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

• Published in: Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 63 - 83
• Main Author: Stefanescu, Bogdan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cluj-Napoca Babeș-Bolyai University 01.07.2022; Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai; Faculty of Letters, UBB; Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
• Subjects: 20th century; Alliances; Cold War; Colonialism; Communism; Comparative Study of Literature; Cultural history; Developing countries; History; History of Communism; Identity formation; Ideology; International organizations; International trade; Language and Literature Studies; LDCs; Marxism; Negotiation; Oppression; Politics; Post-Communist Transformation; Postcolonialism; postcommunism; soviet imperialism; Studies of Literature; System theory; traveling theory; War; world-system theory; Eastern Europe; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics > USSR; comparative cultural studies; alternative peripheries; transcolonialism; postcolonialism; postcommunism; traveling theory; worldsystem theory; triangulation of identity; Soviet imperialism
• ISSN: 2457-8827; 2457-8827
• DOI: 10.24193/mjcst.2022.13.04

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. This paper first illustrates the historical interpenetration between the (post)colonial histories of these alternative peripheries, then looks at how this convoluted network of discourses and encounters forced the colonial subalterns of the capitalist West and the Soviet Union to generate cultural self-images by means of a strenuous process of triangulation. I contend that colonized subjects negotiated their unstable, ambivalent, and relational positions between a coerced centre, a desired centre, and an alternative periphery. Once we factor in the Cold-War confrontation between the Western and Soviet imperial colossi, we are faced with the hitherto unnoticed reality of transcolonialism which calls for abandoning left-leaning postcolonialist orthodoxy and drawing up a revised, cross-imperial history of oppression and resistance against a complicated and ideologically muddled nexus of colonial relations.