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- Convenors:
-
Alina Apostu
(SOAS University of London)
Mukta Das (SOAS University of London)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Transforming under global forces, everyday future-making within postcolonial and postsocialist settings needs renewed theoretical and ethnographical approaches. How can we understand processes, affects, and materiality of future-making by bringing the posts into dialogue?
Long Abstract:
Much debate exists about how postcolonial studies, focused on discourses, practices, identities, and postsocialist studies, focused on the political economy of the former socialist states, are in fact co-constitutive (Badescu 2016; Chari and Verdery 2009). Postcolonial and postsocialist conditions both involve ruptures, often violent, with former states of conformity and nonconformity, dependence and independence from a shared vision of past, present and future. At a time when geopolitical manoeuvrings and political transformations make 'transition' a permanent phenomenon, there is a desperate need to understand how people construct the futures that they are transitioning to (Appadurai 2013). This panel invites ethnographers of the two posts (either or both) to enter a dialogue about how the promises of the past are shaped or eclipsed by desires for the future and consider:
How can we transform the theoretical lenses of these 'posts' to get insight into the transitions towards the future that former colonised and socialist countries are undergoing?
What sort of future-making processes and affects are at work in postcolonial and postsocialist settings following the ruptures in their histories?
What affective and material dimensions emerge, are mobilised, reoriented, repurposed, in postcolonial and postsocialist settings and to what effect? How do these shape future-making?
What are the promised, (un)desired futures that shape the imaginaries of people living in postcolonial and postsocialist conditions?
The aim of the panel is to compare and, crucially, to debate and contour a future for theoretical and ethnographic approaches to everyday future-making in postcolonial and postsocialist settings.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a long-term ethnographic research among Slovak Romani migrants in Great Britain, this paper asks how migration experiences and yearnings for ‘going up’ become one of the most desired future-oriented mobilities for previously marginalized Roma in Slovakia against the backdrop of their post-socialist pasts and present.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic research among Slovak Romani networks migrating between Slovakia and Great Britain, this paper examines development of imagining 'England as a great splendour' and it shows how it generates powerful hopes and hopefulness for greater existential and socio-economic mobilities embodied in the figure of successful Angličanos migrant. It analytically examines this intensification of yearnings for particular self-transforming projects imagined as located in spatio-temporal elsewheres in relation to the bodily dispositions acquired during late socialist period in Czechoslovakia and ‘post-socialist’ present marked by shifting towards racialized workfare in neoliberal state in Slovakia. Following the redrawing of geopolitical borders and mobility regimes after Slovakia accessed EU in 2004, many Romani families migrated to British cities and their experiences were shaped by everyday encounters with past and present postcolonial migrants. The successful migrants established new hierarchies and contributed to the crystallizing of the image of England as a space of future-oriented hope expressed in the category of 'going up'. The mobility established itself as a potential avenue to carve out a sense of a viability against the oppressive circumstances and the asymmetrical relations with non-Roma and with non-related Roma. This paper explores ways in which the particular dispositions and past experiences orient their imagining of the ‘West’ as yearnings for more autonomy in the shrinking spaces of hope in Slovakia but also how these are relationally readjusted in relation to transforming forms and intensities of racism and bordering in Slovakia but also across uneven European spaces. This paper explores under which conditions have this future-making through mobilities become so forceful and unevenly distributed while also considering alternative pathways for hoping within these networks that develop and transform over time.
Paper short abstract:
Hong Kong's ongoing 50-year transition between its colonial past and its socialist future is complicated. This paper focuses on South Asian communities who are connected to the territory's colonial past, but are building a future through heritage projects combining food and festivals.
