Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and south-east European cultural studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that ‘one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race’ (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker’s observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on ‘balkanism’ or Milica Bakić-Hayden on ‘symbolic geographies’ and ‘nesting orientalism’ did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that ‘race’ as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studies’ latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of ‘Europe’ as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced

Les débats théoriques sur les aspects culturels de la mondialisation à travers les discours en France et en Bulgarie (thèse...)

Cette recherche se propose d'appréhender les nombreuses conceptualisations et théorisations de la question de la " mondialisation " et de la " globalisation " au moyen d'une approche critique et analytique des " discours socio-anthropologiques " anglo-saxons, français et bulgares sur ce sujet. À partir d'entretiens semi-directifs, l'étude porte sur la manière dont les débats conceptuels et théoriques sur cette question sont menés par nombre d'intellectuels français et bulgares. L'objectif central poursuivi est d'examiner, d'analyser et de comparer les différents modèles et enjeux d'appréhension et d'interprétation de cet objet, en particulier de ses aspects culturels, afin de reconstituer sa complexité et de proposer une nouvelle approche dite " paradigmatique ". Cette approche cherche à analyser la mondialisation comme le nouveau grand paradigme de l'époque actuelle, générant de variables représentations et visions, complémentaires et concurrentielles à la fois, des multiples transformations en cours. Ainsi, nous avons distingué la vision française d'une " mondialisation sociale et humaine " insistant sur une régulation politique de ce processus, la vision anglo-américaine d'une " globalisation " visant à la mise en économie des relations sociales et la vision bulgare concevant la mondialisation en terme d'européanisation et d'ouverture du pays.This study aims at apprehending the numerous conceptualisations and theorisations of the problem of mondialisation and of globalisation by applying a critical and analytical approach to the socio-anthropological Anglo-Saxon, French and Bulgarian discourses on the problematic. By means of semi directional interviews, we are trying to explain the way the conceptual and theoretical debates influence the conceptions of some French and Bulgarian intellectuals on the question. The main purpose is to examine, analyse and compare the different models of apprehension and interpretation of the subject, in particular of its cultural aspects, so as to reconstruct its complexity and to propose a new approach called paradigmatic . This approach proposes to analyse the phenomenon of globalisation as the new paradigm of present times generating various representations and visions, complementary and concurrent at the same time, of the current transformations. The paradigmatic approach allows us to distinguish the French conception of a social and human mondialisation insisting on a political regulation of this process, the Anglo-American conception of globalization trying to impose economy on all other spheres of life, and the Bulgarian, rather disparate, discourse on globalisation conceiving this phenomenon in terms of Europeanization and of a better positioning of the state on the international scene.NICE-BU Lettres Arts Sci.Hum. (060882104) / SudocSudocFranceF