The decolonial challenge: Framing post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe within transnational feminist studies

Abstract

The article explores the location of Central and Eastern Europe in transnational feminist studies. Despite the acknowledgement of the situatedness of knowledge, feminist theorising nevertheless seems to continue to be organised around a limited number of central axes and internalised progress narratives. The authors argue that there is a pressing need for theories which can approach the near absence of Central and Eastern European perspectives from transnational feminist theorising, and challenge the limited number of discursive tropes associated with post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe-especially that of a 'lag', where difference is translated into a temporal distance. Instead, the authors suggest that a more inclusive vision of transnational feminist studies can be achieved by applying the decolonial framework to the post-socialist context, as explicated in the work of Madina Tlostanova.

Foreword

“…Some years ago, we, editors, were also engaged in these debates on the matter of the convergence or divergence of national schools of spatial studies in Europe ( (1989)(1990), it would not have been difficult to fall into the trap of the self-colonization or self-peripheralisation which many rightly criticize (see in Koobak and Marling, 2014; Plüschke-Altof in this issue). The ‛Western' concepts and the tendencies of the discipline outlined in progress reports served as reference points to us .…”

The Question of Responsibility: (De-)Peripheralising Rural Spaces in Post-Socialist Estonia

“…On one side, it allows to deconstruct how discourses co-constitute core-periphery relations by presenting normative standards and particular interpretations of reality as universal knowledge (Stenning and Hörschelmann, 2008) . Accordingly, Koobak and Marling (2014) show that the truth claim depicting peripheries as lagging behind and in need to catch up stems from a discursively hegemonized normative development concept that translates spatial into temporal differences. This developmentalism is deeply rooted in both, capitalist and socialist modernity (Annist, 2011;Suchland, 2011) .…”

“…By attempting to make post-colonialism fruitful for studying (de)peripheralisation discourses in post-socialist Estonia, the paper follows conceptual debates that aim to intersect postcolonial and post-socialist approaches (Koobak and Marling, 2014;Suchland, 2011;Stenning and Hörschelmann, 2008;Tlostanova, 2012) . Post-socialist space is used here to denote Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries in the former Soviet sphere of influence.…”

“…The first is the frequent reference to the former modernization project by either heroizing or radically rejecting the socialist past (Stenning and Hörschelmann, 2008) . The second is the tendency to (re-)produce normative development notions of the capitalist modernity that are taken as standard for self-evaluation, often resulting in acts of self-peripheralisation (Koobak and Marling, 2014) .…”

“…While the research on socio-spatial ascriptions (Bürk et al ., 2012;Meyer and Miggelbrink, 2013;Wacquant et al, 2014) already establishes that peripheries are materially and discursively (re-)produced, the paper goes one step further by attempting to show that decolonial studies help to analyze how peripheralisation discourses become performative . Based on a critical evaluation of knowledge production mechanisms, they convey that the depiction of peripheries as places lagging behind stems from normative development notions proliferated in hegemonic discourses (Koobak and Marling, 2014) . Adopting this Foucauldian understanding of discourses as form of knowledge production, the paper therefore applies decolonial approaches to critically scrutinize the development models that underlie rural (de-)peripheralisation discourses in post-socialist Estonia .…”