Paper long abstract:
Hong Kong presents a challenge to the literature on post-colonial identities. The territory is postcolonial, but is also pre-socialist – halfway through a 50-year transition period that separates the handover of the territory by the British in 1997 and the full integration of Hong Kong into mainland China’s political, legal and social systems in 2047. The 50-year transition is complicated by its very liminality. Many would argue that the transition itself is all but over, causing seismic tensions over what Hong Kong identity is and who this identity includes. Working from Chari and Verdery’s (2009) argument that people living in post-socialist or post-colonial contexts are tied into similar, and in fact mutual experiences of self-making - this paper examines Hong Kong residents’ everyday perceptions of their post-colonial and ‘pre’-socialist present.
Focusing on well-established communities of South Asians in Hong Kong, this paper examines the everyday perceptions of the liminality of this transition among groups that have long struggled with projects of belonging to the territory. The paper explores how South Asians have come to secure their local food heritage practices through festival making. These heritage-making practices not only combine their anxieties about the present with efforts to protect their past– a dynamic that emerges from much food heritage ethnography (West 2014), but also reflect their visions for the future.
The questions this paper poses two questions. What colonial pasts are revealed in food heritage making practices of South Asian festivals in Hong Kong? What socialist futures are brought into view?
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how drag performers in late postsocialist Belgrade refashion memories of socialist Yugoslavia to create queer and trans futurities that challenge the realities of life in the postsocialist transition, drawing on examples of drag performers and events in contemporary Belgrade.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how drag performers in late postsocialist Belgrade refashion memories of socialist Yugoslavia to create queer and trans futurities that challenge the realities of life in the postsocialist transition. Over the last seven years, the drag community in Belgrade has grown significantly, with many performers creating drag identities that directly reference aspects of the socio-political history of Serbia and the Balkans region more broadly. In particular, despite having limited lived experience of socialist Yugoslavia, some drag queens have been inspired by the former country, integrating its anti-fascist ideology into their performances and borrowing elements of the former country’s visual lexicon in their costumes. Performers directly contrast contemporary Serbia’s authoritarian, homophobic and transphobic political landscape with a framing of Yugoslav identity as emancipatory. Drawing on examples of drag performers and events in Belgrade – Gospoda Pereca, Novoslovenka and Dragoslavia – I argue that drag performers act as ghosts of socialist pasts, disrupting teleological views of recent history and presenting an alternative, queer perspective of the postsocialist transition. In this way, memories of Yugoslavia become a powerful tool for fabulating and imagining alternative futures, which actively work against the colonial underpinnings of a normative reading of Serbia’s transition as failed. In doing so, I build both on scholarship that connects Yugoslavia to ideas of queer utopia (Dioli 2009), as well as that which points to the potential of the postsocialist transition as a form of queer temporality and futurity (Blagojević and Timotijević 2018).
Paper short abstract:
Visions of future living in Johannesburg’s affluent suburbs cultivate imaginaries of desirable urban spaces regardless of such visions materialising in the landscape. These moments of becoming provide a lens to explore how pasts, presents and futures interlock in everyday practices of future-making.
Paper long abstract:
In Johannesburg, a South African metropolis labelled both a “city of extremes” (Murray 2011) and “the African modern” (Nuttall and Mbembe 2008), construction is everywhere – from informal settlements on vacant plots of land to private city developments in the periphery. The city is not only constructed in the physical landscape with bricks, trees, and surveillance technology. This paper, argues that how residential developments and properties for sale are presented both visually and textually, influence how the urban is imagined and how it will continue to develop, regardless of these visions materialising in the urban landscape. The improvisations and negotiations of these seemingly concrete but fleeting futurities show that the cultivation of desirable enclaves and homes in the affluent suburbs are caught in a double bind, embedded both in nostalgia and in global ideals of living detached from the past. Eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, following various actors in the residential real estate industry uncovered that actors in the sector play an important role in cultivating desirable imaginaries of enclaves and homes. Advertisements, miniature models on property expos and conversations about development plans are moments of becoming that provide a lens to explore ethnographically how everyday practices of future-making in a postcolonial setting are interlocked with imaginaries and practices of pasts and presents.