<\/p>\n
Zhivka Valiavicharska (Pratt Institute, New York)<\/span><\/b><\/h3>\nThe Vegetarian Commune in Proslav (Plovdiv) and the Tolstoyan Communities in Bulgaria<\/b><\/h2>\n![\"Red](\"https:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/D68KfkWUEAUOAZ2.jpg\")
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This paper presents the history of the vegetarian land communes in Bulgaria influenced by the Russian writer and social thinker Lev Tolstoy. Pledging to build a life \u201cwithout the exploitation of one being by another,\u201d their members emphasized connection to land and the environment and practiced horizontal communalism, egalitarian spiritualism, and vegetarianism in conscious opposition to private property and the enclosures of land, against militarism and the use of violence, and against state power and the Church. There were over a dozen communes formed in Bulgaria during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and most of them lasted for only a few years. In this talk I bring into focus the history of a vegetarian land commune founded in 1926 near Plovdiv, Bulgaria, which survived for over thirty years and served as a hub for vegetarian, Tolstoyan, anarchist, and alternative spiritual communities in the country. I present materials from the rich archives of the community and the movements.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nZhivka Valiavicharska<\/b> is a political theorist and art historian working on the social, cultural, and visual histories of twentieth-century Bulgaria and Eastern Europe. She is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, New York, and the author of Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria<\/i> (McGill University Press, 2021).<\/p>\nBook tickets here<\/a><\/h4>\nThis talk is part of a mini-series on \u201cContemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice\u201d, co-organised by Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary UoL) and Neda Genova (University of Warwick). It is supported by the Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at QMUL and the Leverhulme Trust.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n16\u00a0May 2024 \u00a0\u2013\u00a0<\/span><\/b>Senior Common Room, Arts Two, QMUL,<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span>4pm \u2013 6pm<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Raia Apostolova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)<\/span><\/b><\/h3>\nThe <\/b>F<\/span><\/b>ormation and the <\/b>D<\/span><\/b>isintegration of a <\/b>S<\/span><\/b>ocialist <\/b>M<\/span><\/b>igration <\/b>R<\/span><\/b>egime<\/b><\/h2>\n![\"Raia](\"https:\/\/0.academia-photos.com\/2153155\/696226\/16453651\/s200_raia.apostolova.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Raia Apostolova\u2019s talk delves into the formation of a socialist migration regime and its subsequent disintegration during the restoration of capitalism in Bulgaria since the 1990s.<\/p>\n
Starting in the early 1960s and throughout the 1980s, the People\u2019s Republic of Bulgaria welcomed thousands of workers, students, and refugees from postcolonial contexts. Pressured by the processes of decolonization, its internationalist duties as a socialist republic and its critique of capitalist forms of migration, the People\u2019s Republic formed a complex of state and mass structures, institutions, and conceptual fields, where actors with heterogeneous knowledge resources interacted and struggled over the ways in which international migration was to function in a socialist society. The talk focuses on processes in the formation of a socialist migration regime, including an exploration of student- and worker-exchange programs between various postcolonial states and the People\u2019s Republic.<\/p>\n
Restoration of capitalism began with a radical eradication of socialist structures and political rationales coded as a \u201creturn to Europe.\u201d The once \u201cforeign friends\u201d of socialism were quickly turned into \u201cforeign enemies.\u201d Residents from postcolonial countries were forced out of the country en masse in a process of whitening educational institutions and labor markets. Anticommunism became a constitutive grammar of racial domination. The second part of the talk thus explores the disintegration of the socialist migration regime, the integration of western logics into the structures of migration apparatuses and poses the challenge to think through alternatives to the contemporary European forms of migration.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Raia Apostolova<\/b> is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Department \u201cKnowledge Society: Education, Science, and Innovations\u201d, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her current research explores political theories of socialist internationalism and migration developed in the context of socialist and postcolonial encounters, their social effects on international labor and educational relations, and their subsequent eradication from the social fabric following the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe. Among her last publications are: \u201cTheory and process of socialist migration: local enmities and international friendships in the Vietnam-Bulgaria relations (1975-1985),\u201d Labor History<\/i> (2023) and \u201cMoving labor power. Capitalist modes of social reproduction in the gap between fixing and freeing of potential laborers,\u201d Sociological Problems<\/i>(2023) [In Bulgarian].<\/p>\nBook tickets here<\/a><\/h4>\nThis talk is part of a mini-series on \u201cContemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice\u201d, co-organised by Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary UoL) and Neda Genova (University of Warwick). It is supported by the Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at QMUL and the Leverhulme Trust.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
23 May 2024 \u00a0\u2013\u00a0<\/span><\/b>Masaryk Room, 16 Taviton St., UCL-SSEES, 3<\/span>pm \u2013 5pm<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Piro Rexhepi (UCL)<\/span><\/b><\/h3>\nReproductive Racism, Displacement and Resistance in Bulgaria<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"Piro](\"https:\/\/encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com\/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTX9RcMzSdvmuLP-PsDztgQQdf__WBUqHdyGG_NOv8grkJmlQJYMjKM1WCo0J0mOo7COQY&usqp=CAU\")
