Public Narratives of Decolonization and Racial (In)Justice in Central and Southeast Europe: Enemies and Colonies, Patriots and Riots

by Andrea Pruchová Hruzová (Editor)

Overview

This collection of essays examines the spheres of arts, culture, and digital communication to trace debates that revolve around the notions of decolonization and racial (in)justice in Central and Southeast Europe. It asks how the global narratives of racial and ethnic solidarity find their way into regional contexts. How do these narratives activate the present political agenda as well as the historical pasts? How are they understood and expressed by professionals like academics, artists, activists, and above all, by actors from the lay digital audience? The edited volume presents provocative cases of political and cultural debates from Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. Individual contributions employ an interdisciplinary framework, ranging from memory and media studies to cultural and visual studies. They discuss various phenomena from the fields of popular culture, visual arts, public art, and literature, as well as the regional examples of Black Lives Matter and Roma Lives Matter movements.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783032032225
Publisher:	Springer Nature Switzerland
Publication date:	12/26/2025
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Andrea Průchová Hrůzová is a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences and an associate professor at Charles University in Prague, Czechia. She works on the intersection of cultural sociology, visual culture, and memory studies. She has published on topics such as media narratives of migration, digital racism, and visual activism.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Race and civilisation in hybrid affective contexts and histories of post-socialist semi-peripheries.- Chapter 2: Stop Calling Me the M-Word: A history of one picture.- Chapter 3: Black Czech Arts in the Making?: Disrupting racial profiling.- Chapter 4: Roma Lives Matter: (Mis)Representations, missing data, and failed dialogue about structural injustice in the Romanian literary scene: Chapter 5: The Czech George Floyd?: Roma Lives Matter, neoliberal policing, and the construction of intersectional marginal identities on Facebook.- Chapter 6: Mediating and Lifeworlds: BDS Slovenija and Gibanje za pravice Palestincev.- Chapter 7: Historical Storytelling in the Hungarian Culture Wars.- Chapter 8: Right-wing Decoloniality?: How memory wars against spectral anti-communism reshape decolonial thought in Bulgaria.- Chapter 9: “We Belong to the West”: Crypto-colonial civilisational discourse in the Czech public sphere.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In the postsocialist regions of Central and Southeastern Europe, the impact of race is obscured even more than on the rest of the continent. This volume is a landmark in current scholarship aiming to make the profound presence of race visible in this area. It reveals the mark of racial and decolonial politics in a wide range of experiences, including those of racialized minorities, with a frequent focus on cultural politics as it unfolds in the digital age. It will become indispensable reading for anyone seeking to understand the postsocialist regions of the European Union, as they should be, in the context of the global workings of racial capitalism and of the contradictions and ambiguities it produces at the periphery of the West.” (Ivan Kalmar, University of Toronto, Canada, author of “White But Not Quite: Central Europe’s Illiberal Revolt”)

“Against the background of rising popularity of far-right politics and rapidly growing illiberal public spheres worldwide, this book delivers a critical and timely examination of the local manifestations of global human rights and solidarity movements in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Adopting an intersectional approach, the volume provides insightful and compelling analysis of the ways in which race, ethnicity, coloniality, or power inequality are manifested and represented in contemporary post-socialist public spaces.” (Václav Štětka, Loughborough University, UK, co-author of “The Illiberal Public Sphere: Media in Polarized Societies”)

“Discussing race and decolonization in the context of the European East is still the exception, not the rule. This edited volume places both at the center of attention, revealing once more that race is inextricable from the history and present of the European semiperiphery and decolonization a necessary ingredient for regional as well as global anti-racist solidarities.” (Manuela Boatcă, Freiburg University, Germany, co-author of “Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires”)