Curated by Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin), Céline Barry (Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung der Technischen Universität Berlin) and Pablo Valdivia Orozco (EUV Frankfurt/Oder).

In cooperation with Gal Kirn (EUV Frankfurt/Oder), Sanja Petkovska (University of Belgrad) and Katja Diefenbach (EUV Frankfurt/Oder).

Participants: Katja Diefenbach, Gal Kirn, Sanja S. Petskova, Pablo Valdivia Orozco

https://fg-dekolonial.com/event/postcolonialcritique/
https://krisol-wissenschaft.org/

Katja Diefenbach, EUV Frankfurt/Oder

Revisiting racial regimes of property and war: Theorems of colonial dispossession in early modern philosophy

Despite their different perspectives, critical philosophies of race and decolonial theories have some common denominators: one of them is the reconstruction of the history of racist ideologemes in the field of European philosophy. Both schools of thought take an anti-racist approach in philosophy and transform the discipline into a battleground against the epistemic violence of colonial modernity. Both examine the genesis of racial capitalism through the lens of its philosophical justifications and mobilize the means of philosophical critique against the European genealogies of racism. Until the 1990s, the philosophical legitimation patterns of colonial violence, among others, in the 17th century natural law and contract theories have been neglected in the critical currents of continental philosophy including (post-)Marxism, although the defense of land grabbing, colonial war, and atlantic slaving has unmistakably inscribed itself in the early canon of European liberalism and enlightenment philosophy.
    The lecture reconstructs colonial ideologemes in Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, with focus on the Leviathan and the Second Treatise of Government. It shows how they developed two divergent possessive-individualist models of natural right that are paradigmatic for understanding, through the eyes of philosophy, the genesis of early modern racial capitalism and fiscal-military state formations. The lecture discusses the extent to which Hobbes’s model of natural right was characterized by categories of war and dispossession, fear and death, the statelessness of First Nations and the model of sovereignty by conquest, while in Locke it was determined by tropes of vacant land, protestant industry, accumulation of property as well as by the idea of a natural right to punish and enslave. The broader research project to which this lecture belongs aims to bring together perspectives from post-Marxism to critical philosophies of race and decolonial feminisms in order to intervene in the recent debates on 17th-century racial and settler contracts and to re-map the philosophical genealogies of European racism and the different modes of resistance it has faced.
    The aim is to create a toolbox that will provide us with categories to better understand the entanglements of epistemic and socio-historical violence in colonial modernity, including its current actualizations. This toolbox should help to raise awareness of unresolved problems and continuing controversies: Did modern racisms arise at the colonial frontier or were they rooted in the racialism of European feudal societies that targeted Romanies, Jews, Slavs, the Irish and other minorities? Were colonial land seizures and slavery born of racism, or was slavery, as Eric Williams suggested, rather a consequence of the colonial plantation economies? What can the archive of the history of philosophy contribute to answering such questions in the context of complex strategies of analysis?

Gal Kirn, EUV Frankfurt/Oder

Radical ambivalence of the project Yugoslavia: Rupture and Socialist Modernization

Yugoslavia is one of the paradigmatic cases that break with the frame of colonial and, even more paradoxically, with Eurocentric history. Why and how can one return to the project emerged in World War 2 without succumbing to Yugo-nostalgia? An epistemological trajectory reads Yugoslavia as a part of the history, or multiple histories of ruptures. Yugoslavia represents a triple rupture, a movement with transformative consequences on local and even global scale. It first emerged during the Second World War – waging a successful liberation struggle that was able to liberate the society through its own efforts. After the split with Stalin in 1948 and international isolation, it first took an independent path to socialism and self-management and then participated in the creation of the Non–Aligned Movement. It contributed to a decolonial imaginary that embraced cultural, political and economic independence (cf. Paul Stubb's new anthology).
    Despite all the emancipatory dimensions Yugoslavia remained heavily within the socialist modernization paradigm. It unfolded its own contradictions and ambivalences, which signaled its own falling behind the project. I argue that a Marxist and decolonial perspective can teach us a double lesson: first that revolutionary transformations only took place on the periphery of Europe from mid 20th-century; and second that within Yugoslavia there is – what is often missed by certain nostalgic retrospective lenses – an own deep asymmetry and injustice: the moment when the social solidarity model of Yugoslavia weakened, also the political, and cultural autonomy became overwritten by nationalistic orientation. The market reform celebrated as opening to the West actually, on the most part, liberalized economy and intensified competition between workers, companies, and republics/regions. The case of Kosovo presented the paradigmatic case of undevelopment, being the most exploited region, with its economy designed to production of cheap raw materials further linked to a kind of political blockade, which often met protests with harsher repression and was translated onto nationalist ideology. A decolonial-Marxist perspective can shed some further light on the longer process of the defeat of socialism, the destruction of Yugoslavia and (its own) Non-alignment.

