Manuela Boatcă

Manuela Boatcă
University of Freiburg | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg · Institute of Sociology

PhD

About

218
Publications
62,986
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Introduction
Manuela Boatcă is a Professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg. She does research on global inequalities, coloniality, multiple and unequal Europes, and the Caribbean. She writes and publishes in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Manuela's current projects are 'Caribbean Europe' and 'Coloniality of Citizenship'. She has just finished a joint book project with Anca Parvulescu on inter-imperiality in turn-of-the century Transylvania.
Additional affiliations
April 2010 - present
Freie Universität Berlin
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
August 2007 - March 2008
Universidade Candido Mendes
Position
  • Professor
October 2003 - March 2010
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)

Publications

Publications (218)
Chapter
Full-text available
To a sociologist like myself, writing an afterword to a book that provides rich material for a long-overdue reconceptualization of the place of imperial structures and transimperial agency in Europe is first and foremost good news. It means that the book undertaking the task of gathering and analysing such material and reading it against the backgr...
Article
Das Schreiben, und damit das Autor*in werden, beginnt bekanntlich mit dem Lesen. Und doch gestehen Wissenschaftler*innen gelegentlich ihre Verlegenheit darüber, bestimmte Schlüsselwerke oder kanonische Texte nicht gelesen zu haben-ein Ausdruck von Bescheidenheit, der ihre (sonstige) Kompetenz unterstreichen soll. Da ist zum Beispiel der Soziologe,...
Chapter
The demands that Eurocentrism-critical approaches have addressed to the social and cultural sciences in the last 30 years have long been of a generic kind and aimed primarily at overcoming a condition, the Eurocentric science of society and/or culture—that is, they aimed at deconstruction. The critique of this tendency became in part a fundamental...
Article
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The conversation between Ali Meghji and Manuela Boatcă focuses on how modernity/coloniality may (or may not) be a productive sociological concept in the remit of global social theory and wider political movements. Speaking from within different locations in the imperial core (England and Germany respectively), we discuss how the concept of modernit...
Chapter
This chapter deals with unequal health mobilities in one of the most understudied margins of Europe: Caribbean Europe – the territories that form an integral part of, or are associated with, the European Union and one of its member states through their colonial histories and presents. Applying an intersectional lens and drawing on the concepts of v...
Article
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This conversation between Michaela Benson and Manuela Boatcă focuses on the coloniality of citizenship. Where dominant understandings of citizenship link this to the emergence of the nation and its national political community, this conversation considers what we can learn about present-day global social inequalities from examining the development...
Chapter
This chapter elaborates on women's education under the concept of an inter-imperial framework and the engagement of modernism. It notes how education stratifies the world system, creating inequality, especially among women and racialized populations. Transylvanian women's educational aspirations were caught between competing nationalisms responding...
Chapter
This chapter examines Transylvania's turn-of-the-century agrarian economy. It references the modern account of the intersections of colonial and imperial interests, hierarchies, and strategies of control that coincides with the notion of inter-imperiality. Liviu Rebreanu's 1920 novel Ion provides commentary on the processes of formalizing land righ...
Book
How are modernity, coloniality, and interimperiality entangled? Bridging the humanities and social sciences, this book provides innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. Historical Transylvania, at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, offers th...
Chapter
This chapter focuses on the correlation between Transylvania's history of land ownership and the history of labor and division of labor. The regime of landownership in Transylvania was anchored in serfdom, which belongs to a modern matrix of labor that is both colonial and inter-imperial. The chapter expounds on the history of enslavement in Moldov...
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This chapter explicates the correlation between inter-imperiality and religion by referencing Transylvania and its history of multiconfessionalism, conversion, and tolerance. It looks into the inter-imperial dynamics wherein institutionalized religion influenced subaltern social strata, languages, and histories into the concept of modernity. Due to...
Chapter
This chapter discusses the gender dynamics at work in inter-imperial nationalisms and the trans-imperial agencies of nationalist actors. The social status of Transylvanian women is a function of uneven access to citizenship. Moreover, the violence against women often sustains inter-imperial nationalisms, even as they draw on the invisible labor of...
Chapter
