Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War

Abstract

Lenin spoke at the Second Congress of 1920 to multiple audiences. In continuity with the First International, he spoke in the utopian language of Bolshevism, of the successful revolutionary proletariat that had taken the state and was making its place in history without the intercession of bourgeois class rule. Recognizing the limits of socialism in one country surrounded by the military and economic might of “World imperialism,” however, Lenin also pressed for a broader, ongoing world-historic anti-imperialism in alliance with the oppressed of the East, who, it seemed, were neither sufficiently proletarianized, nor, as yet, subjects of history. There are many ways to situate this particular moment in Lenin's thought. One can see the budding conceits of Marxist social history, or “history from below,” in which millions in the East could become historical subjects under the sign of “anti-imperialism.” One can also see this gesture to those outside the pale as a flourish of the emergent Soviet empire, and as a projection of anxieties about Bolshevik control over a vast and varied Russian countryside with its own internal enemies. But Lenin also spoke to audiences who would make up the next, Third International, like the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy, who saw imperialism dividing the world into oppressed and oppressor nations. For this Third Worldist audience, looking increasingly to the new Soviet Union for material and military support for “national self-determination,” Lenin extends the historic mission of a future world socialism.

Que reste-t-il de nos amours?

“…Post-socialism is a framing, and as such it is not incompatible with other contemporary frames; in most cases, all these paradigms complement each other. Unsurprisingly, post-socialism has been linked to wider theorisations and phenomena such as globalisation (Bodnár 2001), neoliberalism (Smith et al 2008), postcolonialism (Chari and Verdery 2009), postmodernism (Hirt 2012) and late-modernity (Martínez 2014).…”

Memory, post-socialism and the media: Nostalgia and beyond

“…Given the undisputed role of transnational flows of imagery and narratives in the iconic events of the Cold War, and the growing body of work that adopts a global, transnational approach to this global conflict (e.g., Bracke and Mark 2015, Chari and Verdery 2009, Kwon 2010, it is surprising how little has been done to trace the involvement of the media in the formation of transnational memories of the Cold War era. With the exception of some of the recent work on digital memory wars in post-socialist Poland, Ukraine, Russia and the Baltics (e.g., Rutten et al 2013, Kaprans 2015 the vast majority of research remains national in focus.…”

“…In this context, argued Levy and Sznaider (2002: 88-89), memories can no longer be confined solely to national or ethnic communities but exist on several planes simultaneously. As a result, a new form of 'cosmopolitan memory' (ibid., see also Misztal 2010, Tzanelli 2011) has emerged alongside nationally bounded memories, one which is shared not only by individuals and communities who directly experienced a particular event or period, but also by wider communities with little or no personal connection to the historical realities remembered.Given the undisputed role of transnational flows of imagery and narratives in the iconic events of the Cold War, and the growing body of work that adopts a global, transnational approach to this global conflict (e.g., Bracke and Mark 2015, Chari and Verdery 2009, Kwon 2010, it is surprising how little has been done to trace the involvement of the media in the formation of transnational memories of the Cold War era. With the exception of some of the recent work on digital memory wars in post-socialist Poland, Ukraine, Russia and the Baltics (e.g., Rutten et al 2013, Kaprans 2015 the vast majority of research remains national in focus.…”

The Contested Post-Socialist Rehabilitation of the Past: Dual Narratives in the Republishing of Tibor Mendöl’s "Introduction to Geography"

“…Although Fraser concentrates on the possibilities of a new political Left following a crisis of vision after 1989, the general question here is whether this condition designates: 1) an historical epoch with structural explanations of demarcation (for example, the "transition" to a market economy); 2) a state of culture, mind, memory, or behavior that lingers on and surfaces contradictorily through inherited structures; or 3) a critical epistemology employed not only to reflect upon "actually existing socialism," but also to explore the middle ground between often essentialized "capitalist" and "socialist" worlds, and "Western" and "Eastern" concepts (Frank 1991, Verdery 1996, Chari and Verdery 2009, Bockman 2011, Lampland 2011). The rather "closed" and sometimes provincialized concepts of both socialism and postsocialism-often as the Oriental "Other" of the West-should also be treated differentially and relationally (Hann et al 2002, Outhwaite and Ray 2005, Stenning and Hörschelmann 2008, Silova 2010, Cervinkova 2012) and should be contextualized along globally uneven relations and circulations (see Bockman and Eyal 2002, Tulbure 2009, Bockman 2011, Gille 2010, Éber et al 2014).…”