Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Sex, and Race in Eastern Europe

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Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Sex, and Race in Eastern Europe

by Katerina Kolárová

University of Michigan Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07743-4

Paper: 978-0-472-05743-6

eISBN: 978-0-472-90502-7 (OA)

About the Book

Kateřina Kolářová’s Rehabilitative Postsocialism offers a timely interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of how disability, race, class, and gender operate as ideological tools within the postsocialist Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). Kolářová presents postsocialism as an analytic that can and should be brought to bear to understand cultural politics, economic formations, and state politics through the present day.

Rehabilitative Postsocialism names disability, sexuality, and race as central yet invisible to negotiations of the postsocialist consensus. Drawing from a rich and varied archive, Rehabilitative Postsocialism maps the formation of new structures of inequalities and social imaginaries of wellness, merit, and justice in order to understand current articulations of global disenchantment with democracy, social justice, and solidarity. The book also makes clear that disability, race, and ethnicity continue to circulate in depictions of Eastern Europe as suspended in a chronic developmental “delay.” Rehabilitative Postsocialism both situates this positioning within its political and historical formation and offers the analytical tools to challenge its continued deployment.

About the Author

Kateřina Kolářová is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Gender Studies Program at the School of Humanities, Charles University in Prague.

Reviews

“Kolářová offers food for thought for anyone who has ever been left with unease after seeing an Eastern country or region portrayed in Western media, wondered about disability rights or the “race question” in Eastern Europe, or who generally wish to critically think about this region and are looking for a refreshing break from rigid center versus periphery and East versus West divisions.”

— Zsófia Veszely, H-Soz-Kult

“Rehabilitative Postsocialism is one of the first monographs to apply crip perspectives outside ‘Western’ or ‘Global North’ contexts. Through a powerful blend of cultural analysis and social theory, Kolářová produces a nuanced understanding of the postsocialist approach to disability as an intersectional phenomenon. I’m certain this book will drive crip theory forward.”— Michael Rasell, University of Innsbruck

“Rehabilitative Postsocialism is an excellent model of interdisciplinarity that builds on insights from disability studies, crip studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, to critical theory. Kolářová has produced a definitive study of disability rights and its challenges in the postsocialist, neoliberal space of the Czech Republic.”— Jose Alaniz, University of Washington

"The book may be of particular interest for scholars of Eastern Europe (especially those focused on disability history and culture) but Kolářová’s rich theoretical discussions and expansive attention to intersections of disability, gender, and race in Eastern Europe give the book a broader interdisciplinary and geographical-historical appeal. . . The book is best experienced slowly, chapter by chapter, giving one the time and headspace to digest Kolářová’s rich examples and the author’s associated theoretical reflections within and between the chapters."

— Sarah D. Phillips, Transilvania

“As disability studies has taken a transformative global turn, no one has traced past and future disability vocabularies, legible on ‘crip horizons,’ more than Kateřina Kolářová. Rehabilitative Postsocialism is the book we need at this moment for thinking about the intersections of disability, sex, and race in a transnational context.”— Robert McRuer, George Washington University