^{Reflections on Chapter 1 of Neither/ Nor:}

^{Eastern European Anti-Colonial discussion group in Berlin}

^{“The thought of opacity distracts me from absolute truth whose guardian I might believe myself to be.”} 

^{Poetics of Relation, Edouard Glissant}

“Berlin is now the decolonial capital of Europe!” 

“And Warsaw!” — someone else added excitedly… 

This was during a workshop I co-hosted this year. It may certainly look that way on social media, if only based on the density of people laying claims to the cause, but what does it mean in practice? 

If the prefix was a horoscope-like system of divination, what would it say about us? 

The new age reference is not accidental. As much as I like to think with things like Tarot cards and astrology, I am also very much aware of the insipidness of “spiritual entrepreneurship”, and that this New Age re-categorization of the world can easily careen into a black mirror inversion, in which a horoscope sign is a new form of racism. After all, the new age and alternative practices’ cross over to the fascist right is well documented (Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, Penguin, 2024, pp. 159-191).

So what do we mean exactly by saying:

De-

Anti- colonial

Post-

?

Here I am interested less in addressing the theoretical-academic framework that determines these prefixed terms, but rather in their vernacular use, specifically as related to Eastern European diaspora, noting in process the spectral presence of the colonizer (and the precursor to nazi (Klein, pp. 278-315)), always lurking within us, ready to rear its head. 

For the purposes of the essay I will draw on the experience of running Neither/ Nor, the public project I initiated in March 2023 under the subtitle “Eastern European Anti-Colonial discussion group”. As of October 2024 its subject has changed to be the discussion group on reciprocity, hybridity and opacity (the reasons for this change will become apparent lower in the essay). Now that the anti-colonial chapter of Neither/Nor has closed, at least for a time, I wanted to share the nearby conversations that stemmed from it, and offer a retrospective reflection on my choice of prefix.

Part 1: The Prefix

At a gathering this summer someone metaphorically gave me a pat on the back for calling Neither/Nor an anti- colonial group. I had to ask: why did they think it was “great” to call it anti-, not de- colonial. The person in question, a Russian artist-activist of the boomer generation, shrugged, pondered, and concluded that he liked it because it rang of old school agitprop of the left. Given our calendric difference, his generation’s use of prefix had little to do with my choice as far as our alignment on simply being “against ______”. The idealism and its shadow self, accelerationism, that came before me, only helped to illustrate that it’s impossible to refuse an all encompassing and embodied condition. Albeit indirectly, earlier uses of the prefix anti- influenced the way I think about the colonial present — but in another direction.

My choice had to do with personal as political, and attunement to the set of imposed legacies that shaped my hybrid life. In other words, my initiation of the anti-colonial discussion group was not motivated by a desire to return to an ideal or a cleansed state, re-playing the violence that is ultimately embedded in all de-colonial projects (Frantz Fanon, Wretched off The Earth, Grove, 1963, p.35). Not only do I not want to replicate this pattern of victim becoming the victimizer yet another time in the history, I also have no place (to return to), where to claim the role of de-colonizer. Rather, my motivation for choosing an anti-colonial framework was to look at how colonialism remains an all-permeating condition of the present, and in what ways it becomes us. How to work against its machinations, and how to live, wherever your life has taken you, fully connected to the place.

From this perspective the condition of post-colonialism simply does not exist. Instead, we are, and perhaps indefinitely, pending.

2. “Eastern Europe”

The invitation to join the first chapter of the group read as follows:

“Neither/ Nor is a discussion group assembled in search of a better self-articulation, and to work through the urgent issues related to post-Soviet, Eastern European and hybrid contexts, with a view of elucidating potential anti-colonial position (s) relevant to the regional experience, distinct from the dominant western discourse (here: American/ Western European).”  

The obvious term to address first was the descriptive itself: Eastern Europe. Where are its edges? Who are — we the people? What are our points of contact, and divergences? What followed was perhaps an obvious realization that beyond our links to respective countries and sub-regions, we often knew little of each other’s history, and of struggles and tensions at present. 

