Book review: Staying with doubt,not yet dancing with Azis

Unequal Under Socialism: Race, Women, and Transnationalism in Bulgaria is a powerful guide and companion at a time when the search for emancipatory alternatives to the project of both state socialism and neoliberal capitalism is ever more urgent. It is extremely timely as it comes at a moment when keeping the focus on forms of violence that derive from both Soviet/Russian and Western imperialisms is a challenge to contemporary scholarship. It is here that Todorova’s contribution speaks from a feminist standpoint cautioning against romanticized visions of projects built around socialist and collectivist forms of economic and cultural production, pointing to gender and racial inequalities that remain unaddressed.

This critique is especially directed to Marxist, materialist, and class analysis within Western academic research and education in response to the crisis of neoliberalism. However, there is a missed opportunity to dialogue with recent works of transnational feminist scholarship and collectives to whom questions of expropriation, ongoing slavery and economic inequality as part of global capitalism are already central to understanding contemporary conditions of gendered and racialized forms of violence.

Making questions of race central to the enquiry about women under state socialism, Todorova introduces the notion of ‘socialist racialism’. Here, she traces affinities between modern Eurocentric epistemologies and Leninist and Marxist ideologies and socialist state formations. In situating Bulgaria as a location for such relational thinking, this examination is part of a larger recent effort to situate the Balkans and Southeast Europe within the episteme of racism and whiteness.

The most exciting provocation of the book is Todorova’s relation with both socialism and capitalism as marked by a sense of doubt: an emotional and cognitive awareness that any economic, social and political formation has to be continuously critiqued, examined, distrusted and replaced (p. 5). This is the doubt that leads to unease with Marxism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism and seeks to ‘transcend these modern Eurocentric ideologies that have arrested our imaginations and politics’ (p. 5). ‘Postsocialist feminist doubt’ is a gesture towards examining how state socialism in the 20th century enfolded race, patriarchy, heteronormativity and violence against women. This epistemology of doubt derives from the violence inflicted on women in the name of socialism as well as the realization that jumping on the bandwagon of neoliberal development has led to an unprecedented rise in poverty and continued sexual violence against women in postsocialist societies and globally.

However, the book differentiates between socialist racialism and racism along inclusion/exclusion, emancipation/oppression lines in ways that undermine her own project of tracing the links, ruptures, complicities and transformations of shared Eurocentric epistemologies between Western colonialism and international socialism. ‘Unlike racism which produces violence through division and exclusion, socialist racialism produces violence by seeking togetherness, emancipation, and social, economic and political inclusion’ (p. 60). This also occludes the relational processes of violence through the circulation of discourses of equality, justice and freedom in liberal humanism that drive Western colonialism (Da Silva, 2014) and socialist attachments to a ‘more humane’ version of colonialism (Mark, 2022). This analytical separation risks overlooking how forms of liberal racism also operate through inclusion, integration, togetherness and ‘the represent and destroy’ politics that work through formally antiracist rhetoric (Melamed, 2011). Moreover, this analysis tends to see racism as a ‘by-product of Western hegemony and deeply gendered and racialised eurocentrism that is not native to the Balkans or Bulgaria’ (p. 61). But what is ‘native’ to Bulgaria? By situating the Balkans outside the episteme of racism or on the receiving end of Western hegemony, the complicity of Eastern European states and those produced as its (racially superior) citizens in Western imperiality (Rexhepi, 2022) are left unattended.

Staying with an epistemology of doubt then bears the question of what the political project of this analytic of socialist racialism is meant to do? Is there an assumption that once we ‘know’ about socialist racialism, anti-Muslim and anti-Roma racism will end in postsocialist states today? But this has already been argued to not happen since it keeps in place the analytical modes of raciality on which Marxist and socialist ideologies were also built. It then becomes urgent to ask how state socialism reproduced and engaged in colonial juridico-economic architectures of total violence (Da Silva, 2014) and what epistemic horizons can emancipate the categories of difference on which such systems rely.

In the context of the war in Ukraine today, there emerge more and more calls to build solidarities across Eastern Europe and those from formerly colonized countries, a move which mainly comes from those positioned in the east of Europe. Here, Todorova’s contribution warns us against this quick jump to solidarity without properly examining the sense of self shaping postsocialist feminism. The (post)socialist feminist sense of self, she argues, came to be constructed around the dichotomy of a prospering domestic socialism versus oppression of women abroad that created silences about the struggles of women domestically while ignoring the role of race and reliance of postcolonial nation-building on material support and know-how supplied by socialist states in shaping the terms of such conversations.

However, we believe this critique calls for deepening conversations of postsocialist feminist sense of self to questions of anti-colonial nationalism, whiteness and borders. The book’s understanding of whiteness does not engage with the recent body of work that has explored racial hierarchies beyond the Black/White binary in the context of postsocialism (e.g. Boatcă, 2016; Drăgan, 2019; Krivonos, 2022; Manolova et al., 2019). Moreover, those formerly under state socialism and who have been fully integrated into the European Union (EU) (even if not as fully White subjects) are inevitably part of a White enclosure (Rexhepi, 2022) that expels non-White non-European subjects. These realities must be accounted for seriously before we are to bridge gaps ‘between postsocialist women in the region and women in the global North and South’ (p. 6).

In following categories of difference with the purpose of building bridges, there is a danger of reproducing difference without the epistemic struggles required for subverting or emancipating these categories (Drăgan, 2019) while keeping these categories safe and open to co-optation under liberal multiculturalism (despite the book’s argument against the same). For example, the manifesto of Roma Futurisms (Drăgan, 2019) rejects such conversations across different categories of women for the sake of bridges and aims to emancipate the category of Roma from its unsure place in the future promised by states (socialist or capitalist). They subvert the notion that anti-racist art or knowing about Roma oppression will end racism and instead enact and envision a world where Roma witches are in power. They demand a Romacen and not a hybrid world.

And this is the main challenge between Todorova’s provocative and inspiring invitation to stay with doubt versus the quick jump to build bridges across historically racialized groups by nurturing the postsocialist cultural ‘Third Space’ of borderlands. It begs the question of how, why and who does the labour for such bridgework and to what ends. She claims,

creating more such third spaces in postsocialist Bulgaria does not need institutional structures and foreign sponsorship; rather, it is in the hands of local artists, educators, teachers, activists, creative people, and all other people who, like the Roma performing artists Azis, cross worlds and have built bridges, or are willing to learn how to construct them. (p. 171)

We contend that questions of political economy, labour and material inequality in the region and globally – rather than solely cultural production – must be central to any political project of imagining and building emancipatory alternatives. We are, therefore, unable to join this call to racialized and precarious groups to do the bridgework without the epistemic and structural transformations needed to build political horizons beyond capitalism and state socialism.

Todorova ends the book with what we see as inscribing Bulgaria in the project of goodness and cosmopolitan Europe: ‘The problem is that an overwhelming focus on the deficiencies, excesses, ruptures, corruption, and violence of postsocialism in the Balkans has obscured the events and forces embodying humanity, goodness, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, tolerance, and anti-racism that are also Bulgarian’ (p. 161). But what if it is precisely ‘humanity, goodness, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, tolerance, and anti-racism’, in the name of which the EU, which Bulgaria is part of, inflicts violence against those with whom we (in postsocialist contexts) want to build solidarities? We share the frustration of associating postsocialism with deficiency, but we stay with Todorova’s own tools of ‘epistemology of the doubt’ developed in the book to resist the temptation of joining this European project of goodness instead of unmaking it altogether.