Imagining the Postcolonial in Central Eastern Europe: Controversies of the Czech Manifesto for Decolonization

In September 2020, the Czech digital audience was confronted with a request to critically revise local history and the current official cultural and political attitudes from a decolonial perspective. A group of university students and lecturers published the Manifesto for Decolonization, a digitally circulated text that sparked a debate about what was/is the position of the former Czech lands and contemporary Czechia within the history of Western European colonization. This article examines three phases of the event: the publishing of the text, its digital audience reception, and the reflection of its production. As for publishing and reception, the imaginations inscribed into the text by its authors are examined in comparison with the imaginations present in the popular responses of digital audiences expressed on social media. To explore the context of production, we conducted and analyzed interviews with three local experts involved in the production process. Through our findings, we demonstrate the following: (1) the role of a generational gap that divides the views of local experts in interpreting the aspirations of the Manifesto and (2) the role of a polarized nature of online deliberation that drives the dismissive popular response and leads to the formation of an anti-discourse. We conclude that two symptoms—victimization of the Self and weaponization of Leftist labels—are especially salient in the response to the decolonization agenda in Czechia as a Central Eastern European, post-socialist country.