Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues

"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