Belated alliances? Tracing the intersections between postcolonialism and postcommunism

Abstract

Post-1989 eastern Europe, despite generating in the past two decades numerous studies drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism and the paradigms of postcolonialism (Todorova 1997; Goldsworthy 1998; Bjelić and Savić 2003; Kovačević, “Orientalizing”, 2008), continues to remain neglected and rarely discussed in postcolonial studies. This article traces the intersections between postcommunism and postcolonialism by looking at the emergence of postcolonial frameworks for interrogating the construction of eastern Europe (south-eastern Europe in particular) spanning the Enlightenment, the Cold War and the postcommunist period. The second part of the article examines whether new comparative frameworks between postcolonialism and postcommunism are emerging in the light of recent migration from eastern Europe to the west. Engaging with Rada Iveković’s provocative argument that the non-nationalist opposition in former Yugoslavia claimed the critical terrain of postcolonialism when it lost the Yugoslav space and its referent other, the “non-aligned”, the article concludes by pointing out that an engagement with the non-aligned legacy of communist foreign diplomacy might offer an alternative wealth of interpretative resources and productive “(non-)alliances” between postcolonialism and postcommunism, thus supplementing “1989” or recent migrations as starting points of convergence between the two paradigms.

Keywords:

• postcommunism
• eastern Europe
• Yugoslavia
• Cold War
• Dubravka Ugrešić

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the editors of this volume for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The variations of south-eastern Europe, central Europe, western Balkans and the recent construction “New Europe” are all notoriously shifting signifiers. I shall be using the term ‘eastern Europe’ throughout the article rather loosely to signify both the western construction and an imagined community of “eastern European” people with a shared experience of communism.

2. The 2010 conference “What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say” at the University of York and this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Studies are notable exceptions.

3. For a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon, see Neil Lazarus’s article included in this volume.

4. See Velickovic, “Balkanisms Old and New”.

5. For a more extensive and illuminating discussion on this matter, see the article included in this volume on Lewis Nkosi, “Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw: Translating Eastern European Experiences for an African Audience”, by Monica Popescu.