The ambiguous division and, question mark of the borders of Eurasia, Eastern and Central Europe, the variants of communist pasts in post-Soviet states, Balkan countries, former Yugoslavian constellation, and with Baltics clamoring to be rebranded as Northern Europe, meant the question of who and where we were would not be resolved in our group or, perhaps, is a rhetorical question that’s not even ours. The descriptive was rather an exterior projection totalizing many cultures and ethnicities into a homogenous mass. There was an added tension, which began to affect the dynamic of our group itself over time, generated by the fact that some Eastern Europeans have had an EU passport since 2004 — allowing for mobility, employment and easier access to free education across Europe, next to others — without such privilege to date.

The first book we read was the text that prompted me to put a call out for Neither/Nor in the first place: The Light That Failed by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. It was a relief of recognition to read about my younger self: the ambition and curiosity that motivated many Eastern Europeans to skip over the border into the aspirational future after 1989; the ideological hijacking and mirroring, and the imitative behavior required to remain operational in Western Europe and North America for the past twenty plus years (Krastev/Holms, Penguin, 2020, pp. 1-77).

The reaction to reading the book in the group, however, was for some, on the defensive. Several people said, indignant: 

“I don’t want to see this as our only place — as an imitation of an ideal.” 

It was a curious take to the critique, which seemed to have been received as a prescription, as opposed to an opening through which to flee. But I realized over time that what they were asking is: 

“Don’t I have agency?” (Because often it still feels like we don’t.)

The Slovene theorist Renata Salecl, with whom I had a moment to briefly discuss Krastev’s theory of imitation this summer, asked: but don’t you think neoliberalism makes us all an imitative subject of capitalism? The answer is of course yes, in the globalized neoliberal present we are all subjugated into production of selves. But I am not one to relativize this idea into broad strokes. The question for me is to what degree, and what processes we mean by the imitation imperative, as related to place and historic relations. 

One of the processes The Light That Failed addresses is the shock doctrine that followed the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. The abrupt conversion to free market capitalism is also captured in all its faceted oral history in Svetlana Alexievich’s Second Hand Time (that we read in the group at the end); and in hard to watch, at least for me, series by Adam Curtis, collated from unused TV footage from BBC archives, and inaccurately called TraumaZone: Russia 1985-1999  — though covering events on all post-Soviet territory. 

Another aspect of imitation imperative, for Eastern Eruopeans specifically, is the presumed proximity, and over-identification, with whiteness. Becoming white®. While countering ingrained narratives and the work of troll farm, is an urgent necessity, as is conducting anti-racist work for the region, and diaspora, a lot of Euro-American theorizing also fails to recognize this imitative assimilation in itself as part of colonial process, instead flatlining Eastern Europeans into a notion of white privilege. The racialized racist is not a new concept, of course, nor is the divide and rule. No matter where from outside it, as a cultural worker in the Western context, one can too easily become a cipher for projections and obfuscation, and erasure of inconvenient history. This denial of specificity allows for ample cover for the exploitative relations of the West with their Eastern neighbors, and the territories and resources, aided by equating us (white and not) with Euro-Americans when convenient, and as lower caste, when not.

Thus, the question — Don’t I have agency? — articulated something worth dwelling on: do we, now that we are conscious of the imposed directive, regardless of our generational and structural place in the puzzle of Eastern Europe, want to consent to be a bad imitation of an unworkable Western ideal? What kind of futurity does that offer? How does it change anything, and for whom? To simplify: how willing are we to play ball with the dominant culture’s demands to assimilate into colonial ideology, and what will that lead to? And — what’s the alternative? Particularly, when we depend on the system as a surrogate home, unable to return?

Here it is important to note how Putin’s (and Lukashenko’s, and Orban’s etc.) rhetoric appropriated some of these real concerns, passed them through a warped mirror, and had used them to justify military aggression elsewhere, and oligarchy and autocracy at home, and for that reason made it more challenging to bring to the critical table. Both Krastev and Klein write on the subject of right-wing mirroring far more articulately, and provide the depth of research more profound, than what I could offer in this essay.

Part 3: Diasporic drift 

I can’t say with confidence that it is or isn’t worse or more extreme today than for prior generations, but another great way to lose one’s sense of individual agency, and therefore ability to participate in any meaningful way in a collective action, as offered by dominant cultures, is to only register in the system under the category of your “background”. 

