Summary
To emphasize a set of important historical and present relations within the opening of postcolonial and postsocialist dialogues through feminist theorizing and practice, I would like to draw our attention to four events (points of inflection) that have conditioned the recent economic, political, social and cultural transformation of our societies: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marks the end of the Cold War and opens the way for further processes of colonization; the Bandung Conference in 1955, when the term “decolonization” originates; the attacks of September 11 2001, event which announces the entry into the global age in which capitalism/coloniality and reality become one; and the economic crisis that began symbolically in 2008 with the fall of Lehman Brothers in the U.S. and pushed the concept of crisis itself into crisis. Along these years, in which politics has adopted the most extreme forms of exclusion (social death), domination of subjectivity (using biomolecular and semiotic techniques), blackmail and theft (economic crisis and austerity measures), and war(death), I claim that postsocialism instead of being historically, spatially and temporary bound concept is rather a global condition in which “former” West fulfils itself by deforming what is being suppressed: the materiality of our history, knowledge and memory. If postsocialism is not at all postcolonial, decolonial transfeminist re-reading of capitalism in its correspondence with coloniality of gender and racism profoundly related with class and gender can shed new light to relational processes of colonial/imperial differentiation and subjectification across former communist/socialist space and Global South, and in order to disrupt the monolithic history of feminism allows us to tackle the ticklish subject of feminist struggle from marginalized/minoritized positions, as well as to re-think the new possibilities for building critical alliances transversally with a vision of pluriversal future. Here, the imaginary and affective dimension is playing one of the crucial roles to be taken into analysis.
This text was written for and presented at the open forum session of the conference “Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice”, 27-28 April 2015, Department of Thematic Studies -Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden.