Manuela Boatca

The eastern margins of empire : Coloniality in 19th century Romania

Equating modernization with Westernization has historically been one of the strategies with the help of which the development of entire world regions has been programmatically defined as “catching up with the West”. As a result, structural problems that accounted for incongruities with the postulated model in particular countries were explained (away) as economic, institutional or cultural lags to be overcome by faithful application of development policies mandated by the Euro-American core. Using the example of the clash between Western global designs and Romanian local history both at the end of the 19th century and in the post-socialist era, the epistemological premises of the “European patent on modernity” are examined with respect to their consequences for the conceptualization of modernity in the periphery.

DESIGUALDAD SOCIAL RECONSIDERADA - DESCUBRIENDO PUNTOS CIEGOS A TRAVÉS DE VISTAS DESDE ABAJO

On the basis of arguments put forth by gender studies, dependency/world-system approaches as well as by present-day Latin American postcolonial theories, the paper pleads for a global sociology of social inequality premised on three substantive correctives of the mainstream social inequality research: First, a shift from the focus on the nation-state as sole unit of analysis to a global focus encompassing worldwide center-periphery relations alongside nationwide and regional inequalities and the connections between them; second, a systematic and explicit engagement with the theories of social change implicit in concepts of social inequality and the conclusions entailed for the corresponding definition of modernity and the modern; and third, an emphasis on the dynamics behind the emergence of categories along which inequality structures were historically constructed, i.e., on processes of othering such as gendering, racialization, and ethnicization, rather than static categories such as gender, race, and ethnicity.