Online paper: Filip Herza (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences), Czechoslovak colonialism? Migration, colonisation, and the Land Reform in the interwar Subcarpathian Ruthenia
Online conference: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84299536970?pwd=dm05WEJzRW9hakk2aVA0VW5wTXJSQT09
My presentation relates to the recent discussions on the history of marginal-colonial cultures situated on the fringes of the Empire. Focusing on interwar Czechoslovakia, I will discuss how to productively think about the coloniality of this land-locked country. I will be particularly looking at the entanglements and reverberations between the overseas colonisation and projects of internal colonisation in the east of the republic, namely in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Drawing on governmentality studies and postcolonial theory, I aim to reframe the already existing discussion of internal colonisation to highlight the coloniality of interwar Czechoslovak liberalism. I will suggest that the governance of populations and environments that took shape in the east during the interwar period preconditioned the authoritarian forms of rule that came afterwards during the Protectorate, the Second World War, and later during state socialism.