I will take my own diasporic constellations as an example, if only because I can speak to it with some confidence, as opposed to the rest of Eastern Europe. There are several post-Soviet-cum-national diasporas dispersed over almost a century:

• The Soviet diaspora — exotic newcomers escaping vicissitudes of life behind, and just after the fall of, the iron curtain. This group was small, composed mostly of highly respected professionals and academics, and was “of interest” to the West, and peer and structurally supported (at least according to the same boomer Russian artist-activist I brought up earlier);
• Next are the children of “post-” generation, arriving West in mid90s/ early 2000s, who were gaslit to think of ourselves as “already free”, like the market — a-historical, a-national career warriors equal and not equal to our western peers, mood depending, and of no interest to the system as far as structural support, because apparently we already had equal rights. Just like that! (me)
• And today there are the 2020/ 2022 exiles of authoritarian crackdown and war, fragmented into respective nationalities, again of interest to the system, and variably structurally supported — easy to sell, easy to categorize, these recent arrivals are graded on scales of “distress”. I will quote Annette Geiger, the aesthetics professor at HfK Bremen who did not shy away from cynicism when considering my PhD options: “It’s too bad you’re not “under threat” or “at risk”, otherwise it could have been easy (to get me funded), I’m on the committee for DAAD scholarships, ” — she added point blank.

Needless to say, criticism of the system does not help with getting funding. The center remains under-educated and disinterested in world history, to put it politely. Rapid Americanization as part of shock doctrine, since the 1990s, and use of English as international lingua franca, has also meant that the Anglo-sphere stopped having to learn about the rest of the world (Krastev/Holms, Penguin, 2020, pp. 153-157). Because of this limited comprehension of the long history behind the events, at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and occupation of Belarus, many in the Eastern European diaspora felt yet again dislocated and placeless. The uptick of de- and anti-colonial conversation elsewhere, as well as the need to process the invasion pulled those seeking to reconnect to common Eastern European context out of their a-historic aspirations to integrate, and back towards the diasporas. 

Neither/ Nor attempted to be that place of (re-)connection, with the focus on intra-regionality as opposed to nationality, to hold our emotions and personal stories, to read about our varied histories, and to talk about it all through the place where the meetings were held — Berlin, Germany, EU.

Regional group designation felt more comfortable because of its broad reach, but it also meant conversation was less specific and conducted from a critical distance. In contrast, for me, the diasporic relations with the Belarusian cultural sphere have more to do with navigating a dysfunctional family (both literally and figuratively speaking) than a resource and a community I can rely on. Between patriarchal nationalists of my father’s generation, whom I grew up berated by, and from whom I escaped over the border, to the newly arrived professionals, the doppelgangers of my younger blinkered self, ready to individualize and “advance and succeed”, the intellectual and emotional connections are few and brittle. 

While the question of benchmarking and overlord relations of our supposed Western allies, is being readily questioned by many artists and theorists across Eastern Europe, it is still not a subject comfortably broached within the Belarusian diaspora. Historic dependency on grants as sustenance has produced rather singular discourse: of victimhood and erasure, which entirely fails to consider the conditions within the country itself, that hail all the way to dekulakization, and further back, and continue to shape Belarusian reality into dictatorship. By and large my Belarusian colleagues seem only too happy to qualify for an advantageous position in the ranks of victimhood and perform re-nationalization abroad. What I would call opportunism can also look like adapting ready-made critical positions “from within” the Western discourse: from any wave feminism, marxist critique of labor and neoliberalism, to pinkwashing (Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim, DUP, 2017, pp.95-127). 

Sometimes bitterness about other causes receiving more funds goes as far as Belarusian art platform, whom I briefly helped with SMM, requesting that I don’t share the collective image 2022 Nobel peace prize recipients, which included Russian and Ukrainian activist organizations, instead publishing only the slide with the Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski from Vjasna (still imprisoned today). I left the project shortly after.

