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Join the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and the Centering the Global Periphery Cluster at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies for a graduate student luncheon with Manuela Boatcă on the topic “Creolizing Knowledge: The East of some Europe, the Latinity of one America”.
Presenter: Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has a degree in English and German languages and literatures and a PhD in sociology. She was Visiting Professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro in 2007/08 and Professor of Sociology of Global Inequalities at the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2015. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In 2018 she was awarded an ACLS collaborative fellowship alongside literary scholar Anca Parvulescu (Washington University in St. Louis, USA), for a comparative project on inter-imperiality in Transylvania. The resulting co-authored book, titled “Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires” is available for purchase here.
Abstract: The project of creolization involves the rethinking, reframing, and creative recomposition of the received categories structuring our disciplines—from Europe to the Americas, from the modern to the global. The invention of Latin America as “New Romania” (Nouvelle Romania, a linguistic and cultural sphere of influence) was an ideological move. Through it, France, which had lost its most prized colonial possession in the Caribbean after the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804 and had been forced to sell Louisiana to the United States as a result, tried to maintain political control in the American colonies and thus partake of coloniality. In the process, Latinity was gradually displaced from the center of Christianity and increasingly equated with Catholicism. Yet modern nations in the European East claimed allegiance with classical empires—an attempt at trans-imperial negotiation in a world-system increasingly dominated by West European colonial powers. Creolizing knowledge is discussed here as a way of retrieving the claims of peripheral regions in both colonial and imperial situations to shaping the categories we employ—"Eastern" Europe, "Latin" America—and the legacies they bespeak.
Dr. Boatcă will also give a talk entitled "Unequal Europes: Coloniality, Interimperiality and Otherness" at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies on Monday, November 14. More information is available here. Her recent book with Anca Parvulescu "Creolizing the Modern"
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