The public presentation draws upon a 4-year-long qualitative research focused on discourses of the expert and public reception of global solidarity movements (Black Lives Matter, Decolonize This Place) in Czechia. Specifically, it employs findings from 30+ expert interviews (historians, museum educators, journalists, artists, and activists) and thematic, CDA, and multimodal analysis of media and social media discussions. It shows how adoptive mechanisms of implementing the calls for global solidarity and racial justice work locally (e.g., by establishing parallels through the Roma Lives Matter movement and the case of “Czech Floyd”) and how a negative response is articulated in public space. It reveals through which discursive tools decoloniality is construed as a new version of the totalitarian enemy known from the Czechoslovak modern past. It describes and explains how traumatic lay histories operate through building experience-based, speculative, and hate-based historical analogies between current and past politics and grand historical events. It reflects on how sentiments of economic, political, and cultural semi-peripherality, fuelled by ethnopopulist illiberal politics, manifest themselves in the way Czechs speak about the global present through the local past.
Andrea Pruchova Hruzova, Ph.D., is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences and an associate professor of cultural sociology at Charles University in Prague. She investigates the intersections of visual culture, race/ethnicity, and memory. Her research work has been published in international journals (e.g., Visual Studies; International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society) as well as in international volumes. She is an editor of the upcoming volume Public Narratives of Decolonization and Racial (In)Justice in Central and Southeast Europe. Enemies and Colonies, Patriots and Riots (2025, Palgrave Macmillan). Her recent Czech monograph Captured by Images. The Visual Politics of the 21st Century (V zajetí obrazů. Vizuální politika 21. století, 2024) explores the intersection of visual communication and global cultural politics from the position of Central Europe.