Similarly, when I see “Slava Ukraini! Zshive Belarus! Israel will win!” as a sign off on Belarusian oppositional Telegram channels, I am reminded of the lack of public discourse within the dictatorship, beyond bro-managed social media, and of partial and patchy historic knowledge. It is both bewildering — considering the transient buffer state territory Belarus has historically occupied, and Russia’s dominance — that Belarusians would position themselves with Zionist and not Palestinian cause, as it is explicable: many have friends and family there.

“What do you want after twenty six years?” — says Svetlana Tikhanouskaya in her latest political-ad-as-a-film titled “Accidental President”. In that scene it’s 2020, the height of Belarusian protests, and she just left the country. She means twenty six years of the Belarusian dictatorship, and the difficulty of imagining ways of organizing and toppling the autocracy. It has now been thirty.

What can be expected from people shaped by back to back wars, extermination, labor camps, seventy years of Soviet Union and thirty years of dictatorship; people who have lived with no cultural forum, no public square, no artistic and research field to speak of in the earnest until very very recently, and who have had to learn, often from exterior point of view, how to simply talk to each other, be in the room, across fear and divisions?

While in Berlin’s activist and leftist institutions and circles the mantra is “collectivism=good, individualism=bad”, what is clear from the Belarusian example is that individualism is not an exclusively American or capitalist phenomena. It is also a traumatic reaction: survivalism. After the new wave of recent violence and repressions, the ability to feel one’s own individual agency, and the ability to put trust in your neighbor, to take action with or for the collective, has been so abused and manipulated that its surfacing was brief and short-lasting, and only discrete partisan actions remain. The general workers strike, the only pathway to peaceful revolution many opposition Belarusians figures claimed they wanted, albeit with no investment of time on their part leading up to elections, would not come. It would have required the kind of supportive conditions and social activation that were unavailable.

Viewing this from outside the region, the more we, be it as immigrants or displaced cultural workers, accept terms of exchange, in which we acquiesce to be the comfortable character of a victim, speaking not through overlap of crises, but strategically and strictly within delineated notion of “our issues”, or mask as version of a colonizer to advance our career, the more distant the possibility of changes both in Western and Eastern Europe and beyond becomes. 

Yes, it is important to take the time to land, adjust, integrate, and take care of one’s mental and physical safety in a new place. But if one’s professional capacity as a public person, actively occupying a discursive space, is all but pursuit of personal advantage and bland narratives, it becomes a kind of collectivity of individualists that leads to a stampede. 

This just as well applies not only to the Belarusian diaspora but to our allies too, East and West.

Part 4: Hybrid futures

Much of the diaspora, and my family who still live in Minsk, seem to insist I am betraying my language and culture by living my hybrid life — speaking mostly English (and Russian for the faceted post-Soviet context). My own father went as far as equating me to the dictator Alexander Lukashenko, and accused me of entertaining an unpatriotic globalitarian agenda. The later anti-cosmopolitan paranoia rings anti-semitic, which in the case of my father would be a form of self-hate. Or hate of his bloodline on mother’s side. Rather, I know enough of the context to see it is a confusion of terms, due to the same problem I already described above: the incomplete and missing public debate in Belarus for more than a century. 

Lukashenko is yet another “man who sold the world”, and has been actively erasing the Belarusian language, yet again, rewriting everything from street names to remaining Belarusian public broadcasts into Russian. I am as angry with forced Russification, as the people who charge me with treason (ironic because I would probably be charged with it by Lukashnko himself, which can be punished by the death penalty in Belarus). This doppelganging of “Bats’ka” (aka “father” in Belarusian as Lukashneko is referred to colloquially) and my own father, performing the outrage of the the “men of culture” in my family, is a smug screen to justify defensive violence posing as some sort of repair. Polarization is on the rise everywhere, and mine is far from the only family that’s affected. As a society, we seem to forget that our threatened identities cannot act as alibi for interpersonal aggression and nation-building based on a mono-lingual and ethnically preferred future.

It is also not the first time re-nationalization is mined by colonial forces to serve their own objectives and pacify marginalized groups, as can be remembered of Nazis’ instrumentalization of regional policies to encourage the use of Belarusian language during the occupation. The role of collaborators is much watered down today, supplanted by preferred partisan and recursive ethno-nationalist ideology, but it should not be entirely put aside or forgotten, just because it is often abused as justification for forced Russification. 

