Public Narratives of Decolonization and Racial (In)Justice in Central ...

“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.” --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.” --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.” --Manuela Boatcă, Freiburg University, Germany, co-author of Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires 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. How do these narratives activate the present political agenda as well as the historical pasts? How are they understood and expressed by professionals and by actors from the lay digital audience? The volume presents provocative cases of political and cultural debates from Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. Individual contributions employ an interdisciplinary framework, discussing 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. 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.