In an early scene of the second season of the HBO TV series The Wire, the Baltimore police are confronted with the dead bodies of thirteen women who were found suffocated inside a shipping container. As they attempt to identify the Jane Does, the police interpret every object found on the women, and, by a seeming stroke of luck, recover a passport that reveals at least one of the women as a citizen of Magyarország. Yet this discovery does not even begin to unravel the mystery of the women's origin: indeed, in the shot where we briefly glimpse the name of the country, we also see the police officer in a continued state of disorientation, none the wiser about who the women are. Magyarország, Hungary, remains unreadable – a cipher signalling merely the absence of an identity, even in the act of naming that very identity.

I take this figure as a guiding metaphor for the positionality of Eastern Europe in the contemporary imagination as neither properly East nor properly West, an in-between space that ultimately slips out of signification. More specifically, I argue that Eastern Europe as a region and as a conceptual entity reveals the East-West binary to be so strongly operative in contemporary popular and academic geopolitical imaginaries that any liminal position risks wholesale discursive erasure. This is how Eastern Europe falls between the cracks: while popular discourse avowedly admits the region into the community of Europe, at the same time it is also seen as somehow not really European. In academic geopolitical imaginaries, too, postcolonial theory leaves the region no space for representation: while it is certainly excluded from conceptualisations of the colonised ‘East’, its inclusion in general notions of the colonising ‘West’ is never more than implicit, since the referents to terms such as ‘the West’, ‘coloniser’, ‘metropole’, or ‘colonial centre’ are rarely, if ever, Eastern European. Indeed, Eastern Europe's colonial history, which involves both colonising enterprises and colonisation by various empires, is far more complicated than the binary admits, but this has seldom brought about sustained efforts to re-examine the binary itself. Instead, being neither clearly coloniser or colonised, Eastern Europe simply drops out of consideration altogether.

This article looks into the binary thinking that leads to the ultimate erasure of Eastern Europe both from popular discourse and from academic, specifically postcolonial, imaginations. I argue that Eastern European histories and contemporary identifications disallow the binarisms of West and East, centre and periphery, metropole and province, Global North and Global South. Therefore, Eastern Europe presents us with a powerful opportunity to rethink these binaries and challenge the effects they have on constructing our social world.

Of course, in saying that, it is important to recognise that there is no such thing as ‘the’ – singular – imagination. Yet, there are trends both within academia and discourse more broadly speaking, and within these trends there are also some people who have more weight in shaping what a particular discourse looks like and some who have less. It is possible and also necessary to describe such trends; even if, admittedly, the act of describing them inevitably risks oversimplification. In saying ‘the contemporary imagination’, then, I aim to describe what I argue is a tendency in much contemporary conceptualisation of the world, a tendency that we can understand as led by Western discursive centres and practices, but which is not exclusive to the West as a spatial region.

It has not always been the case that Eastern Europe was understood as a region apart from what this special issue calls ‘core Europe’; indeed, even the designation ‘Eastern Europe’ is a product of recent history, which serves to name the region as an entity and an identity in the ontological sense. Historically, Eastern European lands and people have occupied similar positions within the imagination of European collectivity as have other Europeans. One can find such views reflected in political writings as well as in literature. Among the latter, paradigmatic examples include Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, in which characters leave England for travels to places such as (what is now) Italy along with (what is now) Slovakia, or in James Joyce's Ulysses, one of whose main characters, Leopold Bloom, is a Hungarian Jew. To pursue the Hungarian example further, even in hallmarks of American literature, set in the United States, we can see evidence for an American cultural understanding of Hungarianness as not inherently other: in both Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Henry James's The Bostonians, Hungarians struggling to free themselves from Habsburg rule represent to Americans the European analogy to their own enslaved African American population. I do not mean to suggest that the Hungarian revolution of 1848-9 resembled the fight against American slavery, but the fact that to American abolitionists it seemed that way is telling about the imaginaries of Westerners even as far away as the United States – an imaginary in which the revolutionary efforts of Eastern Europeans such as Lajos Kossuth in Hungary and Tadeusz Kościuszko in Poland were simply part and parcel of the liberation struggles of the day.

Today's culturally dominant perceptions reflect a different view, one in which Eastern Europe is not clearly, or at all, part of the collectivities of Europe or the West. Rather, in spite of its own internally different histories, the region is regarded as somehow uniformly different: ‘Eastern Europe’ has become a label and identity that is understood to set countries as disparate as the Czech Republic, Albania, and Ukraine apart from the rest of Europe. This culturally dominant view is produced on the one hand through popular culture, in which the period after 1989-90 has seen an increasing normativisation of America-centric conceptions of society, community, the individual, and the good life. On the other hand, postcolonial theory, a promising and productive alternative to Western-centric historiography and understandings of the global social order, has not adequately integrated into its geopolitical vision a region whose historical and contemporary experience does not align with that of either the Western coloniser or the Eastern colonised.

This essay elucidates the liminal positionality of Eastern Europe and argues that a serious consideration of the effects of that positionality allows us, indeed compels us, to rethink contemporary geopolitical imaginaries through a multipolar lens that challenges the binary elements of postcolonial discourse. I begin with a brief consideration of how the theoretical enterprise to decentre the West has neglected to account for the liminality of the neither-East-nor-West. I then turn to two Hungarian examples as case studies of Eastern European articulations of the liminal identity between East and West: first in acclaimed author Péter Nádas's novel Parallel Stories (Párhuzamos történetek) and then in a speech by Hungary's far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán at Băile Tuşnad in July of 2022. These examples show that the patterns of discursive erasure have centralised for Hungarian identity the tension of whether Hungarians belong to Europe or not, in ways that are strikingly similar across the left and right ends of the political spectrum, although with radically different consequences. In other words, the erasure of Eastern Europe is not merely a matter of theory; it is productive of politically powerful affects – of alienation on the one hand, and of national-chauvinistic violence on the other.

