine the work feminists do on the political left to resist their erasure as political actors and to orient the political consciousness of their leftist men-comrades away from civic patriarchy and toward a more equitable collective life. I argue that a nonhierarchical politics of cultivating relationality that not only sustains our embodied lives in all their materiality but also attunes us to each other with collective life-sustaining care is key to building broad feminist coalitions across differences.