This chapter looks into the integration of Transylvania into a structurally unequal capitalist world economy. The notion of inter-imperiality highlights the fact that the agent of capitalist integration is a series of imperial and state formations, alongside a variety of other heterogeneous actors, such as religious institutions. The chapter elabor...
Chapter
This chapter explores a linguistic inter-imperiality case study that involves the conceptualization of Transylvanian interglottism. It references Liviu Rebreanu's novel Ion to see interglottism at work. Interglottism is defined as a mode of connecting the linguistic with both the political, social, and economic imperial order and its contestation....
Chapter
Citizenship and residence by investment is a fast-growing global phenomenon. As of 2022, more than a third of all countries in the world offered paths to membership in exchange for a donation or investment into their economies. Yet we know little about how these programmes operate and debates in academia and the wider public are often misinformed b...
Article
In this article, we re-connect highly unequal mobilities in the Caribbean that have so far escaped the purview of migration research and challenge dominant understandings of migrant integration: By replacing the methodological Occidentalism shaping the field through a creolized decolonial lens, we show how the precarious position of Haitians in the...
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“What took place in the Caribbean,” writes Édouard Glissant, “which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation as nearly as possible.” ¹ For Glissant, the word creolization condenses the history of the Caribbean. This is a history characterized by trans-border connections, culture flows, and the transregional mov...
Article
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In dem Artikel argumentiere ich, dass die Weltsystemanalyse entscheidend dazu beigetragen hat, die theoretischen und methodologischen blinden Flecken der Soziologie aufzudecken und einen umfassenden Rahmen für die Untersuchung globaler Ungleichheiten zu formulieren. Damit nahm sie sowohl die Kritik an Eurozentrismus und methodologischem Nationalism...
Article
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This article is the authors’ response to the Transilvania journal special issue dedicated to Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). The issue (no. 10, 2022) featured articles and review articles on inter-imperiality and decolonial thought, alongside several pieces on world literature and cultural repres...
Chapter
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Across the globe, a growing number of social movements, such as demonstrations in support of equal civil status or reproductive freedom and against sexualized violence, show that women's and gender rights are highly contested. Against the backdrop of a long history of unequal rights implementation, the contributors to this volume deal with the ques...
Book
How are modernity, coloniality, and interimperiality entangled? Bridging the humanities and social sciences, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă provide innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. Historical Transylvania, at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungar...
Article
Full-text available
Este artigo argumenta que a abordagem do sistema-mundo de Immanuel Wallerstein foi fundamental para revelar pontos cegos teóricos e metodológicos da Sociologia e para formular um quadro abrangente para o estudo das desigualdades globais. Ao fazê-lo, antecipou tanto a crítica ao eurocentrismo como ao nacionalismo metodológico, apresentada pelas abor...
Article
Im vorliegenden Aufsatz strukturieren wir die seit 2018 in der Soziologie geführte, anhaltende Diskussion um postkoloniale Soziologie anhand zentraler theoretischer Vorannahmen zu Raum, Wissen und Macht, sowie in Bezug auf zugrundeliegende Er­kenntnisinteressen. Wir fokussieren uns auf Missverständnisse, die durch mangelnde Klärung theoretischer Vo...
Chapter
Across the globe, a growing number of social movements, such as demonstrations in support of equal civil status or reproductive freedom and against sexualized violence, show that women's and gender rights are highly contested. Against the backdrop of a long history of unequal rights implementation, the contributors to this volume deal with the ques...
Article
Full-text available
The article includes a preview excerpt, in Romanian, from the introduction of the book authored by Anca Pârvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires, published by Cornell University Press in 2022. This volume espouses an inter-imperial approach focused on Transylvania and takes Liviu Rebreanuʼs canonical novel I...
Article
Full-text available
Drawing on several critical cartographers’ approach to counter-mapping as method and on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ “sociology of absences,” I discuss their combination – counter-mapping as a method for the sociology of absences – as a means of enhancing sociological reflexivity through a transdisciplinary lens. Such a lens reveals the very constit...
Article
This article argues that focussing on issues of citizenship highlights the relationality of North/South dynamics and that doing so through a ‘Southern lens’ reveals two complementary and otherwise neglected aspects of North/South relationality: the coloniality of the institution of citizenship, and the lasting impact that (de)colonial contestations...
