Framing Criticism and Knowledge Production in Semi-peripheries
Framing Criticism and Knowledge Production in Semi-peripheries

Post-socialism Unpacked

Summary/Abstract: More than two and a half decades after the demise of actually existing socialism, much of the contemporary literature produced about CEE is still organized around a dichotomy between socialism and post-socialism, transforming the region in an epistemic enclave. This paper clarifies the agency of scholars from both the West and the East in producing these epistemic landscapes. It contributes, in particular, to the analyses that describe peripheries-developed devices that contribute to the asymmetries between the core and its academic hinterlands. I address the positioning games played by the CEE scholars, the modalities in which their various critical agendas became embedded in global fluxes of ideas, and their important role in co-producing the self-Orientalizing narrative on ‘socialism’ and ‘post-socialism’. Following the debate between Thelen (2011; 2012) and Dunn & Verdery (2011) over postsocialism as a strategic case, my contention is that epistemic enclavisation of the region spring from those types of global partnerships, which forged critical alliances predicated on attributing history to the West and taking out the East from the ‘normal’ flow of history. I further develop this point through an example, the understanding of socialist urbanization in the 1980s and 1990s. I show why the over-emphasis on socialism/capitalism, socialism /post-socialism differences and the underestimation of similarities is a wrong analytical option. I plead for a more Gramscian understanding of counter-hegemonic alliance-making.

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