Full Description
Kateřina Kolářová's Rehabilitative Postsocialism offers a timely interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of how disability, race, class, and gender operate as ideological tools within the postsocialist Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). Kolářová presents postsocialism as an analytic that can and should be brought to bear to understand cultural politics, economic formations, and state politics through the present day.
Rehabilitative Postsocialism names disability, sexuality, and race as central yet invisible to negotiations of the postsocialist consensus. Drawing from a rich and varied archive, Rehabilitative Postsocialism maps the formation of new structures of inequalities and social imaginaries of wellness, merit, and justice in order to understand current articulations of global disenchantment with democracy, social justice, and solidarity. The book also makes clear that disability, race, and ethnicity continue to circulate in depictions of Eastern Europe as suspended in a chronic developmental "delay." Rehabilitative Postsocialism both situates this positioning within its political and historical formation and offers the analytical tools to challenge its continued deployment.
Contents
Introduction: Rehabilitative Citizenship, the Inarticulate Crip Horizons and the Cruel Optimism of Postsocialist Imaginaries
Chapter 1: The Idea of Civil Society and Lessons in Minority Citizenship
Chapter 2: Sex, Syndromes, and Mixed Feelings
Chapter 3: Intellectual Disability and Rationalities of Chronic Abandonment
Chapter 4: The Inadaptable (Non)Citizen: The Racialized Capital of Abandonment
Chapter 5: Avatars and Gifts of Freedom: Aspirational Exceptionalism and Impossibility of Belonging
Coda: Viral Postsocialisms
Notes
Works Cited
Index
