The East is a delicate matter

This article is Martin Müller’s response to essays and remarks that critically examined the Russian translation of his article “In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South” (Russian Sociological Review. Vol. 19. № 3). The material for the analysis were texts published in the thematic block “The Global East: The Politics of Naming and Knowledge Production” (found in the same issue). The article analyzes these texts according to the standpoint principle, that is, in keeping with the desire to go beyond the dominant social construction of reality in order to understand marginalized groups and regions by giving them a voice. The focus is on the generational differences between the author and his critics, as well as the inevitability of the differences in reactions to the author’s proposal to pay more attention to a region traditionally referred to as post-socialist. Examples of the specific reactions and positions of the critics are given. The author has highlighted the following aspects of the problems associated with the popularization of the concept of the Global East: the non-identity of this concept to post-socialism, the importance of “global” in this concept, the pros and cons of understanding the Global East through the prism of strategic essentialism, and the complex temporality of this concept (“future for the past”).


Introduction
Like children, texts start to escape our schemes as soon as they are born. It is no different with 'In search of the Global East' (Müller 2020a). I wrote it for an audience that, I thought, should yet get to know the East. I wrote for those colleagues who work in and on the Global North and Global South; for those who seek to decolonise, or decentre, academic research across disciplines and who militate for a more 'global' theory beyond the Western European and North American heartland (Anzaldúa 1987;Comaroff and Comaroff 2011;Mignolo 2012;de Sousa Santos 2014;Tuhiwai Smith 1999, by way of example for many others). I am sympathetic with this enterprise -but I also think it needs to be aware of its blindness vis-à-vis what I have called the Global East. This is why I published the English version of 'In search of the Global East' with a journal, Geopolitics, that does not have a regional focus. In short, I did not aim to speak, at least not primarily, to an audience with expertise in the Global East. Yet, our texts have lives of their own -for better and for worse. It turns out, that it was mostly students and scholars from that very East, or working on that East, who felt addressed by 'In search of the Global East'. 1 This is perhaps for the better -after all I am arguing for remaking the geopolitics of knowledge and thinking with, through and from the East, and not just about it. But it is perhaps also for the worse. First, because the article will appear wholly superficial for an audience that is well-versed in many of the debates that I touch on ever so lightly or even ignore altogether. Second, because the conceptual vocabulary is different. Elena Trubina (this issue) puts her finger on this when she writes that 'Global North' and 'Global South' are not established categories in Russian academic discourse. That may lead to misunderstandings.
I therefore need to thank the colleagues whose commentaries are assembled in this issue for their time and generosity in engaging with my work; all the more with a piece of work that was not written with them, as primary readers, in mind. You have helped me further my thinking -and recognise its limits. In the following, I have synthesised five major lines of questioning from the twelve commentaries.

The Global East from where I stand
There is a geopolitics and a body-politics to all knowledge. In other words, all knowledge sits in places and is embodied in subjects, as Donna Haraway (1988) and Walter Mignolo (2002), among others, remind us. It is no different with the project of the Global East. I wrote the piece in question as someone based in Switzerland, with one foot in an Anglophone tradition of scholarship but another firmly planted in German and French as my other principal languages, next to Russian. Texts read differently in different national and regional contexts (on this see Țichindeleanu, this issue). The East in particular, indeed a 'delicate matter' (дело тонкое), tends to always be elsewhere, always east of wherever one is right now: it is something to be displaced ever further to the east. My interlocutors in this journal come from a variety of, often transnational, backgrounds, each with their own Easts, as it were (on this see Bezuglov, this issue): Russia, Kazakhstan, Romania, the United States, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus/Lithuania, France (to name just their current affiliations, with much richer transnational histories behind them). Among us, we present a number of different language traditions -Russian, English, French -each with their own style of writing and constructing an argument.
I also wrote from a particular disciplinary position -as a geographer and urban studies scholar. These are disciplines where an interest in the East is far from guaranteed. My colleagues have trouble locating Ekaterinburg or Sochi on a map, let alone see the relevance of working on such exotic, to them, places. I have not just historians, anthropologists, political scientists and philosophers, but also architects, curators, writers, translators who respond in this journal, a sociological one. Some of their communities may share the predicament of marginality that gave rise to my original article, others may not (see, for example, Rogers, this issue, Golubev, this issue, Sokolovskaya, this issue, Levkin, this issue).
Finally, I wrote as someone belonging to a generation without an active memory of the Cold War and the competition of two systems. I can see the afterlives of that competition, not least inscribed in the materialities of the cities I study and visit, and in the narratives of people, but I have not lived through it. I have grown up in that epoch that scholars call the age of accelerated globalisation from the 1990s (an age that might well be waning as we write). As Usmanova (this issue) remarks, this has shaped my outlook on the world. It has been easier for me to say 'goodbye' to postsocialism and it is perhaps indicative that my article "Goodbye, postsocialism!" (Müller 2019b) first appeared in Russian translation in the Russian student journal DOXA, without my knowing about it (Müller 2019a). It appears to have most resonated with these young students.
I mention my positionality here, because, as Trubina (2020) rightly points out, it has shaped the project of the Global East, as it has also shaped the responses assembled here, each reflecting the authors' own locatedness in place, gender, social networks, cultures, discipline, languages and so on -each of them partial and situated. This forum is then also an experiment in how far a text can travel beyond its place of origin and epistemic community, and what questions it throws up there. This experiment of reading across world regions, disciplines, professions and generations has been successful in so far as my piece appears to speak to all of these colleagues -although in different ways and with different intensity. 2

