Manuela Boatcă: Creolizing Transylvania. Between European Interimperiality and Global Coloniality

The talk counteracts the notion of Europe as a geographically, culturally, religiously, and racially coherent entity by focusing on one of Europe's subaltern formations, Transylvania. Its location on the European continent, yet in the rural periphery of several of Europe's imperial powers, renders it a unique candidate for the larger decolonial project of "creolizing Europe." Originally coined to describe the processes of racial, cultural and linguistic mixing in the Caribbean, the term creolization has increasingly been defined as a mode of transformation premised on the unequal power relations that characterize modernity/coloniality—dispossession, colonization, and enslavement. As employed here, creolization involves the rethinking, reframing, and creative recomposition of categories structuring sociological analysis —from Europe to Transylvania, and from the modern to the comparative method. It necessarily involves the creolization of theory by retrieving subaltern histories and experiences in both colonial and imperial situations and reinscribing them into social theory. Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is the author of From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis (Leske+Budrich, 2003), Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism (Routledge 2016), Laboratoare ale modernității. Europa de Est și America Latină în (co)relație (IDEA, 2020) and co-author, with Anca Parvulescu, of Creolizing the Modern.Transylvania Across Empires (Cornell UP 2022).