6 listopada 2024 r. podczas seminarium „Tradycja chciana i niechciana” dr Francesco Trupia (Uniwersytet im. Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu, Uniwersytet w Bolonii) wygłosił referat pt. Europe’s “Otherness” as a Commodity: Rethinking Islamophobia and Antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe from the Time of “Global Socialism”.
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Abstract
This lecture aims to rethink the phenomena of contemporary Islamophobia and antisemitism by exploring the genealogy of the far-right tradition in Central-East Europe. It particularly aims to illuminate the roots of anti-minority discourse, racism and ethno-nationalism in Bulgaria and Poland by harking back to the state-run racial policies deployed during socialism.
The lecture will shed light on the longue durée of eugenic practices across spatio-temporal breaks in the two countries, thereby looking at the durability of antisemitic and anti-Muslim practices implemented under the guise of the decolonial efforts in the Global South.
Two lines of enquiry guide the whole lecture: first, how did Communist Poland and Bulgaria’s mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion indebt to state-run eugenic practices? Second, how did the decolonial turmoil in the Mediterranean region provide the momentum to deploy a set of racial policies against their “ethnic other”?
Organisation of the lecture
The lecture will be organised in three sections. The first part discusses how post-war Poland and Bulgaria reordered their domestic heritage to cloak the alternative project of Communist modernisation in the attempt of eliminating the remnants of domestic ethnoreligious diversity.
The second shows how the socialist interconnectedness between Bulgaria and the Arab world, as well as that between Poland’s anti-regime critics with those from the Middle East and ‘the West’, were exploited to dismiss the ethnically diverse history of both countries. In this instance, the 6-Day War in 1967 and Turkey’s invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974 will be introduced to explain how the reaction of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP) and the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) were entailed to cement power hierarchies and quarrel with internal dissents ascribed as Turkish nationalists and Zionists, respectively.
In closing, the third part postulates that the watchword of internationalism and people’s unity became an ideological commodity to collude with decolonial efforts, unleashing a process of de-globalisation even before the demise of Communism in 1989.
Questions to be addressed
How to rethink latter-day antisemitism and Islamophobia in Poland or Bulgaria through the lens of postcolonial studies?
How do both phenomena continue to operate along the troubling continuum of racial discourse?
How do the very personal and community stories of Jews and Muslims in Poland and Bulgaria, respectively, reveal how the image of the “Other” in Europe has been always used to cement power authorities and erase the “unwanted”?
Main objectives
At the heart of this lecture, is the need to pay attention to the genealogy of race in Central-East Europe between biology and society and re-explore the Comintern through the colonial lens. The lecture will also hinge today’s far-right antisemitic heritage in Bulgaria on that of some Arab (diaspora) organisations, showing the backlash of the global far-right populist waves and its antisemitic and Islamophobic discourse shaped by the interdependence of structural racism and forms of exclusion worldwide.
Main literature
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