Short Abstract

This panel focuses on Africa–Eastern Europe encounters to rethink the categories through which ‘coloniality without colonies’ is understood. What do these encounters reveal about their asymmetries and shared production within global hierarchies, and about what they might have in common?

Long Abstract

What resonances and dispersions emerge when Eastern Europe is seen through African prisms, and when Africa through Eastern European prisms?

Since at least the 1880s, Eastern Europe has occupied a paradoxical position within formations of empire and race. Its territories and populations were themselves subject to imperial and colonial projects, while Eastern Europeans simultaneously engaged colonial imaginaries, explorations and projects in Africa. Scholarship has accounted for these contradictions through “semiperipheral whiteness,” “coloniality without colonies,” “Global Eastern South” and “socialist globalization” unsettling distinctions between colonizer/colonised, centre/periphery; work on colonial fantasies, racial imaginaries, representations of Blackness and whiteness further demonstrated these contradictions shaped Eastern European modernity and contemporary racial formations.

This panel pursues three interconnected interventions. First, it extends the chronology, tracing Africa–Eastern Europe political, economic, scientific, religious entanglements from the 1880s through colonial, socialist, post-socialist to present: what resonances and dispersions emerge across these periods when considered together? Second, we examine how asymmetrical and shifting positions of marginalisation and privilege shaped not only processes of distinction, but also forms of identification, solidarity, appropriation: what forms of affinity and comparison become thinkable when these regions are approached as interconnected? Third, we move beyond colonial projects, state relations and focus on representations toward circulations, including trade, religion, sexuality, gender, fashion.

We invite contributions that use Africa–Eastern Europe encounters to rethink the categories through which ‘coloniality without colonies’ is understood. What do these encounters reveal about their asymmetries and shared production within global hierarchies—and about what they have, and might have, in common?

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