New Article: The Time of Jokes in the Rubble of Post-communism

More and more articles of the Special Issue Conjunctural Geographies of Postsocialist and Postcolonial Conditions are being published. The latest article by Neda Genova, University of Warwick, deals with “The Time of Jokes in the Rubble of Post-communism”.

The full article is online available at https://www.connections.clio-online.net/article/id/fda-133278

This Special Issue (editors: Nikolay Karkov, Kasia Narkowicz, Lela Rekviashvili, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Zhivka Valiavicharska) grew out of the “Conjunctural Geographies of Postsocialist and Postcolonial Conditions: Thirty Years after 1989” workshop of 2020, which was conceived as part of a cluster of ongoing discussions, among which are the “Dialoguing between the Posts” conferences in Belgrade and the special English-language issue of the journal dVERSIA, “Decolonial Theory and Practice in Southeast Europe” (edited by Katarina Kušić, Philipp Lottholz, Polina Manolova).

The contributions focus on a diverse range of topics, including infrastructure and mobility, protest and social contention, feminist and queer activism, property rights and human-soil relations. They reveal and contest the erasure, marginalization, and reductionism at play when it comes to the socio-political realities and the histories of the “East,” along with the lived and embodied violence that ensue from the domination of Eurocentric models in post-socialist societies. Each paper offers its own ways of moving beyond political and epistemological dead-ends, offering alternative interpretations, methods, ways of theorizing, and academic, activist and artistic practices, in an effort to contribute towards decolonizing knowledge production and political practice in the region. Whether by engaging with post- and decolonial thinking, unearthing forgotten or marginalized histories or creating new spaces for knowledge production for post-Soviet lives beyond conventional Western paradigms, these contributions offer us different strategies through which to navigate and push against our marginalization in knowledge production.