The Complicated Selves of Transcolonialism: The Triangulation of Identities in the Alternative Peripheries of Global Post/Colonialism

Abstract

The paper argues that twentieth-century (post)coloniality was a multi-centric and poly-peripheral space and as such calls for a different, more complex geo-cultural and historical portrayal than the one provided by mainstream postcolonialism. Conventional postcolonialist critiques are ill equipped to address the historical interactions and the conceptual migrations between the discourses of the Second and Third Worlds, or with their “dual dependencies” because, with notable exceptions, postcolonialist studies only focus on the relations between the West and its (former) colonies. I argue that Eastern Europe and the (post)colonies of the West are alternative peripheries in the convoluted field of global (post)colonialism and that there were protracted two-way exchanges between these subaltern discourses in their interconnected experiences of (post)colonialism. This interplay, together with their vacillation between the two power centres during the Cold War, complicated not only the global power games, but also the processes of (post)colonial identity formation, and the ideological genealogies of repression and resistance.

Keywords

• postcolonialism
• postcommunism
• traveling theory
• soviet imperialism
• world-system theory