Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe

Abstract

In this article, I analyse the ways in which coloniality as a racialized and racializing rationality of government and knowledge production shapes political and historical subjects in postsocialist Europe. I analyse Latvian attempts to establish historical presence in European modernity through appropriation of 17th-century colonial pursuits of the Duchy of Courland into Latvian national history, as well as interpretations of this historical appropriation by Western scholars and travellers. I argue that Latvian identification with Europe's colonial past not only renders visible the continued salience of coloniality in European politics but also illuminates the mechanisms through which Europe attempts to renew its moral superiority in the global arena by relegating colonialism to a past that Europe claims to have overcome and that Latvians are required to overcome to become fully European. I argue that in order to understand how coloniality continues to inform political life in contemporary Europe it is necessary to move beyond analysis of national histories and deploy a relational approach which traces how contemporary political subjects are constituted in racialized and racializing fields of power relations. It is also necessary to analyse postsocialist Eastern Europe not only in relation to the socialist past but also the global present.

EthnographyinEurope, or an anthropologyofEurope?

“…From this perspective, the so‐called ‘post‐socialist’ predicament of Eastern Europe must be rendered more rigorously apprehensible in terms of the postcolonial condition that otherwise is truly the defining feature of any notion of ‘Europe’ as such. Nonetheless, as Dzenovska has shown elsewhere for Latvia, postsocialist Eastern Europeans can now be found aspiring ‘to overcome their seemingly permanent “not‐quite‐European” position’ by striving ‘to identify with colonialism’ and reaffirming Europe's (collective, defining) colonial legacy (: 411).…”

Intersections. EEJSP_Vol1_No2

“…While these asymmetries gained attention in recent literature (Pobłocki, 2009;Blagojević andYair, 2010, Thelen, 2011;Boatcă and Costa, 2012;Buchowski, 2012;Dzenovska, 2013;Oleksiyenko, 2014), the CEE 'scholars' critical agenda was left under-examined. Yet, many of these agendas and visions of the region have been critically engaged for their role in the local and global narratives instrumental in legitimizing CEE capitalism (Bockman and Eyal, 2002;Poenaru, 2011;Simionca, 2012).…”

“…The provincialization of CEE is hardly a surprise if integrated in a greater time frame. CEE became the internal other of capitalist Europe in the struggles of imperial formation across the continent in the Renaissance era, of the 16 th and 17 th centuries (Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2012) and the industrial-agrarian labor division of the Enlightenment era of 18 th and 19 th centuries (Boatcă, 2003;Boatcă and Costa, 2012;Dzenovska, 2013). Central and Eastern Europe became a land of beasts, vampires and werewolves at the end of the 19 th , and then again at the end of the 20 th century the object of modernization endeavors, the Orient of Occident (Pobłocki, 2009;Todorova and Gille, 2010) in need of new institutions to reshape a 'traditional society' (Boatcă, 2003).…”

“…Also a new wave of scholarship questions the structure of power relations and unequal flows that sustained the old cold war boxing games, PETROVICI, N.: FRAMING CRITICISM AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN which confined the region to area studies (Chari and Verdery, 2009;Poenaru, 2011). Poignant analyses give voice to the disciplinary concern about the subordination of the CEE semi-peripheral knowledge production to the metropolitan agendas in anthropology (Pobłocki, 2009;Buchowski, 2012), feminist studies (Mizielinska and Kulpa, 2012), history (Dzenovska, 2013), sociology (Blagojević and Yair, 2010;Oleksiyenko, 2014) and economics (Schueth, 2011). The disciplinary analyses of the regimes of knowledge production have the great merit of making visible the link between the power struggles over the organization of post-1950s world system and the importance of CEE over defining the soul of capitalism in opposition to socialism and its successor, post-socialism.…”

Reply to comments

“…I think that complicity is a very good term to think with not only about this scene but also about Europe in the way that De Genova suggests and about the postsocialist subjects becoming European. This becoming is complicit with Europe as a postcolonial and racial formation (Dzenovska ; see also De Genova's comments). This complicit becoming can be observed in the bordering encounter when the emergent sociality of savējie is racialised as more white vis‐à‐vis the Somalis and as less than European vis‐à‐vis an ideal‐type image of Europe.…”