I remember reading Sergei Lozintsa’s letter on e-flux in 2022 (regarding his dismissal form the Ukrainian Film Acacdemy), and being in total agreement until this paragraph where I felt he has taken his point too far (my underline): 

“ “Now, when Ukraine is struggling to defend its independence, the key concept in the rhetoric of every Ukrainian should be his national identity, ” write the Ukrainian “academicians.” Not a civil position, not a desire to unite all sane and freedom-loving people in the fight against Russian aggression, not an international effort of all democratic countries to win this war, but “national identity.” Unfortunately, this is Nazism. A gift to the Kremlin propaganda from the Ukrainian Film Academy.”

At the time I was incensed. How could he brandish the worst label on the planet and apply it onto the people who have just been invaded, incomprehensibly, by the neighbor with whom they share the same side of history in WWII, fighting against the Nazis? But after three more years in the EU, I feel different about his reaction. The number of re-nationalizations and self-exoticizing ethnographic projects that dominate my info streams is overwhelming. 

More examples of this trend were found at a residency in Estonia this September. In a dizzying hall of mirrors and doubles, just as I was reading Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, the book seemed to play out before my eyes, when I met two people whose Estonian background seemed to be determined purely by their ethnicity and lingual capacity.

An Estonian of Russian descent wanted my opinion about their position within the de-colonial discourse. While I’d like to disqualify myself from posing as an expert, or advising others on their rights to a place, I listened to their experience with interest. Raised in post-Soviet Estonia, as a result of less desirable ethnicity, they studied in a segregated school for ethnic Russians, which are rapidly being downsized and closed in Estonia’s push for re-nationalization (and decolonization, of course). Despite being born and raised in the country they had a gray passport until passing a citizenship exam, including Estonian language proficiency, that allowed them to receive the “real” Estonian document setting them free to roam the EU. The same kind of exam I had to pass to get my Canadian citizenship, after we’d immigrated.

At the same residency I met a Canadian of ethnic Estonian descent traveling in the opposite direction. Born and raised in Ottawa, they returned to claim back their roots (and I’m assuming, EU passport), and spoke the language to prove it. Borrowing generously from narratives of indigenous communities (and of entirely different history) in Canada, they described their interest in reconnecting to “ancestors who did it right”, yet whom they mostly met but through archives, and bringing a queer-as-anti-colonial perspective to the process. An all rounder. My question to this bucolic assemblage of admirable and grant friendly objectives was, again, personal as political:

What should the rest of us do? Those without access to archives, oral tradition, and without a place to reclaim. The Canadian-Estonian understood, agreeing, yes of course, we have to consider how to work through dispossession. 

But that’s not it, or not all we have to work through. We also have to work with unclassifiable and yet to be determined patchwork constellations we inherit on site. People move, forcibly, or in someone’s belly, or by choice. If diasporic discourse stays on its current course, what awaits us is yet another round of who belongs. Denoting the right citizens and the wrong (next to trying to be the best European clones we could muster).

As an artist, as opposed to a populist politician, the future I want to imagine is not of a nation or revivalism, but of connections, entanglement and place-relations as they happen, wherever they find us. I believe this is what Edouard Glissant meant by opacity (Edouard Glissant, Poetics Of Relation, UMP, 2010, pp.189-195). The contrived symbolism of mainstream oppositional narratives, flags and other related paraphernalia hold little inspiration for me, likewise recursive ethno-nationalism. Instead I am curious: 

What might irridescent future feel and look like? 

Take this essay: can a Belarusian speak, and write in, English?

This makes me think of the texting habit we adopted with the writer Tatsiana Zamirouskaya, when we first met in a grad school in upstate New York in 2015. She just arrived from Minsk and would write to me in Russian, I would respond in English, and we both occasionally used specific Belarusian lingo. It felt so natural that I paid no attention to it, until Tanya pointed it out. For both of us, use of this specific language had to do with something deeply personal. I imagine, as a writer and journalist, for Tanya it was her main tool, her livelihood. For me, who has taken a long time to become fluent in English, and in the meantime unlearned much of Russian and Belarusian, it had to do with having the full lingual capacity as an adult — since loss of language always feels infantilizing and disabling. 

