When: Thursday, May 16, 2024, 4:00 PM - 6:00 PMWhere: Senior Common Room, ArtsTwo Building, Queen Mary University of London, 335 Mile End Road, London, E1 4FQ, Mile End
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A part of a mini-series talk on “Contemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice”, a collaboration between CEREES and the University of Warwick
Raia Apostolova’s talk delves into the formation of a socialist migration regime and its subsequent disintegration during the restoration of capitalism in Bulgaria since the 1990s.
Starting in the early 1960s and throughout the 1980s, the People’s 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’s 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’s Republic.
Restoration of capitalism began with a radical eradication of socialist structures and political rationales coded as a “return to Europe.” The once “foreign friends” of socialism were quickly turned into “foreign enemies.” 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.
Raia Apostolova is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Department “Knowledge Society: Education, Science, and Innovations”, 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: “Theory and process of socialist migration: local enmities and international friendships in the Vietnam-Bulgaria relations (1975-1985),” Labor History (2023) and “Moving labor power. Capitalist modes of social reproduction in the gap between fixing and freeing of potential laborers,” Sociological Problems(2023) [In Bulgarian].
Organisers
Neda Genova (University of Warwick) & Maria Chehonadskih (QMUL)