Does anyone know what European means? Manuela Boatcă thought she did, until a late 1990s move from Romania to Germany unsettled everything she had taken for granted. In this episode, she challenges mainstream ideas of “Europe” to show how its borders extend to the Caribbean (and beyond) – a fact that’s obvious if we acknowledge colonialism’s past and present, but is an inconvenient truth for some in political power.

Alexis and Rosie ask Manuela: How has Brexit revealed the contradictions built into so much discourse about “Europe”? How does “Creolizing” theory differ from “Decolonising” it? And what is the legacy of early sociologist Max Weber’s leading question: why the West?

Plus: a celebration of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems approach, which decentres the nation state. With reflection on Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih.

Guest: Manuela Boatcă
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Manuela, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

• Arton Capital’s The Passport Index
• “Europe” travel guides
• Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Família
• Daša Drndić’s novel “Canzone Di Guerra”

From The Sociological Review

• The material effects of Whiteness – Aleksandra Lewicki
• Puzzlement of a déjà vu – Nirmal Puwar
• The ambiguous lives of ‘the other whites’ – Dominika Blachnika-Ciacek, Irma Budinaite-Mackine

By Manuela Boatcă

• Thinking Europe Otherwise
• (Dis)United Kingdom
• Counter-Mapping as Method
• What does British citizenship have to do with Global Social Inequalities?

Further reading

• “Provincializing Europe” – Dipesh Chakrabarty
• “Poetics of relation” – Édouard Glissant
• “The Creolization of Theory” – Shu-mei Shih, Françoise Lionnet
• “Sweetness And Power” – Sidney Mintz
• “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” – Max Weber
• “The Essential Wallerstein” – Immanuel Wallerstein

Read more about the work of Stuart Hall, Fernand Braudel, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Fernando Coronil and Salman Sayyid.