Today I see Tanya, like many other public figures in Belarusian circles, making an extra effort to speak Belarusian here and there. It is both admirable and awkward, like Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s early TV addresses and spontaneous interviews he can barely hold in Ukrainian. At the same time I am enjoying googling everyone’s name I mention here, to make sure I get correct the new Belarusian and Ukrainian spelling, and seeing how we are becoming less homogeneous (aka less Russified). My artist last name too, by choice, is professionally spelled as Belarusian, Kolas, and by passport still Russian — Kolos. But deeper commitment to and faithfulness to my “ancestral tongue” while living where life has taken me, is something I admittedly can’t find capacity for. Today I’m saddled with having to learn another language — German.

Germany, where I live (for now), is the place where the ugliest forms of nationalism are always lurking just beneath the surface. They will find you as abuse shouted at you in a sauna, when you’re trying to relax on the weekend and misunderstand “the rules”, they will find you in a shop, in the street, in academia. It is exhausting, and demotivating to that very task of learning the language, even when technically I am all for it, as part of understanding the territory where I find myself. Instead, I am thinking I need to move yet again, back to the anglo-sphere where I can be an adult human being with full lingual capacity, if only to be able to defend my ground.

My body too, perhaps historically wired, refuses to learn the obtuse language, just like it refuses to be forced to perform my original nationality. Meanwhile, my French has improved since I’ve moved to Europe, because I like French cinema. Hence Claire Denis’s images that accompany this essay, from her most hypnotic work: The Intruder. A film centered around a Ukrainian legionnaire seeking a heart transplant, played by the Russian-French actor, late Michel Subor.

In conclusion:

Neither of the place, nor belonging to a clear diasporic group, the underpinning position from which I started the Neither/Nor discussion group, I realized after I closed the first chapter, was of profound loss: of place and connections. For Eastern Europeans, with my accent in English and second Canadian passport, I am vaguely North American. And for the rest I am vaguely Eastern European. Or both, and always ever so vaguely. As I’ve moved through anti-colonial research, and met new people, while receiving hostile words from family members, and a cold shoulder from the Belarusian diaspora, I chose in the end to accept this reality as a fact. And to build where I am: against the grain of North American myopia, European replacement fears, Russian regional dominance, and against determinations of my belonging by people from my diaspora with whom I share place of origin, history and language (s), but not necessarily all of my values.

Despite the pressures to conform, from my vantage point in between all these contexts, I would not know to pick a cause between the wars and forms of oppressions raging at present. Largely because I would not know where to start, or where to belong. Rather than removing myself from circulation because I can’t seem to align with a singular of the many pressing political issues, I am offering something else, something that those who feel a more natural connection to local or specific causes can still find useful, or so I hope.

Opacity, hybridity, entanglement, is what I can resonate with and manage to live through — with my mental capacity**, and place within the structural logistics. The very ability to choose not to succumb to peer pressure is already a small revolution, given how unpopular my decision is with the dominant activist circles on all sides.

With that Neither/Nor has moved into its new incarnation, to Chapter 2, to discuss reciprocity, opacity and hybridity, with anti-colonial perspective in mind, as I continue to look for my version of a creole and the only futurity that I believe is available to us, regardless of place in the world (Glissant, pp.89-103).

** at some point soon I will write another essay about the pressure of extraversion-performative-activism vs. what western/post-modern globalized culture classify as “neurodivergent spectrum”, and how asymmetries linked to forms of participation based on visibility is a disservice to the many causes we might believe in and try to advocate for…

Excerpts (not in order of appearance)

1. Frantz Fanon —The Wretched Of The Earth (Concerning Violence)

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it—relationships between individuals, new names for sports clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the police, on the directing boards of national or private banks—decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain "species" of men by another "species" of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution. It is true that we could equally well stress the rise of a new nation, the setting up of a new state, its diplomatic relations, and its economic and political trends. But we have precisely chosen to speak of that kind of tabula rasa which characterizes at the outset all decolonization. Its unusual importance is that it constitutes, from the very first day, the minimum demands of the colonized. To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colonizers.

