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This introduction explains the scholarly interventions made by the five articles in this cluster: Nikolay Karkov, “Racism and Anti-Racist Thought in Interwar Bulgaria: Some Lessons for the Contemporary Moment”; Zhivka Valiavicharska, “Plovdiv’s Bratska Mogila as a Microcosm of the 1970s in Bulgaria and the Socialist World”; Christina Novakov-Ritchey, “Locating the Peasant in Decolonial Analysis”; Marina Antic, “Socialist Modernism: Miroslav Krleža and the Poetry of Capitalist Development”; and Bojana Videkanic, “Nonaligned Modernism and Continuities of Revolution, Partisan Struggle, and Anti-Imperialism in the Work of Yugoslav Visual Artists.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an exploration of the momentous debates around racism and eugenics, or “racial hygiene,” that took place in Bulgaria in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Implicating some of the most influential public intellectuals and drawing much attention, those debates constitute, to this day, the high point of both racial/racist thought and anti-racist critique in the country. The text begins by looking at the context of and major protagonists in the debates, notably socio-biologists Stefan Konsulov and Metodiy Popov, before turning to philosopher Dimitur Mikhalchev’s liberal critique of racism and to heterodox Marxist scholar Ivan Khadzhiiski’s less familiar yet crucial intervention in the debate. The text suggests that Mikhalchev’s strongest arguments emerge both from his proximity to historical materialism and from his anticipation of some of postcolonial theory’s major methodological insights. More importantly still, it is Khadzhiiski’s critical discussion of the origins of Western (racial) capitalism, the role of the middle-class intelligentsia in promoting racist thinking, and the importance of political mobilization and struggle that continue to be profoundly relevant for debates around racism in the contemporary moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text seek to make a contribution to both anti-capitalist and decolonial critique from the perspective of the historical legacy of East-European socialism. More particularly, the text argues that a critical decolonial methodology can shed light on aspects of socialist history that might otherwise be inaccessible or unintelligible, and, conversely, that a critical investigation of the complexities the socialist period can offer important nuances to decolonial theory itself. Along the way, the article offers a brief genealogy of decolonial scholarship in the region and what it considers to be the conceptual advantages or ‘bonus of insight’ of that scholarship in addressing the historical specificity of socialism. Deploying a decolonial interpretative lens, the text then takes up the ambiguous role that Marxist humanism, the dominant discourse in the region during the post-Stalinist period, played in both opening up spaces of freedom and possibility and in laying the ground for the ethnonationalist turn of the 1970s in Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia. In a final section, the article explores instances and practices of collaboration between the socialist East and the anti-colonial South as an important and yet often ignored part of the fabric of socialism. The authors conclude that East-European socialism’s efforts to organize alternative and resistant modernities at times converged and at others starkly departed from the projects of both global capitalist and Western colonial modernity, a historical legacy strained by the tensions of its own contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against what can be called a “double ontological erasure” of state socialism in eastern Europe, by both the east European right-wing intelligentsia and the west European militant left. In an effort to challenge said erasure, the paper draws on the journalistic and fictional work of Bulgaria's major dissident writer of the 1970s, Georgi Markov. Against mainstream readings of his work as staunchly anti-communist, the paper suggests that Markov makes at least three major contributions to the “communist hypothesis” from the perspective of eastern Europe. First, by offering a “postcolonial” (rather than a political-economic) critique of the “cult of things” and consumerism in the region. Second, by developing a truly immanent critique of state socialism from the position of the communist ideal. Lastly, by proposing what could be called a “communism of the abject” among individuals and communities on the margins of socialist governmentality. Arguably, this triple contribution not only proffers a more nuanced and complex understanding of life under socialism, but also has important insights for contemporary debates on the left today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text offers a discussion of the concept and experience of alienation, as it has been theorized in two very different traditions. Accordingly, I juxtapose a recent discussion by Italian Autonomist Marxist Franko "Bifo" Berardi to that of Argentine philosopher and scholar of indigenous cosmologies Rodolfo Kusch. Unlike Berardi's anti-capitalist critique, Kusch identifies Western Modernity (and not just capitalism) as the source of alienation, and proposes a "de-linking" from its categories and epistemic practices. I caution that even a progressive meta-theory such as Marxism can engage in conceptual violence, when it claims universal validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slavoj Žižek's more recent work rarely references the Balkans as a space of resistant practices and possibilities. While highly critical of Western constructions of the Balkans, Žižek paradoxically evacuates the region of its peopled history. This article explores that evacuation as constitutive of, rather than tangential to, his thinking. Over against his best intentions, Žižek ends up reproducing the Western gaze and effectively “balkanizes” the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]