Connecting the "posts" to confront racial capitalism's coloniality

Abstract

This chapter is a conversation on the coloniality of racial capitalism in contemporary post-socialist politics. Specifically, our dialogue examines the contradictions and challenges of the post-socialist position within transnational anti-racist solidarity in the face of emboldened structural and situational forms of violence that have come to dominate formerly socialist spaces. Moving through queer, trans and decolonial interventions in seeking to unsettle coloniality's posts, in the first part we explore how the temporalities the 'post' prefix not only conceals the connections and continuities between colonial and cold war projects with contemporary racial capitalism but it also furthers a colorblind narrative of Europeanness that seeks to recruit the post-socialist subject in the ongoing racial, classed and gendered (geo) politics of EU borderization. In the second half, we discuss how these forms of postsocialist theorization have frequently contributed to the contradictions between the aspirational whiteness of the fascist movements in Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria on the one hand and the precarious position of post-socialist labor migrants in the EU. Finally, in the last section we reflect on the possibilities of transnational anti-fascist and anti-racist alignments that could confront racial capitalism's coloniality. Alyosxa:A decade ago, I first suggested to differentiate between racism and what I call 'migratism' to analyse the complex nexus of racialization and migration in postcolonial Europe. Since then, I have published quite a bit on the topic and its challenges and controversies (e.g. Tudor 2017a/b, 2018a). My insistence that not all migration-based discrimination can be called racism but that whiteness -semiperipheral East European whiteness for that matter -needs to be reflected upon critically, has been met with vehement critique. People often bemoan that I would take away 'racism' as a word to name the discrimination against East Europeans (who implicitly or explicitly are imagined as racially homogenous = white in these accounts). It is the affective anxiety that is bewildering to me -the idea that harm is done to white East Europeans when the discrimination against them/us is not called 'racism', the idea that it was Black feminism or Critical Whiteness Studies that had taken something away. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval Davis in an article published as early as 1983 claim: "The notion of 'black women' as delineating the boundaries of the alternative feminist movement to white feminism leaves non-British non-black women (like us -a Greek-Cypriot and an Israeli-Jew) unaccounted for politically" (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983, 63). These approaches alternate in their argumentation between calling for inclusion of white migratised women into the group of people This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Koobak, Redi, Tlostanova, Suruchi, (eds.), Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues Intersections, Opacities,

The end of postsocialism (as we knew it): Diverse economies and the East

“…To mention just one example of such destabilisation– or ‘queering’ (Tudor and Rexhepi, 2021) – the complex temporalities of the East add to postcolonial scholarship on the ecology of temporalities (De Sousa Santos, 2004) and its questioning of the linear time of Western modernisation. While postsocialist countries are seemingly stuck in the past, their trajectories confuse the developmentalist temporality even further, since their point of departure is not the ‘backwardness’ assigned to the Global South but another type of modernity – the Soviet modernity (Tlostanova, 2019).…”