Why the Global Easts reach beyond post-socialist societies
I insisted in the article that the Global East is an epistemological project that seeks to revision the geopolitics of knowledge, not a place. Yet, there is no escaping from territorialisation if one uses geographical metaphors such as 'East', 'South' and 'North', as Usmanova (this issue) notes. That is true and this diagnosis is, in a sense, both the strength and the weakness also of the term 'Global South', as it signals both a relation and a place. In this unintended invitation to territorialisation, many of the respondents have been eager to pin down where the Global East starts and where it ends for me.
2 I should also mention that some critiques that I would address to myself did not appear in the commentaries, or if so, only marginally. Among those are: the potential limits of articulating an emancipatory project from my particular position, or, in other words, who I can speak for, and with what authority; the limited use I have made of scholarship from the East, and scholarship not published in English, to develop my arguments; and the risk of feeding populist discourses of exceptionalism, nationalism and an 'Eastern' turn (Ginelli 2020; Kudaibergenova 2016; Snochowska-Gonzalez 2012; Уффельманн 2020). Discussing these challenges will be for another time.
Shelekpaev and Chokobaeva (this issue) rightly point out that I only offer a negative definition of the East as that which becomes invisible between North and South.
Since I first wrote 'In search of the Global East', back in 2016 (it took a long time to appear in print), my thinking on what the Global East is has evolved. While I continue to underscore the Global East as primarily an epistemological project (and thus guard against prima facie territorialisation), I have started to speak of the Global Easts in the plural. Why? Because I started to realise that the particular epistemological position that I had established for the post-socialist societies applies also to other societies. Colleagues from China and Iran, and from Turkey and Taiwan have approached me and have confided to me that my diagnosis -not quite North, not quite South -was also apt for 'their' countries. That has led me to refine my definition of the East. For me now the Easts bespeak a larger relation: that of the (former) non-European empires and their colonies 3 to the world. For while terms such as Global North and Global South encompass and problematise primarily the relations of European colonialism, they fail to travel much beyond that relation.
This relation of the (former) non-European empires and their colonies to the world is, of course, grounded in places. There is no escaping that the Global Easts manifest themselves someplace. But I insist that the Global Easts are neither a region (e.g. Levkin, this issue, Sokolovskaya, this issue) nor a civilisational entity or political actor (Makarychev, this issue). This distinguishes the Global Easts from notions of 'Eurasia' (Hann 2016;Choi and Mi 2019), popular in current academic and political discourse, but also from an identification with the 'postsocialist space'. It resonates with notions of the Global East as used by other authors (e.g. Bach and Murawski 2020; Shin, Lees, and López-Morales 2016) that also point us beyond Eurasia and the postsocialist space. In so doing, this notion of the Global Easts is germane to analysing entanglements on the borders of spaces of empire, such as the post-Ottoman and post-socialist imbrications on the Balkan and the post-socialist and current Chinese entanglements in Central Asia. 4