2. Edouard Glissant — Poetics Of Relation 

From ELEMENTS — Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World

The baroque made its appearance in the West at a moment when a particular idea of Nature as harmonious, homogeneous, and thoroughly knowable was in force. Rationalism refined this conception, one convenient to its own increasing ambition to master reality. At the same time, the spectacle of Nature was supposedly something one could reproduce: knowledge and imitation set themselves up as mutuaI guarantors.

The idea of imitation presupposed that beneath the appearance of things, but basic to them, there lay the same "depth," some indubitable truth, led to primarily by the sciences and more closely represented in art, to the extent that these representations systematized their reproductions of reality and recognized the legitimacy of its aesthetic. Thus, the revolution in perspective in paintings from the beginnings of the Quattrocento was conceived of as moving toward this depth.

Against this tendency a baroque "rerouting" emerged and thrived. Baroque art was a reaction against the rationalist pretense of penetrating the mysteries of the known with one uniform and conclusive move. A baroque shudder, via this rerouting, set out to convey that alI knowledge is to come and that this is what makes it of value. Baroque techniques, moreover, would favor "expansion" over "depth."

From PATHS — Dictate, Decree

Baroque derangement and the guarantee provided by scientific rigor: just yesterday these were the counterpoises of our movement (our balan, our surge, our momentum) toward totalité-monde. But the baroque no longer constitutes a derangement, since it has turned into a "natural" expression of whatever scatters and comes together. The age of classicisms (of deepening an internal unity, raised to the dimensions of a universal, itself postulated) is past, no doubt, for aIl cultures. It remains to make the network of their convergences work, or to untangle it. It remains to study those cultures that have not had time, before coming into planetary contact (or conflict), to realize "their own" classicism. Are their powers not impeded as they come to the meeting? Then again, what shall we say about composite cultures, whose composition did not result from a union of "norms" but, rather, was built in the margins with aIl kinds of materials that by their very nature were exceptions to the patience of the rule, to be thrust headlong into the world by necessity, oppression, anguish, greed, or an appetite for adventure?

The baroque is the favored speech of these cultures, even if henceforth it belongs to all. We call it baroque, because we know that confluences always partake of marginality, that classicisms partake of intolerance, and that, for us, the substitute for the hidden violence of these intolerant exclusions is the manifest and integrating violence of contaminations. 

3. Naomi Klein — Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World 

From THE FAR RIGHT MEETS THE FAR OUT

Fitness and alternative health subcultures have long mixed with fascist and supremacist movements. In the United States, early fitness and bodybuilding enthusiasts were also enthusiastic about eugenics, and the prospect of breeding for what they saw as a superior human form. Nazi propaganda was crowded with images of young men hiking, and Hitler was convinced that “natural” food was central to the success of the Reich (though his vegetarianism appears to have been somewhat exaggerated). The Nazi Party was riven with health fads and extreme occult beliefs, which were all marshaled in the project of building an Aryan super race of godlike men. Put another way, the entire mission of building a supposedly golden race had an occult quality, which is why it merged so easily with New Age health fads and various naturalist fetishes.

After the horrors of the Second World War, the fascist/fitness/New Age alliance broke apart. When the New Age experienced its next big wave of popularity, in the 1960s, it was firmly associated with hippies, environmentalism, and the Beatles studying transcendental meditation. Now, however, it seemed as if the movement’s older, supremacist roots were reasserting themselves. 

From UNSHAKABLE ETHNIC DOUBLE — “Look Over There!”

" The failed Russian Revolution of 1905 was a particularly tragic case. In January of that year, workers and peasants across the Russian empire staged a wave of strikes and revolts, including inside the military, challenging the monarchy and the rule of Nicholas II. The revolution was led by a multiethnic and diverse alliance, with one of its key factions being the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist party with tens of thousands of members and hundreds of local councils and defense militias that was particularly powerful in Poland and Ukraine. One of the Bund’s core principles was doi’kayt, or “hereness”—the idea that Jews belonged where they lived, in what was known as “the pale of settlement, ” and should fight for greater rights and increased justice as Jews and as workers, alongside non-Jewish members of their class. They should not have to place their hopes in a far- off Jewish homeland, as the early Zionists had begun to argue in that same period. Nor should they have to flee to North America, as hundreds of thousands of German and Eastern European Jews had already felt forced to do. Doi’kayt proclaimed that Bundists would stay here — and make here better. "

