Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to reveal a so far underexplored potentiality of postsocialist migrant imaginaries as a political praxis of envisioning alternative futures (Castoriadis 1987) by invoking meanings and values from embodied experiences of the pre-1989 past.

Paper long abstract:

Recently, anthropologists of migration have theorised how the absorption of the globalised promise for a ‘good life’ and the rapidly diminishing pathways for its realisation had turned migration into an existential necessity (Schielke 2021; Vigh 2009; Elliot 2021) for a great number of ‘abjected’ subjectivities (Ferguson 1999). In these renderings migrant imaginaries often denote a world of simplified binaries - the West signifies desire and future becoming while the non-West is marked by different ‘lacks’, of hope, civilization, progress, life. This paper seeks to reveal a so far underexplored potentiality of postsocialist migrant imaginaries as a political praxis of envisioning alternative futures (Castoriadis 1987) by invoking meanings and values from embodied experiences of the pre-1989 past. Focusing on Bulgarian labour migrants from the late-socialist and early ‘transition’ generation the paper argues that they imagine life in the West as socialist ‘normality’ imbued with ideals of social stability, dignity in labour, and solidarity. I trace how these imaginations emerge as counterpoints to the traumas of the postsocialist present which has led to the complete rejection of the political ideology of neoliberal capitalism by a majority of the ‘left behind’. Rather than a master narrative of essentialised superiority and epistemic subordination, migrants’ imaginings transpire the West as an empty signifier able to carry self-affirming and politically emancipatory agendas of socialist modernity into a Western future. Migration becomes a vehicle for inverting the dominant delegitimisation of the socialist past as backward and for reasserting interpretative authority over subjective experiences of postsocialism as regressive modernity.