Article
This article argues that Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system approach was instrumental in revealing sociology’s theoretical and methodological blind spots and in formulating a comprehensive framework for the study of global inequalities. In doing so, it anticipated both the critique of Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism put forth by transn...
Chapter
The period from the 1920s to the present is marked by the rise of eugenics, the expansion and hardened enforcement of immigration laws, legal apartheid, the continuance of race pseudoscience, and the rise of human and civil rights discourse in response. Eugenics programmes in the early 20th century focused on sterilization and evolved into unimagin...
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The history of the West’s violent interaction (including genocide, conquest, and plunder) and exchange (of people, material goods, and information) with its constructed non-Western Others provides the explanatory context for the making of both the modern and the non-modern in their current acceptance. Reconceptualising modernity from a decolonial p...
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Full-text available
Über Radikalisierung, Ungleichheiten, die US-Wahl und die Pandemie.
Article
Why does a book with "capitalism" in the title and "accumulation of capital" in the subtitle not get reviewed in any major sociology journal within the first three years of its publication? This was the case with Jason W. Moore's 2015 volume until the book co-authored with Raj Patel appeared in 2017-and was likewise met with sociological neglect. T...
Article
The article makes a case for Europe as a creolized space, or Europe Otherwise. It argues that, in order to account for both the transregional entanglements and the internal hierarchies that European colonialism and imperialism have produced since at least the sixteenth century, we need to unlearn received notions of Europe as an unmarked category;...
Research
Full-text available
Pornind de la căutarea unui "cadru analitic" care să facă cît mai inteligibilă propria plasare în contextul academic și politic (în sens larg al termenului) în care activează, Manuela Boatcă pune modul în care a operat procesul de exportare a modernității în periferiile est-eu ropeană și latino-americană sub lupa colonialității. Autoarea este profe...
Article
Full-text available
The editorial summarizes the main conceptual and epistemological challenges of theorizing on society across borders. Its particular aim is to initiate the dialogue between theories of society and cross-border studies that address global, transnational and postcolonial relations. In essence, this special issue addresses four interrelated concerns of...
Article
Adesea, criticii văd în practica demolării statuilor o simplă cosmetizare sau chiar epurare a memoriei colective, care nu schimbă cu nimic structurile inegale sau atitudinile rasiste din societatea de azi. Motivele protestatarilor care au demolat și aruncat în apă statuia din Bristol a lui Edward Colston, negustor de sclavi prin Royal African Compa...
Article
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Taking Liviu Rebreanu's novel Ion (1920) as an example of a modernist text produced in the periphery of European empires, the essay proposes a typology of inter-imperial modes of gendered silence. Set in a small village in Transylvania, on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian empire, itself on the semi-periphery of the modern world-system, the nov...
Preprint
Full-text available
Este capítulo presenta una noción más amplia de Europa como un espacio creolizado: toma en cuenta los vínculos regionales a los que el colonialismo y el imperialismo europeos han dado origen desde el siglo xvi y replantea a Europa desde sus fronteras no reconocidas en el Atlántico y el mar Caribe. Para mostrar cómo el término “creolización” —origin...
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Not even a pandemic should endanger the Germans’ asparagus consumption. Even if Romanian seasonal workers bear the health costs for it – or die.
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Auch eine Pandemie soll den Spargelkonsum der Deutschen nicht gefährden. Nicht einmal, wenn rumänische Saisonkräfte gesundheitliche Schäden davontragen - oder sterben.
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Viele der heutigen Überseegebiete gelten offiziell als unabhängig, gehören administrativ aber zu den USA oder europäischen Staaten. Sie haben noch immer mit den Folgen der Kolonisierung zu kämpfen und sind sogar vom Brexit betroffen.
Article
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This article analyzes the differences and overlaps between the dynamics of coloniality and inter-imperiality that have shaped Transylvania since the sixteenth century vis-à-vis neighboring European peripheries and shifting cores, zooming in on how the tensions between different modes of colonial and imperial rule play out in rural settings. We fore...
Book
Lucrarea de față se bazează pe poziții conexe cu privire la studiul Europei de Est și Americii Latine ca regiuni interdependente – nu ca obiecte ale studiilor regionale (area studies), ce au drept obiectiv modernizarea după tipar occidental, și nici ca aglomerări de state naționale cu caracteristici culturale comune. Ambele regiuni au deținut poziț...
Preprint
Full-text available
