Decolonizing Eastern Europe: A conversation with Zoltán Ginelli and Piotr Puchalski

CEU Review of Books Podcast Series

In this episode of the CEURB Podcast, Andrea Talabér (Managing Editor, CEURB) sat down with Zoltán Ginelli and Piotr Puchalski to talk about their research on decolonizing Eastern European history. Among other topics we discussed historical relations between colonialism and race in Central and Eastern Europe, the contradiction between modernity and preserving national identity, and the politicization of coloniality and race in the region.

Zoltán is a critical geographer and global historian contracted by the Ludovika University of Public Service. To learn more about his research you can visit his website. He is co-director of the Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy Research Group (Facebook), and member of the scientific advisory board of the MANIFEST artistic project on transatlantic slavery. Currently, he is working on a book for Cambridge University Press with James Mark and Péter Apor on the global histories of Hungarian race and coloniality.

Zoltán’s recent publications include: “’Hungarian Indians’: race and colonialism in Hungarian ‘Indian play’” in Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race, edited by Catherine Baker, Bogdan C. Iacob, Anikó Imre and James Mark, published by Manchester University Press; “Transcoloniality” in Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation, edited by Ana Vilenica with contributing editors Zoltán Ginelli and Olivera Jokić, published by New Media Center _kuda.org; and “The Travelogue: Imagining Spaces of Encounter—Travel Writing Between the Colonial and the Anti-Colonial in Socialist Eastern Europe, 1949–1989”, co-authored with Eric Burton, James Mark, and Nemanja Radonjić, in Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular: Second-Third World Spaces in the Cold War, edited by Kristin Roth-Ey and published by Bloomsbury.

You can find Zoltán on X, Facebook and Instagram, and his social media group Decolonizing Eastern Europe (Facebook, X).

Piotr is an Associate Professor of History at the University of the National Education Commission, Krakow. Piotr’s publications include his book: Poland in a Colonial World Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918–1939 published by Routledge. His new research can be sampled in his most recent article: Directed by Moscow? Communist Poland’s Policies in Decolonial Africa, 1918/1945-1964.

Piotr can also be found on X.

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