Ie.talks: Manuela Boatca (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)

Creolizing the Modern. European Entanglements of Coloniality and Inter-Imperialityä

Seminarraum SG2
Sensengasse 3/1
1090 Wien

Mittwoch, 25. März 2026, 16:15 - 17:45

Presentation by Manuela Boatca (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) followed by discussion, chaired by Franziska Müller (Department of Development Studies) World-systems and decolonial perspectives fasten their analysis on the constitutive relation between European colonial expansion and capitalism. The overwhelming scholarly spotlight on the Americas as the primary arena where these processes took place leaves processes occurring in the East of Europe and in the context of imperial rather than colonial dynamics largely unaccounted for. The talk draws on the case of Transylvania in order to account for dialectical developments in Europe and to include the imperial alongside the colonial dimensions of capitalism. It proposes a detailed engagement with Transylvania’s inter-imperial history at the crossroads of Eurasian empires and Western colonial powers as one of the many necessary contributions to the larger project of creolizing the prevailing category of the modern as featured in and endlessly reproduced through dominant conceptions of modern Europe, modern empires, the modern nation-state, and the modern world-system.

Antrittsvorlesung, Public Lecture

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:15:00 +0100