Historians and sociologists alike have rightfully cautioned against assuming a simplistic and unbroken continuity between colonial racial politics and the racial project of Nazi Germany in particular – and, in general, against mistaking parallels for causation (Keim 2014, Kössler 2005, Melber 2011). With this proviso in mind, the chapter examines t...
Article
Der Artikel diskutiert am Beispiel der Karibik einige der Paradoxien der (De-)Kolonisierung im 21. Jahrhundert als Kennzeichen eines ungleichen modernen/kolonialen Weltsystems, für die es bisher nur rudimentäre globale Lösungen gibt. Die Karibik hat die längste Geschichte kolonialer Verflechtungen mit Europa und ist damit auch die periphere Region...
Book
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Achievement-orientation and its manifestation in meritocratic principles is a powerful aspect in cultural narratives across the globe that impacts on social and individual lives in multiple ways. It is present in African societies and in communities across the African diaspora. This collection of short essays seeks to initiate a conversation that c...
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The enslavement of Romani populations in East Europe remains an eloquent silence in labor history. This essay traces the imbrication of material histories and textual strategies that place Romani labor, especially as aesthetic performance, outside of the purview of labor histories of East Europe. We sketch a history of enslavement of Romani populat...
Preprint
The history of the West's violent interaction and exchange with its constructed non-Western Others provides the context for the making of both the modern and the non-modern. Reconceptualizing modernity from a decolonial perspective entails taking this context as the starting point of any analysis. In the following, I argue that an understanding of...
Chapter
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Über das Wirken eines langfristig so produktiven Intellektuellen wie Immanuel Wallerstein lässt sich alleine dadurch viel schreiben, dass man seine zahlreichen Veröffentlichungen, Auszeichnungen, Wirkungsstätten, Vorsitze akademischer Gesellschaften oder Sprachen, in die seine Arbeiten übersetzt wurden, aufzählt. Mindestens so bezeichnend für sein...
Article
The essay analyzes the interglottism at work in Liviu Rebreanu’s novel Ion (1920) against the polyglottism theorized and performed editorially by the first Comparative Literature journal ( ACLU ), which it positions against the background of post-1867 Austro-Hungarian imperial policies for the use of languages.
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Ausgehend von einem doppelten historischen und politischen Argument präsentiert der besprochene Essay von Rosi Braidotti die europäische Bürgerschaft als progressives Projekt, das sich Nationalismus, Rassismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit entgegenstelle. Als theoretisches Plädoyer mag man dies verteidigen können, allein die Rückbindung an die Europäisc...
Chapter
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Prevailing social scientific definitions view citizenship as a modern institution for the distribution of civil, political, and social rights meant to counterbalance social inequalities among members of the same polity. For a long time, citizenship was considered to reflect changes occurring in Western societies in the wake of the French and U.S.-A...
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A growing number of Western states currently scandalize the claims to residence and citizenship of people racialized as non-European, non-Western, or non-white.* Many such states increasingly denounce or block illegalized migrant paths to residence and further restrict the rights and the duration of refugees’ presence on their territory. Such measu...
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Das Projekt einer postnationalistischen Europäischen Union als Prozess der "Minoritärwerdung" oder Nomadisierung Europas, einschließlich seiner historischen wie seiner critical whiteness-Komponente, erinnert an ähnliche, epistemisch und politisch verwandte Vorschläge. Sowohl Chakrabarty's Plädoyer für eine "Provinzialisierung Europas" (Chakrabarty...
Research
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Conference Theme De-Linking: Critical Thought and Radical Politics Delinking as a counterstrategy in a structurally unequal world-system has featured prominently in different social science approaches to radical emancipatory politics, from dependency theory and world-systems analysis to decolonial thought. Understood as self-reliance or autonomous...
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In this email debate we discuss the relation between postcolonialism and sociology. While post- and decolonial approaches had a significant impact on the huma­ni­ties, reception in sociology has been more reluctant. The reasons for this difference as well as recent connections between postcolonial thought as so­cio­logy are discussed.
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Die Kritik an einer westlichen Soziologie, die aktiv Abwesenheiten produziert, ist mit Verweis auf Max Webers These von der »Einzigartigkeit des Westens « formuliert worden . Bekanntermaßen begründet Weber diese These der westlichen Einzigartigkeit, indem er nicht-westlichen Gesellschaften, besonders China und Indien, aber auch islamisch geprägten...

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