Migration, consumption and work: A postcolonial perspective on post-socialist migration to the UK

This article explores the links between transnational migration, consumption and work within a postcolonial and post-socialist world. By exploring contemporary Polish and Slovenian migration to the UK through a postcolonial lens, this article aims to provide an understanding of the post-socialist space beyond the western knowledge production. The article exposes the historical orientalization of post-socialist central and eastern Europe (CEE) and its subjects, which, throughout history, has marked its peripheral status within Europe and evoked the (self-)colonial ‘catching up’ model that constitutes CEE imagined communities as well as informs CEE migrants’ agency, and defines their diversity and their positioning in the West. In particular, the article stretches the understanding of orientalism in relation to transnational consumption and migration processes, and the neo-colonial binary division of capitalism and socialism that characterizes the postsocialist world. The article demonstrates that this binary division acts as an orientalising device that legitimizes the framing of neoliberalism as the modernizing project, and affects CEE migrants’ positioning in the UK and their strategies to reclaim their value. Ultimately the article contributes by offering a critique of neo-colonial epistemic violence that legitimizes the global expansion of neoliberalism to places and spaces previously shielded from unregulated market pressures