Sanja Petkovska, University of Belgrade

The importance of the decolonial approach for the Global East and the survival of the idea of critical theory

This contribution to the Postcolonial Critiques – Decolonial Perspectives series of lectures will focus on the importance of a decolonial impulse as a potential site of the perseverance of contemporary progressive political ideas and socially relevant epistemologies through two main points of reading the decolonial and postcolonial critique from the (Global) East. The first point addresses the political and cultural status of the East in the European project and its historical subjugation to it. The application of the decolonial approach to the status of the (Global) East is the main topic of the edited volume Decolonial Politics on European Peripheries (Routledge 2023) of which I served as the main editor. I will explicate the book project as a response to the assumed negative side of post/decolonial critique: above all a heavy accent on descriptive and abstract categories without structural social analyses. I will highlight the racial aspect of the relation to the East in the European project highlighted by the book and its reflection visibility in the negotiation with the Third countries, but also how in the book racial, national, class, gender, and other intersectional dimensions of inequality were implemented to the main political, actual problems such as building the epistemologies and politics for the process of transition and a response to it, its infrastructural obstacles and ideological fallacies, migration, various inequalities in certain domains, etc.
    On another hand, my contribution will focus on inequalities in the domain of academic production and its infrastructures in the East of Europe that forms a heav y obstacle in teaching and research coming from the region that is globally accessible and visible. I will highlight the importance of critical scholarship taking into account both philosophy and social theory in examining the potentials of decolonial thought to rethink inequalities and exclusion between but also within the East and West countries and raise awareness of the weaknesses of decolonial and postcolonial scholarship which rarely offers alternatives for the claimed wrongs detected. Particularly the notions of progress and pathology and their place in critical social theory will be reminded of while concluding that no assumption of innocence applies to academic labour as such; instead, building self-criticism and looking for mechanisms for solidarity is an essential task in front of us. In conclusion, I will address all the means of subjugation and privileges of my position and point to some directions for my future research efforts.

Pablo Valdivia Orozco, EUV Frankfurt/Oder

The coloniality of being European: The Duty and Desire of historical existence in Early Modern Europe

It is safe to say that the colonial-capitalist world has never truly considered a history beyond its own. Only this history is deemed History, and only the Western self is regarded as historical, while, as Eric Wolf ironically noted, the rest of the world consists of "people without history." The invention of History—with a capital “H”—must therefore be analyzed as a colonial-capitalist construct, one so powerful that it remains largely intact even within orthodox Marxism. In this short input, I aim to illustrate that it is no coincidence that the modern colonial system, which took shape from 1492 onward, was established by those European nations that, in the preceding two centuries, had developed a concept of history that extended beyond mere historical knowledge, narratives, and myths. This concept also forged a distinct form of historical consciousness—one that played a crucial role in shaping colonial difference and became intertwined with other categories of difference, such as race and gender.
    A decolonial critique of this History must involve a reconstruction of how this historical consciousness was implemented. The emergence of “historical (self-)consciousness” marks a foundational moment in European history—one that led to the coloniality of being European. I aim to illustrate this moment by examining the historical discourses that arose during the Italian Renaissance and the invention of the Middle Ages as a prehistory of colonial History. Humanist historical self-affirmation reveals the profound entanglement between power and history, between the legitimacy of power and historical legitimacy, as well as the subjectivizing force of History. As early modern humanist texts reveal, this form of historical consciousness is tied to a subjectivizing mode of historical existence and understanding. It is embedded within a discourse of power that compels privileged subjects to “make history.” This History operates as a force of total integration, which— as colonial and racial capitalism demonstrate—coexists with the exclusion and exploitation of all those deemed unworthy of "making history."
    Given this, a decolonial critique must also engage with those struggles that resist History precisely in the name of those histories that have been negated and mutilated by the drive toward total integration—an impulse characteristic of racial capitalism. One of the central objectives of these decolonial struggles is to (re)articulate relationships that do not conform to History, that is: a reevaluation of the rest.