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By Dorota Kołodziejczyk On September 23rd-24th, 2019, the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung held a two-day workshop, Postcolonial Critique: Latin American and Eastern European Perspectivations (America South – European East), convened by Clara Frysztacka, Jennifer Ramme, and Pablo Valdivia, all affiliated with the Viadrina Institute for European Studies at Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder. The event was pitched as “explorative” because of the questions posed to participants in the invitation and the program of short presentations to trigger intensive brainstorming.The purpose of the seminar was to explore the potential of using knowledge related to the problems of coloniality and postcolonial thought between Latin America and Eastern Europe. The participants shared the proposition to use “postcolonial thinking as a variety of located critical perspectives on the replicating mechanisms of power and power asymmetries in globalised modernity.”Through such an exploratory venture, the organizers sought to create amultidisciplinary and intersectional space of critical dialogue on the regimesof knowledge and the circuits of intellectual and artistic labour from the regionalperspectives of Latin America and Eastern Europe. The two regions, each in theirown way, remain entangled in various consequences of colonial modernity that bearupon societies, cultures and politics, both in a longhistorical perspective and in the immediate global present. These consequences,in turn, are manifest in the processes of identity construction, in politicaldiscourses, and in collective memory archives and their uses. The organizers made the point that it was an explorative workshop whose structureencouraged the development of a shared acumen in putting the two regions,Eastern Europe and Latin America, in a dialogue. The somewhat ambiguouslocation of postcolonial studies, both as critique of the West’s imperialhistory, its contemporary residues and consequences, and, at the same time,part of the theoretical industry at the very heart of western academia, becamethe common grounds for discussing the potential gains and misgivings ofdeveloping a postcolonial framework that considers the relatedness of LatinAmerican and Eastern European modernities. The conveners gathered a richly diverse array ofscholars, artists and cultural activists whose work engages with questions of peripheralityand decoloniality, the dialogue with power centres, conceived of as both institutionsand intellectual markets, and, last but not least, the mutual influences ofart, intellectual thought, and cultural activism in creating localities: thatis, places, communities, and both human and non-human environments.[1] The workshop hosted several artists of internationalrenown: Esther Shalev-Gerz, known for her contribution to the role and place ofart in public spaces; Antonio Eligio Fernández (Tonel) – artist, critic andcurator whose work includes an ironic takeover of the Cold-War iconography, andJoulia Strauss, who introduces herself as the Mari “the political activistsupercat shaman artist in Athens,” originally from the Mari El indigenousnational minority at the outskirts of the Ural Mountains. In a special sessiondedicated to this artistic work, entitled “Artist Talk: »De-centering theGaze: Artistic Strategies for a Decolonial Future«”, and moderated by SaraAlonso Gomez, the artists presented their art as a critical intervention intosocial and cultural constructs: &#160;as a searchinto places of (non)memory (Esther Shalev-Gerz), as ironic takeovers andquotations across the borders of the Cold War divide and its aftermaths(Tonel), or as a tour-de-force cosmopolitics of indigeneity in a performancetitled “Songs of a Transindigenous Environmental Front” (Joulia Strauss).&#160; [caption id="attachment_23470" align="alignnone" width="2560"] Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández), Limited Engagement, 2014.[/caption]Bringingtogether these artists with scholars resulted in a lively and cogent exchangeof approaches communicated in multifarious languages of scholarship andintellectual thought. The uniquely multilingual – international and transmedial– dialogue made it possible to canvass a tapestry of transregional reflection, richin detail, in which postcolonial/decolonial thought displayed a strong localimagery and power to interrogate global theories and knowledge constructs. Puttingthe two regions in a dialogue together through postcolonial discourse, the convenerssought not so much to find similarities between them, as, more pertinently tothe leading question of knowledge location and transfer, “to discuss EasternEurope and Latin America as specific loci of postcolonial critique andknowledge production. The workshop aims to break through the hegemonic logic oftheoretical transfer, expressed through the canonization of postcolonialtheories, languages and scenes” [from the programme]. It sought to speak throughpostcolonial discourse, but also, as the workshop’s development attested, torespond to it critically from contextualised local sites of knowledge throughthe lenses of decolonial thought, world-systems theory, and post-dependencestudies.The premises of the workshop, i.e. the search for the locatednessof knowledge and its response to power centres, understood as both politicalsites and also as the academic “industry”, recurred in the 3 sections of the workshop, which were structured inshort kick-off presentations and follow-up comments and discussions. In thisformat, artists and academics pursued the related questions of asymmetric powerrelations and the potential of the concepts of colonial, postcolonial anddecoloniality in Section 1: Arenas and Scenes of the Colonial: Latin-American andEast-European Paradigms (kicked off by DanijelaMajstorovic, Redi Koobaak, Victor Viviescas and Sara Alonso Gómez, discussionby Claudia Kraft and Fernando Nina); the concept and usability of the postcolonialdispositive in Section 2: What Defines aPostcolonial Dispositive? Contextualized Critique (kicked off by AlexeiPenzin, Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Teresa Kulawik, Emilian Ortega, comment by RuthSonderegger); and the positionality of the (American) South – (European) East inSection 3: (American) South – (European)East:&#160; Shared Positionalities, Risks andPotentials (kicked off by Janis