31101

Osteuropa: postkolonial/dekolonial?

Katharina Bluhm, Susanne Strätling

Comments

When postcolonial studies began to emerge as a paradigm in the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of research was primarily on examining the consequences of colonial rule in Africa and the Middle and Far East. However, since the 2000s at the latest, along with the intensification of research into global and imperial history, Eastern Europe has also increasingly become the focus of postcolonial studies. As a result, there has been a fundamental re-perspectivization of East-West relations, which has made Eastern Europe appear, among other things, as a projection surface for Western "inventions" (Larry Wolff), and which has triggered the critical revision of the geopolitical agendas of those empires that were and are effective in the Eastern European region and on its borders. On February 24, 2022, this situation changed once again. Now it is no longer 'just' the question of postcolonial research into Eastern Europe that is up for debate – the decolonization of Eastern European studies itself has been put on the agenda, based on the assumption that Eastern European studies in its Russocentrism had academically supported the political hegemonic claims of the Russian Federation for many decades. Against the background of this diagnosis, the lecture series invites representatives across the disciplines to reflect on what "Eastern Europe postcolonial/decolonial" can mean. What perspectives on Eastern Europe does postcolonial/decolonial research offer? Which blind spots in the research field of Eastern Europe come into view here? What alternative research trajectories open up from a postcolonial perspective? However, the fundamental question of what postcolonial perspectives can achieve in academic analysis and how far the transfer of concepts from the global South to empires in Europe and to the Soviet Union or even the Eastern Bloc can go is also up for discussion. While postcolonial studies are part of the core inventory of methodological approaches, especially in the humanities, and are considered indispensable for a precise analysis of asymmetrical power structures, they are often viewed very critically by the social sciences. The quantitative social sciences increasingly focus on the investigation of phenomena referred to as "legacy". In this context, for example, the long-term consequences of Soviet institutions and policies in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe on current economic, political and social developments are being investigated. At the same time, imperial legacy research with a focus on the long-term influence of the European empires of the 18th and 19th centuries is playing a growing role, with a time horizon that extends well beyond the legacy of the Soviet Union. In addition, many disciplines have increasingly decentralized their research perspectives from the "West" and Western European modernity. Against this backdrop, the aim of the lecture series is to discuss the possibilities, but also the limits of post- and decolonization perspectives conceptually and empirically in order to determine their validity with regard to Eastern Europe. close

Suggested reading

Arystanbek, Aizada (2023, forthcoming). Decolonial disruptions in Central Asia: Understanding reactions to Russian migrants in the wake of Putin’s mobilization. In M. Salvador, A. Alcazar III, J. Babcock, F. Cumberlidge, T. Abu Hamdan, S. Nagy, & I. Wódzka (Eds.), Beyond the colonial vortex of the ‘West’: Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022. Society and Space. Amelina, Anna (2022). Knowledge production for whom? Doing migrations, colonialities and standpoints in non-hegemonic migration research. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1-23. Baker, Cathrine, Iacob, Bohdan, Imre, Anikó, & Mark, James (Eds.). (2024). Off White. Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race. Manchester University Press. Becker, Sascha O., et al. (2016). The empire is dead, long live the empire! Long-run persistence of trust and corruption in the bureaucracy. In The Economic Journal 126.590, 40-74. Boatca, Manuela (2023). Postkolonialismus und Dekolonialität. In Boatca, Manuela, Fischer, Karin & Hauck, Gerhard (Eds.). Handbuch Entwicklungsforschung. Springer Fachmedien, 115-126. Bukowski, Pawel (2019). How history matters for student performance. Lessons from the partitions of Poland. In Journal of Comparative Economics 47.1, 136-175. Chioni Moore, David (2001). Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique. In PMLA, Vol 116, No.1, 2001, 111-128. Etkin, Alexander (2011). Internal Colonialization. Russia’s Empire Experience. Polity. Markevich, Andrei, Naumenko, Natalya, & Qian, Nancy (2021). The political-economic causes of the Soviet Great Famine, 1932-33. CEPR Press. Pucherová, Dorota, & Gáfrik, Róbert (Eds.). (2015). Postcolonial Europa? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures. Leiden; Boston. close

16 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Wed, 14:00 - 16:00 16 Class schedule

Wed, 2024-10-16 14:00 - 16:00

Lecturers:
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Katharina Bluhm
Univ.-Prof. Susanne Strätling