In the context of the war in Ukraine today, there emerge more and more calls to build solidarities across Eastern Europe and those from formerly colonized countries, a move which mainly comes from those positioned in the east of Europe. At the same time, imperial borders distinguish between “relatively European, relatively civilized” bodies and “non-European, not-yet civilized others” fleeing war, which are not meant to converge. It is at the razor edges that separate these bodies that allow us to sense stratified subalternities part of longer histories of production of difference and shifting boundaries of non/whiteness. Rather than flattening difference and romanticizing solidarities across subalternities, we urge for a relational lens which is attentive to the underpinning uneven processes producing these separations. Thus, rather than simply “applying” postcolonial theory to the analysis of Europe once again or “including” the European East to the conversation, we inter-reference salient forms of violence and subject positions within, between, across, and against empires. We call it “Souths and Easts as method”. Inter-referencing is for us an inter-referencing of material histories of violence and survival in the interstices of peripheral worlds, where souths and easts not as geographical metaphors, but the material and everyday conditions that produce unequal regions and bodies.

Our presentation draws on a forthcoming edited volume “Souths and Easts as Method: Europeanisation as Violence” (Manchester University Press), which brings scholars across Europe’s and non-Europe's multiple Easts and Souths in the attempt to open political horizons without the SpaceTime of Europe.

This paper is part of a larger project based on the idea that comparing cultural products related to migrations across different types of borders can help us recognize some of their common dynamics, such as the complex relationship between Eurocentrism and ideas of belonging. While decoloniality has traditionally been understood to relate to Latin American contexts, a significant number of works of creative nonfiction recently published in Germany and in the United States share what we may call a decolonial approach to belonging. Decoloniality here serves as the paradigm and the practice that allow the writer and the reader to re-create and produce knowledge. This holds particularly true for groups that have historically sought inclusion and at the same time have resisted hegemonic Western narratives of belonging, such as people of Central and Eastern European descent in Germany, and people who identify as Chicanx or Mexican-American in the United States. Bringing these experiences into conversation with one another—experiences of people living in the Global North whose identities are deeply rooted in the Global East and the Global South—adds to an essential dialogue on the dynamics, effects, and most importantly the limits of Western Eurocentrism, as the decolonial elements of these narratives directly challenge and undermine the constructs upon which Eurocentrism is built.

Creative Nonfiction—such as memoir—has an undeniable public reach far beyond academic circles, thus carrying real transformative potential. It can perform as an act of re(imagining) citizenship and create spaces of belonging. This presentation juxtaposes renowned Chicana intellectuals Sandra Cisneros’s A House of My Own (Knopf, 2016), María Hinojosa’s Once I Was You (Atria, 2019), and Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2019) with Dmitrij Kapitelman’s Eine Formalie in Kiew (Hanser Berlin, 2021), Emilia Smechowski’s Wir Strebermigranten (Hanser Berlin, 2017), and Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft (Luchterhand, 2019), of Ukrainian-, Polish-, and Bosnian-German background, respectively. It seeks to tease out some of the decolonial elements that problematize dominant narratives that seek to exclude, invalidate, and/or erase particular experiences and identities as Other.

Using decolonial approaches for academic practice---in analysis as well as in teaching these texts and contexts—explicitly affects knowledge production and transmission, and is thus conducive to the epistemic reconstitution at the center of decolonial thought.