Why the 'Global' in 'Global East' matters
While many respondents have tried to come to terms with the 'East', for me it is perhaps the 'Global' in 'Global East' that carries the greater emphasis. 'Global East' signals a global conversation -with the South, the North, with global elsewheres -and a decentring of who calls the shots in global academia as well as of our sources of theorising.
When I meet colleagues who do not work on the East, I occasionally ask them to name one scholar from the East. Any one. Many do not manage to come up with a single name. After some thought, some will offer Slavoj Žižek. 'The arrow between the global and Eastern Europe remained unidirectional', Zsusza Gille (2010, 15) wrote, 'always from the West or the global as cause to Eastern Europe as effect'. Țichindeleanu (this issue) sums up my contention well: 'The general point here is that the "East has remained unknowable" also because the circuits of Western academia have failed to see these institutions and social processes, their organic actors, and their archives'. And that global theory-building is much poorer for it. I find the text by Paul Wolkenstein (this issue) inspiring in this regard: although he seems to suggest that post-Stalinist architecture is a common thread that could delimit the Global East as a region (with which I would disagree, see above), I think there is a more powerful suggestion transpiring towards the end of his commentary: that of the extraordinary richness of urban and architectural experiments that often receives short shrift in Western accounts. Can one really teach urban planning without making reference to the Soviet or Chinese experiences? Can one understand the US American preference for single-family, privately-owned houses without putting it into relief with Soviet housing policy? Can one teach contemporary urban dynamics without making reference to Dushanbe, Vilnius and Moscow? In other words, would the body of urban studies and planning scholarship not be much richer, if it gave equal consideration to dynamics happening outside the purview of the North and the South?
For me, the Global East is an epistemological project that creates, in the first place, a space for thinking and recognition for what is already there. After all, to quote Shelekpaev and Chokobaeva (this issue), 'drawing original conclusions is not a prerogative of Western scholars' ('оригинальность доводов не является прерогативой западных исследователей'). My point is precisely that there is much excellent research in and on the Global East already that deserves more recognition than it receives; that the East appears like a black hole in global academic debates, not that it is one (as Rogers, this issue, and Golubev, this issue, appear to suggest I claim). If Rogers (this issue) is right and I have much underestimated the field-defining power and global integration of research from the East, I shall be glad. Although a number of recent studies, both quantitative and qualitative, on the absence of the East in global debates and the lack of a subject position from which to speak make me sceptical (Demeter 2018b The argument is not to submit to the Western knowledge architecture, but to change it. This is a necessary move, but also a risky one, as my commentators do not hesitate to remark. The quintessential question boils down to one asked a while ago by black activist and writer Audre Lorde (1984): will the Master's tools be able to dismantle the Master's house? In other words, will critiquing the Master in his language (English) and in his outlets (international journals) change much in Western knowledge architecture? Or will this just become a semi-peripheral move to semi-relevance? Bezuglov (this issue) raises the very real possibility of being exploited -of selling out and being appropriated rather than setting the agenda for conversation. Yet, much of this exploitation in uneven power relationships between East and North is already happening today (on this see Timár 2004). That scholarship from the East goes unnoticed and that Western scholars, once they starting asking similar questions, receive much of the credit is not a new phenomenon. Similar to decolonial efforts (Karkov 2015;Kušić, Lottholz, and Manolova 2019;Țichindeleanu 2013;Тлостанова 2020), the project of the Global East seeks to counter such structural inequalities. But there is no doubt that undoing them will be an arduous task.

Why the Global East as strategic essentialism has benefits -and pitfalls
The goal of a strategic essentialism such as the Global East is to put aside differences, strategically, to make oneself heard in larger conversations and be able to shift frames of references. United we stand. Strategic essentialisms mitigate methodological nationalism and regional nationalism, in which nations or regions become the main frames of reference for academic enquiry. Indeed, there is no shortage of methodological nationalism in the post-socialist states, as Usmanova (this issue) points out.
But there is also a cost to strategic essentialism: that of glossing over internal difference and differentiation. The cost of interrogating the place of the East in the world, and turning the gaze outside, is to neglect the richness, but also the tensions, of what is inside. It is in this way that I understand the responses by Levkin, Sokolovskaya, Golubev (all this issue). 'The East is not invisible in the East itself', writes Țichindeleanu (this issue). And indeed, there are 'Easts of the East', there is internal colonial differentiation, such as between Russia and Central Asia, as Shelekpaev and Chokobaeva (this issue) remind us 5 . I appreciate this stance for its skepticism towards chasing the chimera of globalness and its resolute insistence on first understanding and appreciating things much closer to home. It perhaps allows knowledge and cultural creation in a more autonomous way, without having to follow the latest fad. But there is a risk in this: that of an attitude of 'we are just fine by ourselves' ('нам и так хорошо'), of which there is currently, alas, no shortage in the East. On a global level, that risks confining the East to a position of consuming and applying knowledge rather than creating it. The goal of the Global East as strategic essentialism is precisely to create a space for the excellent work and the diversity of knowledges that already exist to make a difference to global conversations. The strategic nature of the essentialism is to put aside difference for a while to achieve a political purpose, but not to ignore or negate difference.

