Table Of ContentEP
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a anAL Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality
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aU POSTSOCIALIST DIALOGUES
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t INTERSECTIONS, OPACITIES, CHALLENGES
IN FEMINIST THEORIZING AND PRACTICE
Edited by
Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and
Suruchi Thapar-Björkert
www.routledge.com
Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats
9780367434403_Full Cover_HBK.indd 1 11-01-2021 15:40:28
“This timely anthology comes together at the generative intersections of the
asynchronous and sometimes contradictory struggles of postcolonial and
postsocialist feminisms. Boldly confronting the race-blindness of postsocialism,
and the overwhelming preoccupation with the capitalist West in postcolonialism,
the contributions tackle the delicate challenge of theorizing from non-dominant
locations – beyond complicity, and with a sensitive regard for difference. The
collection highlights ‘uneventful activism’ and especially ‘opacity’ as resources
for feminist resistance that confound easy legibility and cooptation by neoliberal
recognition and success. The aim here is to safeguard ‘spaces of re-existence
and change’ and a politics of post-colonial/socialist coalitions against racial
capitalism.”
– Mahua Sarkar, Professor, Binghampton University, SUNY
“To understand our current complicated and tantalizing geopolitical and
corpopolitical situation, feminist scholarship needs to engage with positive
meaning making as a way of fine-tuning the researcher’s lens. This exemplary
and diverse group of authors correlates postcolonial and postsocialist dimensions
with feminist experiences in order to offer concepts and enlighten connections,
and to combat ‘global white ignorance’ with much needed innovative politics
of knowledge, activism and organizing that may give the world its future
dimension back.”
– Andrea Pető, Professor,
Central European University, Budapest-Vienna
“This collection will be of great interest to researchers, students, and general
readers interested in contemporary women and feminist writing across the
geopolitical East, West, North and South. It illuminates powerfully how people in
different locales theorize, argue and negotiate the meanings of postcolonialism,
postsocialism and their own role as intellectuals, educators and activists in the
making or unmaking of the oppressive historical systems and relations underlining
these phenomena. Yet the volume articulates the contributors’ desire for new
epistemologies and conceptual constructs that could better capture the complexity
and globality especially of postsocialism as a condition, marking important
theoretical and political debates about postcoloniality, globalization, political
economy, race, and power in transnational feminism, postcolonial studies, and
women, gender and sexuality studies.”
– Miglena Todorova, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
Postcolonial and Postsocialist
Dialogues
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.
Redi Koobak is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s and
Gender Research, University of Bergen, Norway.
Madina Tlostanova is Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping
University, Sweden.
Suruchi Thapar-Björkert is Docent and Senior Lecturer at the Department of
Government, University of Uppsala, Sweden.
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality is committed to the develop-
ment of new feminist and pro-feminist perspectives on changing gender relations, with
special attention to:
• Intersections between gender and power differentials based on age, class, dis/abilities,
ethnicity, nationality, racialisation, sexuality, violence, and other social divisions.
• Intersections of societal dimensions and processes of continuity and change: culture,
economy, generativity, polity, sexuality, science and technology;
• Embodiment: Intersections of discourse and materiality, and of sex and gender.
• Transdisciplinarity: intersections of humanities, social sciences, medical, technical and
natural sciences.
• Intersections of different branches of feminist theorizing, including: historical materi-
alist feminisms, postcolonial and anti-racist feminisms, radical feminisms, sexual dif-
ference feminisms, queer feminisms, cyber feminisms, post-human feminisms, critical
studies on men and masculinities.
• A critical analysis of the travelling of ideas, theories and concepts.
• A politics of location, reflexivity and transnational contextualising that reflects the
basis of the Series framed within European diversity and transnational power relations.
Core editorial group
Professor Jeff Hearn (managing editor; Örebro University, Sweden; Hanken School of
Economics, Finland; University of Huddersfield, UK)
Dr Kathy Davis (Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Professor Anna G. Jónasdóttir (Örebro University, Sweden)
Professor Nina Lykke (managing editor; Linköping University, Sweden)
Professor Elżbieta H. Oleksy (University of Łódź, Poland)
Dr Andrea Petö (Central European University, Hungary)
Professor Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, University of London, UK)
Professor Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Syracuse University, USA)
Subaltern Women’s Narratives
Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies
Edited by Samraghni Bonnerjee
Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues
Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice
Edited by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert
For more information about the series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-
Advances-in-Feminist-Studies-and-Intersectionality/book-series/RAIFSAI
Postcolonial and Postsocialist
Dialogues
Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in
Feminist Theorizing and Practice
Edited by Redi Koobak,
Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi
Thapar-Björkert
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Redi Koobak, Madina
Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-
Björkert to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Koobak, Redi, editor. | Tlostanova, M. V. (Madina
Vladimirovna) editor. | Thapar-Bjo¨rkert, Suruchi, 1966- editor.
