GAPP Reading Club

In July 2020, GAPP launched an online reading club, Filling the (reading) GAPP: Voices from the Periphery. Bringing together a group of academics from the Global South, we are interested in conceptualising and developing new theoretical and methodological frameworks that will take a comparative study of the post-colonial and the post-socialist spaces in new direction.

Rather than discrete worlds, these spaces are entangled in shared and complex histories of Marxism, of the legacies of party-state systems and of planned economies. They are also ‘Non-Western’ and usually ‘Non-Aligned’ spaces, which briefly found political expression in the BRICS alliance. The question of reform(s), emancipation and peripheralization will be prioritised.

We are interested in exploring questions of heterogeneity and particularity, convergence and disjuncture, difference and hierarchy, as well as temporality within these two spaces.

The Club will have three meetings in 2021, once in every two months. Each session will have a general topic while the discussion will be organized around one particular book, referencing to relevant readings will be strongly encouraged. A session will be an hour long. Anyone is welcome to join!

Topics (and books) for 2021

I Introducing the Posts-: Post-socialism meets Post-colonialism

Book: Mark R. Beissinger & Crawford Young. 2002. Beyond State Crisis: Post-Colonial Africa and Post-Colonial Eurasia in Comparative Perspective. Woodrow Wilson Canter Press.

 

II The Non-Aligned Movement at 60: lessons learned and the way forward

Book: Vijay Prashad. 2007. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. The New Press.

 

III The never-ending transition: position of the ‘eternal peripheries’ in the neoliberal global order

Book: William I. Robinson. 2014. Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. Cambridge University Press.

 

Members of the Reading Club:

Dr. Ivor Chipkin (GAPP)

Prof. Radmila Nakarada (University of Belgrade)

Prof. Firoz Khan (Stellenbosch University)

Prof. Paul Stubbs (The Institute of Economics, Zagreb)

 

Facilitator: Dr. Jelena Vidojević (GAPP)