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<\/p>\n
Piro Rexhepi\u00a0explores how overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes along the Balkan Route reinforce regional racialized relations of power. By bringing the Balkans into the complex interlacing of global racial borders and coloniality, he argues that the spatial integration of post-socialist territories and people in the last three decades into the Euro-Atlantic enclosure serves to both secure its borderlands while also recruiting Eastern European workers as means of tackling the demands for cheap labour and the decline of white demographics. These transformations raise fundamental questions about the nature of enclosures, not only as a contemporary coagulation of a white world walling of colonial-capitalist accumulated wealth within Euro-American spaces through sprawling and inter-connected border carceral regimes around the US\/Mexico crossing, EU\/Mediterranean passage and the Balkan Route, but also as continuities of colonial formations of race bent on bolstering white demographics at its edges.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Piro Rexhepi i<\/strong>s the Alexander Nash fellow in Albanian Studies at the\u00a0UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies 2023. His research focuses on decoloniality, sexuality and Islam. His recent work on racism and borders along the Balkan Refugee Route has been published in a range of mediums in and out of academia including the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Critical Muslims and the Guardian among others. He is the author of White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route, Duke University Press (2022).<\/p>\nBook tickets here<\/a><\/h4>\nThis talk is part of a mini-series on \u201cContemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice\u201d, co-organised by Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary UoL) and Neda Genova (University of Warwick). It is supported by the Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at QMUL and the Leverhulme Trust.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/45\/2023\/07\/Leverhulme-Trust_5zZJoxp.max-400x400-1-300x60.png\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/45\/2023\/07\/cropped-Logo-e1689683242419-300x47.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n
![\"UCL](\"https:\/\/encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com\/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSBdmei9j1m9aDX_QigdK2olFPansujnOU63A&usqp=CAU\")
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![\"University](\"https:\/\/d1yjjnpx0p53s8.cloudfront.net\/styles\/logo-thumbnail\/s3\/0018\/1312\/brand.gif?itok=hLUz5Bz9\")
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<\/p>\n
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\n<\/h2>\nCEREES<\/h3>\nPost-Communist Studies Group<\/h3>\n
____________<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/45\/2024\/02\/Socialism-300x225.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nShape the Conversation<\/h2>\n
To form part of the conversation on Eurasia, participate in our groups and programme of events, or find out how we can support your research, please contact the Centre Director Dr Andy Willimott (a.willimott@qmul.ac.uk<\/a>).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Pitch a new CEREES Group<\/a> \u00a0\/ \u00a0Pitch a new CEREES Screening<\/a> \u00a0\/ \u00a0Pitch a new CEREES Collaboration<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Contemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice 9\u00a0May 2024 \u2013\u00a0\u00a0Senior Common Room, Arts Two, QMUL,\u00a04pm \u2013 6pm Zhivka Valiavicharska (Pratt Institute, New York) The Vegetarian Commune in Proslav (Plovdiv) and the Tolstoyan Communities in Bulgaria This paper presents the history of the vegetarian land communes in Bulgaria influenced by the Russian writer and […] Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":217,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/217"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1741"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1916,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1741\/revisions\/1916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/h2>\n
Zhivka Valiavicharska<\/b> is a political theorist and art historian working on the social, cultural, and visual histories of twentieth-century Bulgaria and Eastern Europe. She is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, New York, and the author of Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria<\/i> (McGill University Press, 2021).<\/p>\n This talk is part of a mini-series on \u201cContemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice\u201d, co-organised by Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary UoL) and Neda Genova (University of Warwick). It is supported by the Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at QMUL and the Leverhulme Trust.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n 16\u00a0May 2024 \u00a0\u2013\u00a0<\/span><\/b>Senior Common Room, Arts Two, QMUL,<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span>4pm \u2013 6pm<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Raia Apostolova\u2019s talk delves into the formation of a socialist migration regime and its subsequent disintegration during the restoration of capitalism in Bulgaria since the 1990s.<\/p>\n Starting in the early 1960s and throughout the 1980s, the People\u2019s Republic of Bulgaria welcomed thousands of workers, students, and refugees from postcolonial contexts. Pressured by the processes of decolonization, its internationalist duties as a socialist republic and its critique of capitalist forms of migration, the People\u2019s Republic formed a complex of state and mass structures, institutions, and conceptual fields, where actors with heterogeneous knowledge resources interacted and struggled over the ways in which international migration was to function in a socialist society. The talk focuses on processes in the formation of a socialist migration regime, including an exploration of student- and worker-exchange programs between various postcolonial states and the People\u2019s Republic.