Title: Postcolonial and postsocialist dialogues : intersections,
opacities, challenges in feminist theorizing and practice /
edited by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi
Thapar-Bjo¨rkert.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series:
Routledge advances in feminist studies and intersectionality |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020044007 (print) | LCCN 2020044008
(ebook) | ISBN 9780367434403 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003003199 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism—History—21st century. |
Sex role—History—21st century. | Neoliberalism—History—
21st century. | Race—Political aspects. | Postcolonialism—Social
aspects. | Post-communism—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 .P67 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1155
(ebook) | DDC 305.309—dc23 LC record available at https://
lccn.loc.gov/2020044007 LC ebook record available at https://
lccn.loc.gov/2020044008
ISBN: 978-0-367-43440-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00319-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of figures x
List of contributors xi
1 Introduction: uneasy affinities between the postcolonial and
the postsocialist 1
REDI KOOBAK, MADINA TLOSTANOVA, AND SURUCHI THAPAR-BJÖRKERT
PART I
Intersections 11
2 Locating postsocialist precarity in global coloniality:
a decolonial frame for 1989? 14
JENNIFER SUCHLAND
3 A conversation on imperial legacies and postsocialist
contexts: notes from a US-based feminist collaboration 29
NEDA ATANASOSKI AND KALINDI VORA
4 Bridging postcoloniality, postsocialism, and “race” in the
age of Brexit: an interview with Catherine Baker 40
CATHERINE BAKER AND REDI KOOBAK
5 Queering “Postsocialist Coloniality”: decolonising queer
fluidity and postsocialist postcolonial China 53
SHANA YE
6 Circassian trajectories between post-Soviet neocolonialism,
indigeneity, and diasporic dispersions: a conversation 69
LIDIA ZHIGUNOVA AND MADINA TLOSTANOVA
viii Contents
PART II
Opacities 91
7 Opacity as a feminist strategy: postcolonial and postsocialist
entanglements with neoliberalism 94
RAILI MARLING
8 Anti-colonial struggles, postcolonial subversions:
an interview with Nivedita Menon 109
NIVEDITA MENON, SURUCHI THAPAR-BJÖRKERT AND
MADINA TLOSTANOVA
9 Uneventful feminist protest in post-Maidan Ukraine: nation
and colonialism revisited 121
MARIA MAYERCHYK AND OLGA PLAKHOTNIK
10 Postsocialist poetics: interview with Krёlex zentr 138
KRЁLEX ZENTR, LESIA PAGULICH AND TATSIANA SHCHURKO
11 Speaking against the void: decolonial transfeminist relations
and radical potentialities 155
TJAŠA KANCLER
PART III
Challenges 171
12 How to See the Spots of the Leopard: an interview with
Quinsy Gario and Jörgen Gario 175
QUINSY GARIO, JÖRGEN GARIO AND REDI KOOBAK
13 Uneasy “posts” and unmarked categories: politics of
positionality between and beyond the Global South and the
European East. An interview with Manuela Boatcă 185
MANUELA BOATCĂ AND MADINA TLOSTANOVA
14 Connecting the “posts” to confront racial capitalism’s
coloniality 193
ALYOSXA TUDOR AND PIRO REXHEPI
Contents ix
15 “We need to learn about each other and unlearn patterns of
racism”: a conversation with Angéla Kóczé 209
ANGÉLA KÓCZÉ AND PETRA BAKOS
16 Cripping postsocialist chronicity: a conversation with
Kateřina Kolářová 216
KATEŘINA KOLÁŘOVÁ AND REDI KOOBAK
17 Grappling with the “China crisis”: positionality, impasse,
and potential breakthrough of Chinese feminist diaspora in
post-Cold War North America 227
WEILING DENG
18 Gendered nationalism in India and Poland: postcolonial and
postsocialist conditions in times of populism 243
KASIA NARKOWICZ AND MITHILESH KUMAR
Index 259