4. Jasbir K. Puar The Right to Maim — Debility, Capacity, Disability 

From: Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State —The Queer Politics of Reproduction in Palestine/Israel

“The claims of pinkwashing are often seen as plausible when rendered through an LGBT rights discourse that resonates within North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope as a dominant mea­sure­ment of teleological pro­gress. These claims make far less sense in the “­ Middle East, ” for example, where ­ there is a healthy skepticism about the universalizing of lgbt rights discourses and where knowledge of the complexities of sexualities in the region is far more nuanced. Additionally, in some senses Israel is a pioneer of homonationalism, as its par­tic­u­lar position at the crosshairs of settler colonialism, occupation, and neoliberalist accommodationism creates the perfect storm for the normalization of homo­ sexuality through national belonging. The homonationalist history of Israel illuminates a burgeoning of lgbt rights and increased mobility for gays and lesbians during the concomitant increased segregation and decreased mobility of Palestinian populations, especially post-­ Oslo. I have detailed this point at greater length elsewhere, but to quickly summarize: the advent of gay rights in Israel begins around the same time as the first intifada, with the 1990s known as Israel’s “gay de­cade” brought on by the legalization of homo­sexuality in the Israeli Defense Forces, workplace anti-discrimination provisions, and numerous other legislative changes.The IDF becomes a notable site of homo-nationalist distinction in relation to other countries in the “­Middle East, ” as “Only in Israel” can “Gay Officers ServeTheir Country.”

The financial, military, affective, and ideological entwinement of U.S. and Israeli settler colonialisms, and the role of the United States more generally, should also not be minimized when evaluating why pinkwashing appears to be an effective discursive strategy. The United States and Israel are the greatest beneficiaries of homonationalism in the current global geopolitical order, as homonationalism operates to manage difference on the scalar registers of the internal, territorial, and global. Moreover, pinkwashing is an ideological and economic solicitation directed to the United States—­ Israel’s greatest financial supporter internationally—­ and to Euro-American gays who have the po­liti­cal capital and financial resources to invest in Israel. Thus, pinkwashing’s unconscious appeal to U.S. gays is produced through the erasure of U.S. settler colonialism enacted in the tacit endorsement of Israel’s occupation of Palestine” 

5. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes — The Light that Failed

 From STRAINS OF IMITATION

“[…] and even more importantly, we should separate the imitation of means from the imitation of goals. We call the former borrowing rather than imitation. A classic formulation of this distinction was articulated by the great economic sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century that the Japanese had borrowed ‘the industrial arts’ of the West but not the West’s ‘spiritual outlook’ or its ‘principles of conduct and ethical values’. Borrowing technical means does not affect identity, at least not in the short term, while imitating moral ends cuts deeper and can initiate a much more radically transformative process, veering close to a ‘conversion experience’. In rebuilding their societies after 1989, Central Europeans strove to replicate the lifestyles and moral attitudes which they observed in the West. The Chinese, by way of contrast, have taken a path not unlike the one identified by Veblen, adopting Western technologies to drive economic growth and boost the prestige of the Communist Party for the explicit purpose of resisting the siren song of the West.

The imitation of moral ideals, unlike the borrowing of technologies, makes you resemble the one you admire but simultaneously makes you look less like yourself at a time when your own uniqueness and keeping faith with your group are at the heart of your struggle for dignity and recognition. The prevailing cult of innovation, creativity and originality at the core of liberal modernity means that, even for the inhabitants of economically successful countries such as Poland, the project of adopting a Western model under Western supervision feels like a confession of having failed to escape Central Europe’s historical vassalage to foreign instructors and inquisitors.

This self-contradictory request to be both an original and a copy was bound to be psychologically stressful. A feeling of being treated disrespectfully was also fomented by what can be reasonably identified as the central irony of post-communist democracy-promotion in the context of European integration: the Central and East European countries ostensibly being democratized were compelled, in order to meet the conditions for EU membership, to enact policies formulated by unelected bureaucrats from Brussels and international lending organizations.”