Book review: Staying with doubt, not yet dancing with Azis

Unequal Under Socialism: Race, Women, and Transnationalism in Bulgaria is a powerful guide and companion at a time when the search for emancipatory alternatives to the project of both state socialism and neoliberal capitalism is ever more urgent. It is extremely timely as it comes at a moment when keeping the focus on forms of violence that derive from both Soviet/Russian and Western imperialisms is a challenge to contemporary scholarship. It is here that Todorova’s contribution speaks from a feminist standpoint cautioning against romanticized visions of projects built around socialist and collectivist forms of economic and cultural production, pointing to gender and racial inequalities that remain unaddressed. This critique is especially directed to Marxist, materialist, and class analysis within Western academic research and education in response to the crisis of neoliberalism. However, there is a missed opportunity to dialogue with recent works of transnational feminist scholarship and collectives to whom questions of expropriation, ongoing slavery and economic inequality as part of global capitalism are already central to understanding contemporary conditions of gendered and racialized forms of violence. Making questions of race central to the enquiry about women under state socialism, Todorova introduces the notion of ‘socialist racialism’. Here, she traces affinities between modern Eurocentric epistemologies and Leninist and Marxist ideologies and socialist state formations. In situating Bulgaria as a location for such relational thinking, this examination is part of a larger recent effort to situate the Balkans and Southeast Europe within the episteme of racism and whiteness. The most exciting provocation of the book is Todorova’s relation with both socialism and capitalism as marked by a sense of doubt: an emotional and cognitive awareness that any economic, social and political formation has to be continuously critiqued, examined, distrusted and replaced (p. 5). This is the doubt that leads to unease with Marxism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism and seeks to ‘transcend these modern Eurocentric ideologies that have arrested our imaginations and politics’ (p. 5). ‘Postsocialist feminist doubt’ 1165859 EJW0010.1177/13505068231165859European Journal of Women’s StudiesBook reviews book-review2023