What would it mean to ‘decolonize’ Eastern Europe? We aim to answer by situating Eastern Europe within broader colonial, anti-colonial and decolonial projects, to understand how the region’s historically and geographically shifting relations to coloniality and race inform current political dynamics.
Call for Papers | American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting | Seattle, WA | April 7–11, 2021 | Virtual Session convened by Zoltán Ginelli and Jonathan McCombs
Public and academic discussions have completely ignored the fact that the recent wave of anti-racism and decololonization movements have sparked intensive reactions from Eastern European countries, including Hungary, for the first time. These reactions dominantly focused on Western events but never actually defined decolonialism, nor looked at the global, geographical implications of colonialism. In Hungary, the local relevance of racism and decolonialism has been framed in a rather reductive manner (anti-Semitism, conditions of Romas), and there have been no serious discussions about the country’s specific historical relations to global colonialism, or any criticism of Eurocentric and racist knowledge. The presentation explores these issues and argues for Hungarian relevance to decolonization, and introduces in this context the main concept of a forthcoming exhibition project, The Transperiphery Movement.
Online workshop on 10 September Organisers: Romina Istratii – School of Oriental and African Studies, University of LondonMárton Demeter – National University of Public Service, HungaryZoltán Ginelli – Universität Leipzig, Leibniz ScienceCampus “Eastern Europe – […]
The perhaps much overlooked geographical significance of recent social unrest in the USA related to the Black Lives Matter and various anti-racist and decolonial movements is how quickly they ’scaled up’ globally, sparking sharp debates in Eastern Europe for the first time. This paper aims to unpack Eastern European ‘frustrated whiteness’ through exploring a decolonial approach to this uneasy and contradictory semiperipheral position in global (post)colonialism.
This paper gives a postcolonialist, critical geographical, and global historical re-interpretation of this expedition based on the travel writing of Xántus published during 1877–1886. Against the dominantly biographical and documentary accounts on Xántus, which follow institutional or nationalist legitimation logics in presenting his “heroic” figure (focusing on his collections, personality and merits), this study instead engages with his activities in colonial networks, his descriptions of local industry and European export ambitions, and his global comparative ideas about colonialism and race, including comparisons between his local Hungarian, Eastern European, and Asian experiences.
In postcolonial studies, Eastern Europe’s colonial experiences and ambitions have been routinely silenced in the literature’s focus on (post)colonial centres and peripheries. The region remains largely absent from mainstream textbooks, which is indicative not only […]
Knowledge filtration under structural constraints (Source: https://www.middleeasteye.net) Book chapter proposal for Political Ecology in Eastern Europe, edited by Eszter Krasznai Kovács This chapter provides a critical overview of how Hungarian human geography developed since 1989, […]
The history of internationalism was quickly forgotten following the fall of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. But now these stories are surfacing once again, fascinating a new generation alive to conflicts over peoples and cultures on the move in today’s global order and seeking fresh takes on the past. This festival presents a rich and exciting range of films inspired by ideas of revolution, national liberation, and solidarity between socialist Eastern Europe and the Global South. We bring the Romanian audience stories from Cuba, Angola, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, and the former Yugoslavia—stories that explore belonging, border-crossing, and belief in radical change. Several of the directors featured were themselves internationalist migrants in the socialist era—men and women from the Global South who brought their talents to the socialist East. All bring visions of socialist worlds that shatter the easy black and white categories of the Cold War and raise important questions about what it means to be international, and in solidarity, then and now.
A bevett olvasat szerint nekünk soha nem voltak gyarmataink, sosem vettünk részt a gyarmatosításban, ezért semmi közünk nincsen a (poszt)gyarmati világhoz. De valóban így lenne? Új blogsorozatom ezt a témát igyekszik körüljárni!
Zoltán Ginelli 