<\/p>\n Restoration of capitalism began with a radical eradication of socialist structures and political rationales coded as a \u201creturn to Europe.\u201d The once \u201cforeign friends\u201d of socialism were quickly turned into \u201cforeign enemies.\u201d Residents from postcolonial countries were forced out of the country en masse in a process of whitening educational institutions and labor markets. Anticommunism became a constitutive grammar of racial domination. The second part of the talk thus explores the disintegration of the socialist migration regime, the integration of western logics into the structures of migration apparatuses and poses the challenge to think through alternatives to the contemporary European forms of migration.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Raia Apostolova<\/b> is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Department \u201cKnowledge Society: Education, Science, and Innovations\u201d, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her current research explores political theories of socialist internationalism and migration developed in the context of socialist and postcolonial encounters, their social effects on international labor and educational relations, and their subsequent eradication from the social fabric following the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe. Among her last publications are: \u201cTheory and process of socialist migration: local enmities and international friendships in the Vietnam-Bulgaria relations (1975-1985),\u201d Labor History<\/i> (2023) and \u201cMoving labor power. Capitalist modes of social reproduction in the gap between fixing and freeing of potential laborers,\u201d Sociological Problems<\/i>(2023) [In Bulgarian].<\/p>\n This talk is part of a mini-series on \u201cContemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice\u201d, co-organised by Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary UoL) and Neda Genova (University of Warwick). It is supported by the Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at QMUL and the Leverhulme Trust.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 23 May 2024 \u00a0\u2013\u00a0<\/span><\/b>Masaryk Room, 16 Taviton St., UCL-SSEES, 3<\/span>pm \u2013 5pm<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Piro Rexhepi\u00a0explores how overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes along the Balkan Route reinforce regional racialized relations of power. By bringing the Balkans into the complex interlacing of global racial borders and coloniality, he argues that the spatial integration of post-socialist territories and people in the last three decades into the Euro-Atlantic enclosure serves to both secure its borderlands while also recruiting Eastern European workers as means of tackling the demands for cheap labour and the decline of white demographics. These transformations raise fundamental questions about the nature of enclosures, not only as a contemporary coagulation of a white world walling of colonial-capitalist accumulated wealth within Euro-American spaces through sprawling and inter-connected border carceral regimes around the US\/Mexico crossing, EU\/Mediterranean passage and the Balkan Route, but also as continuities of colonial formations of race bent on bolstering white demographics at its edges.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Piro Rexhepi i<\/strong>s the Alexander Nash fellow in Albanian Studies at the\u00a0UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies 2023. His research focuses on decoloniality, sexuality and Islam. His recent work on racism and borders along the Balkan Refugee Route has been published in a range of mediums in and out of academia including the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Critical Muslims and the Guardian among others. He is the author of White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route, Duke University Press (2022).<\/p>\n This talk is part of a mini-series on \u201cContemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice\u201d, co-organised by Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary UoL) and Neda Genova (University of Warwick). It is supported by the Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at QMUL and the Leverhulme Trust.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n ____________<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To form part of the conversation on Eurasia, participate in our groups and programme of events, or find out how we can support your research, please contact the Centre Director Dr Andy Willimott (a.willimott@qmul.ac.uk<\/a>).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Contemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice 9\u00a0May 2024 \u2013\u00a0\u00a0Senior Common Room, Arts Two, QMUL,\u00a04pm \u2013 6pm Zhivka Valiavicharska (Pratt Institute, New York) The Vegetarian Commune in Proslav (Plovdiv) and the Tolstoyan Communities in Bulgaria This paper presents the history of the vegetarian land communes in Bulgaria influenced by the Russian writer and […] Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":217,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/217"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1741"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1916,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1741\/revisions\/1916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/cerees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Book tickets here<\/a><\/h4>\n
\n<\/div>\nRaia Apostolova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)<\/span><\/b><\/h3>\n
The <\/b>F<\/span><\/b>ormation and the <\/b>D<\/span><\/b>isintegration of a <\/b>S<\/span><\/b>ocialist <\/b>M<\/span><\/b>igration <\/b>R<\/span><\/b>egime<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nBook tickets here<\/a><\/h4>\n
\nPiro Rexhepi (UCL)<\/span><\/b><\/h3>\n
Reproductive Racism, Displacement and Resistance in Bulgaria<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n
Book tickets here<\/a><\/h4>\n
\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n<\/h2>\n
CEREES<\/h3>\n
Post-Communist Studies Group<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nShape the Conversation<\/h2>\n
Pitch a new CEREES Group<\/a> \u00a0\/ \u00a0Pitch a new CEREES Screening<\/a> \u00a0\/ \u00a0Pitch a new CEREES Collaboration<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"