SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter is a conversation on the coloniality of racial capitalism in contemporary post-socialist politics. Specifically, our dialogue examines the contradictions and challenges of the post-socialist position within transnational anti-racist solidarity in the face of emboldened structural and situational forms of violence that have come to dominate formerly socialist spaces. Moving through queer, trans and decolonial interventions in seeking to unsettle coloniality’s posts, in the first part we explore how the temporalities the ‘post’ prefix not only conceals the connections and continuities between colonial and cold war projects with contemporary racial capitalism but it also furthers a colorblind narrative of Europeanness that seeks to recruit the post-socialist subject in the ongoing racial, classed and gendered (geo) politics of EU borderization. In the second half, we discuss how these forms of post-socialist theorization have frequently contributed to the contradictions between the aspirational whiteness of the fascist movements in Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria on the one hand and the precarious position of post-socialist labor migrants in the EU. Finally, in the last section we reflect on the possibilities of transnational anti-fascist and anti-racist alignments that could confront racial capitalism’s coloniality.