Bridging postcoloniality, postsocialism, and “race” in the age of Brexit

In this interview, conducted over two rounds in August 2019 and January 2020, post-Cold War historian and cultural studies scholar Catherine Baker reflects on how she situates her work within the growing literature on intersections between postcoloniality and postsocialism, and the commitment to centering a lens of ‘race’ in postcolonial/postsocialist studies that drove her, in an environment of rising ‘xeno-racism’ in the UK, to revisit the theoretical standpoints of her previous work in the project that became Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (2018). The interview continues by exploring how a transnational feminist ethics has influenced her positionality as a white Western and Anglophone woman working at a university in the Global North/West, and the prospects of feminists fighting for a future while having to fight for the recent past not to be erased.