Why the Global East articulates a future for the past
I see the 'Global East' as an epistemological project that intervenes in the geopolitics of knowledge now in order to change it for the future. In its orientation towards potentialities, towards what could be, it might be called, as Trubina (this issue) does, a 'cognitive utopia'. This does not mean that it eschews the past or neglects the importance of historicizing. As I have shown in 'In search of the Global East', to understand the East's current epistemological position, we need to understand how it came to be where it is now, epistemologically speaking.
The project of the Global East seeks to recover a future for the past (de Sousa Santos 1998). I find this all the more important, since a common stance towards the postsocialist East resembles that described in Walter Benjamin's (1968, 249) famous commentary on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus: an angel blown rather helplessly into the future but turned with the back towards it, as she looks on, paralyzed, at the wreckage of history. The frequent evocation of 'path dependencies', 'socialist legacies', 'shattered utopias', 'catch-up modernization' or even 'Eastern mentality' has us turn back in an eerily similar vein. Sometimes we are, it seems to me, too transfixed by the past of the East to imagine turning towards a future, towards which we are nevertheless blown with unrelenting force. That does not mean that we should ignore or jettison the past (it will catch up with us sooner or later, as Rogers, this issue, remarks), but rather that we should learn how to historicize it so as to 'recapture the capacity for fulguration, irruption and redemption ' (de Sousa Santos 1998, 98) of the past.
Importantly, there is a wealth of studies historicizing the experience of socialism and the emergence of post-socialism (by way of very selective example see Sîrbu and Polgár 2009). Yet, for me historicizing needs to serve the purpose of imagining alternative futures. That is one of the reasons why I have been critical of the concept of postsocialism, because in much of its usage up to now I have found it lacking precisely in 'recaptur[ing] the capacity for fulguration, irruption and redemption ' (de Sousa Santos 1998, 98; but see Kurtović and Sargsyan 2019). Write Atanasoski and Vora: 'Most accounts of postsocialism, by placing postsocialism in the homogeneous and empty time-space of the rubble of the Wall and the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union, replicate the inevitability of the capitalist "now"' (Atanasoski and Vora 2018, 140). I think that this postsocialism is constraining how we think the futures and potentialities of postsocialist societies (and indeed their pasts) (see Kurtović and Sargsyan 2019, 8 for a similar critique). Yet, one does not need to jettison the term postsocialism to find oneself in agreement with the agenda I propose through the term Global East. If it is achieved through rallying around and rethinking 'postsocialism' (see Atanasoski and Vora 2018;Kangas and Salmenniemi 2016;Kurtović and Sargsyan 2019;Tuvikene 2016 for recent innovative work in this regard) and my farewell should prove premature, I would be delighted.

Why the Global East is the beginning, not the end, of an epistemological journey
Throughout this piece I have called the Global East a 'project'. Projects are temporary endeavours with a specific goal. I would like to underscore the term 'temporary'. For me, the Global East is a means to create a space and articulate subject position from which to challenge the North-South binary (Müller 2021b) and to move towards decentring scholarship from a few Anglophone and Western European countries . It will have had its greatest success if and when it will no longer be needed, its mission having been accomplished. The goal is therefore not to establish a new way of compartmentalizing the world, as some commentators seem to suggest (Levkin, Sokolovskaya, this issue). In this I agree with Golubev (this issue) and Gradskova (this issue) that North and South (and East, for that matter) are not the right categories in which to frame debates about global theory. But these are the frames in which many scholars conduct these debates right now, whether we like it or not. The category of the Global East is precisely meant to show the limits of these frames. I take heart from reactions from colleagues and students who tell me that the notion of the Global East articulates the predicament that they feel, caught without voice between the dominant hemispheres of North and South. There are indeed, contra Makarychev (this issue), subjects that identify with such a voice. In contrast to misgivings about the term 'East' (Makarychev, this issue) and commentaries that raise the risk of orientalisation (see Gradskova, this issue), I am confident that the East, as a term and as emancipatory project, can be (re)claimed. Its fortunes have waxed and waned over the centuries, from 'ex oriente lux' to Frankenstein (for very different takes on the East see Mahbubani 2008;Neumann 1999;Osterhammel 2018). It is about time to reclaim it from the patronising and fear-mongering language of geopolitics and demi-otherness to activate its potentialities of inspiration.
Let me close with one concrete initiative that reflects the breadth of commentators' backgrounds, ranging from the arts to academia: a bi-annual magazine that goes by the provocative name 'South as a State of Mind' and is edited from Athens (above, I have cited one article from a recent issue: Choi and Mi 2019). Its mission statement reads: Possessed by a spirit of absurd authority, we try to contaminate the prevailing culture with ideas that derive from southern mythologies such as the 'perfect climate', 'easy living', 'chaos', 'corruption', and the 'dramatic temperament', among others. Through our twisted -and 'southern' -attitude, expressed through critical essays, artist projects, interviews and features, we would like to give form to the concept of the South as a 'state of mind' rather than a set of fixed places on the map. ... Opening up an unexpected dialogue among neighbourhoods, cities, regions and approaches, South as a State of Mind is both a publication and a meeting point for shared intensities (South as a State of Mind 2020).
Whether or not one agrees with the idea of South as a state of mind, this valiant and playful attempt at reappropriating the meaning of 'South' lifts it from the realm of territorialization ('the South is out there') to turn it into a force for creative interrogation of our most cherished beliefs to open up to 'unexpected dialogue among neighbourhoods, cities, regions and approaches'. What more could we ask from the project of the Global East?