Nalbadidacis, Clara Frysztacka, Pablo Valdivia, Jennifer Ramme andFernando Nina, discussion by Manuela Boǎtca). The sections proved to be an experiment which yieldedvery interesting results. The conveners’ idea of “perspectivation” – of applying thetheoretical formulas of postcolonialism and decolonial studies to themultifarious disciplinary narratives of the two regions – allowed participants tofind many intersecting areas of interest for scholars working on the tworegions. For example, the potential of visual and verbal arts to criticallyintervene into political discourses and produce alternative social, culturaland political imaginaries; indigenous and marginalised positionalities in artand culture with their hybridising and decentring work; the problem ofdevelopmentalism and modernization discourses in semi-peripheral regions; therelated problem of transition models taken or not taken by post-socialistcountries and the sense of insufficiency of own voice in these processes; theaftermaths of changes in political and economic systems on societies;semi-peripheral/off-centre regions and their position in globalised modernity; thecontentious legacies of Marxism and its changing appraisal, the aftermaths of statesocialism and postcommunist transitions and how they resurface in the currentrise of right-wing populism, and many more. Thepostcolonial framework served as a space of theoretical reference working as anexploratory toolkit rather than as a matrix for abstracting the regionalspecificities into a theoretical speculation. Thus, the comparability of thetwo regions was elaborated as a shared reflection on semi-peripheral anddecolonial spaces in global modernity and on respective concrete issues arisingfrom these locations, rather than similarities yielded through the postcolonialmatrix. Also, the locatedness of scholarly and theoretical reflection allowedfor an interesting interrogation of postcolonial paradigms, encouraging ashared acumen between the two regions.Oneof the most interesting conclusions of the concluding roundtable was thevulnerability of theoretical discourse to the uses, or, rather, abuses inpolitical sphere. Postcolonialism is especially susceptible to political interceptions.It has served to describe the ambiguous attitudes between Western and Eastern(postsocialist/postcommunist) Europe and the inequal relations between thesetwo parts of Europe. This particular use of postcolonialism was also turnedinto a very effective weapon of right-wing populism in Poland and Hungary, aswell as Russia as Turkey. Postcolonial terms may serve to legitimatenationalist discourse, allowing it to be disguised as a struggle against theongoing colonisation of Europe. The theme of art’s immanent disobediencediscussed throughout the workshop encouraged explorations into the immediacy ofart’s intervention into public spaces and discourses, and aesthetics’ criticalpower. Theexperimental structure of kick-off introductions to a problem, which were thensubsequently discussed in a constellation of regional and disciplinaryperspectives, proved not only productive but also extremely invigorating, tothe extent that the conveners had some difficulties closing the day ofdiscussions. Likewise, the closing session was open by Joulia Strauss’ summarisingpresentation, in which she performed an aleatory replication of the criticaland theoretical terms that recurred during the workshop’s discussions. This bothironic, yet fond Dada-style recording of the whole course of the workshop was amasterful feat of an impromptu critical artistic cosmopolitanism bestexpressing the spirit of the conference and the results of its two-day work. [1] The participatingacademics represented a broad spectrum of disciplines and affiliations: ManuelaBoǎtca, Professor of Sociology with a focus on macrosociologyat the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg; Clara Frysztacka, historian, Postdoctoral Researcherat Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder; Claudia Kraft, Professor ofContemporary History at the University of Vienna; Redi Koobak, PostdoctoralResearcher at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen;Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies,University of Wrocław, Director of the Postcolonial Studies Center, co-founderand board member of the Post-Dependence Studies Center research network; TeresaKulawik, Professor of Gender Studies, School of Culture and Education,Södertörn University; Danijela Majstorović, Professor of English Linguisticsand Cultural Studies, English Department, the University of Banja Luka; JanisNalbadidacis, Doctoral Candidate at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; FernandoNina, Research Associate at the Chair for Romance Languages at Heidelberg,Guest Professor at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (Ecuador), Universidadde Antioquia Medellín (Colombia), Universidade Federal Do Rio Grande Do Sul inPorto Alegre (Brazil), Universidad de Granada (Spain) and Universidad Nacionalde Educadores (Ecuador); Emilian Ortega y Feili, PhD in Romance Philology and Culture,Universität Heidelberg; Alexei Penzin, Reader in Philosophy and Art Theory atthe University of Wolverhampton, and Research Associate at the Institute ofPhilosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Jennifer Ramme, Faculty ofSocial and Cultural Sciences at Europa-Universität Viadrina/CollegiumPolonicum, member of the Institute for European Studies (IFES); RuthSonderegger, Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetic Theory at the Academy ofFine Arts, Vienna; Pablo Valdivia, PhD in Romance Literature Europa-UniversitätViadrina; and Víctor Viviescas, Professor at theUniversidad Nacional de Colombia and Director of Teatro Vreve – Proyectoteatral, Bogotá.Dorota Kołodziejczyk is Assistant Professor of the Institute of English Studies, Wrocław University. She is Director of the institute's Postcolonial Studies Center. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, postcolonial literature, novel genres, theory and history, comparative literature, translation studies, and disability studies.Citation: Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Towards a Locatedness of Postcolonial Knowledge: Report from the Exploratory Workshop “Postcolonial Critique”, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional  Research, 16.03.2020, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/23464.