在 HBO 电视剧《火线》第二季的早期场景中，巴尔的摩警方遇到了 13 名女性的尸体，这些女性被发现窒息在一个集装箱内。当他们试图辨认简·多斯的身份时，警方解释了在这些妇女身上发现的每一件物品，并幸运地找到了一本护照，护照上至少显示其中一名妇女是马扎罗沙格公民。然而，这一发现甚至还没有开始解开这些女性的起源之谜：事实上，在我们短暂瞥见国家名称的镜头中，我们还看到警察处于持续的迷失方向，根本不知道谁是女人是。匈牙利的Magyarország仍然难以辨认——这个密码仅仅表明身份的缺失，即使在命名该身份的行为中也是如此。

我把这个数字作为东欧在当代想象中的定位的一个指导性隐喻，它既不是真正的东方，也不是真正的西方，是一个最终脱离意义的中间空间。更具体地说，我认为，东欧作为一个地区和一个概念实体，揭示了东西方二元论在当代大众和学术地缘政治想象中的强烈作用，任何临界立场都有可能被大规模话语抹除。东欧就是这样陷入困境的：虽然流行话语公开承认该地区加入欧洲共同体，但同时它也被视为在某种程度上不是真正的欧洲。在学术地缘政治想象中，后殖民理论也没有给该地区留下任何表现的空间：虽然它肯定被排除在被殖民的“东方”的概念化之外，但它在殖民“西方”的一般概念中的包含却只是隐含的，因为“西方”、“殖民者”、“大都市”或“殖民中心”等术语很少指东欧。事实上，东欧的殖民历史，既涉及殖民企业，也涉及各个帝国的殖民化，远比二元承认的复杂，但这很少带来重新审视二元本身的持续努力。相反，东欧既不是明显的殖民者，也不是被殖民者，而是完全被排除在外。

本文探讨了导致东欧最终从流行话语和学术（特别是后殖民想象）中消失的二元思维。我认为，东欧历史和当代认同不允许西方和东方、中心和边缘、大都市和省份、全球北方和南方的二元论。因此，东欧为我们提供了一个强有力的机会来重新思考这些二元论并挑战它们对构建我们的社会世界的影响。

当然，在这么说的同时，重要的是要认识到不存在“单一的”想象力这样的东西。然而，更广泛地说，学术界和话语中都存在一些趋势，在这些趋势中，有些人在塑造特定话语的外观方面拥有更大的权重，而另一些人的权重则较小。描述这种趋势是可能的，也是必要的；即使，诚然，描述它们的行为不可避免地存在过于简单化的风险。那么，在说“当代想象力”时，我的目的是描述我所认为的当代世界概念化中的一种趋势，我们可以将这种趋势理解为由西方话语中心和实践主导，但它并不局限于西方世界。西方作为一个空间区域。

东欧并不总是被理解为一个不同于本期特刊所谓的“核心欧洲”的地区。事实上，即使是“东欧”这个名称也是近代历史的产物，它在本体论意义上将该地区命名为一个实体和身份。从历史上看，东欧的土地和人民在欧洲集体的想象中与其他欧洲人占据着相似的地位。人们可以在政治著作和文学中找到这种观点的反映。在后者中，典型的例子包括塞缪尔·理查森的《克拉丽莎》，其中人物离开英国前往意大利和（现在的）斯洛伐克等地旅行，或者詹姆斯·乔伊斯的《尤利西斯》，其中的主角之一是利奥波德布鲁姆是一位匈牙利犹太人。为了进一步探究匈牙利的例子，即使是在美国文学的标志中，以美国为背景，我们也可以看到美国文化对匈牙利性的理解的证据，即匈牙利性并非本质上是异类：在哈丽特·比彻·斯托的《汤姆叔叔的小屋》和亨利·詹姆斯的《波士顿人》中，在美国人看来，匈牙利人努力摆脱哈布斯堡王朝的统治，就像欧洲人与他们自己被奴役的非洲裔美国人一样。我并不是说 1848 年 9 月的匈牙利革命类似于反对美国奴隶制的斗争，但事实是，对于美国废奴主义者来说，这种方式似乎讲述了远在美国的西方人的想象——一种想象其中匈牙利的拉约什·科苏特和波兰的塔德乌什·科希丘什科等东欧人的革命努力只是当时解放斗争的重要组成部分。

今天的文化主导观念反映了一种不同的观点，即东欧并不明确或根本不是欧洲或西方集体的一部分。相反，尽管其内部历史不同，但该地区在某种程度上被认为是完全不同的：“东欧”已成为一个标签和身份，被理解为将捷克共和国、阿尔巴尼亚和乌克兰等不同国家与欧洲区分开来。欧洲其他地区。这种文化主导观点一方面是通过流行文化产生的，在 1989-90 年间，以美国为中心的社会、社区、个人和美好生活观念日益规范化。另一方面，后殖民理论作为以西方为中心的史学和对全球社会秩序的理解的一种有希望和富有成效的替代方案，并没有充分融入其地缘政治视野，因为该地区的历史和当代经验与西方国家的经验不一致。殖民者或东方被殖民者。

本文阐明了东欧的极限位置性，并认为，认真考虑这种位置性的影响使我们，实际上迫使我们，通过挑战后殖民话语二元要素的多极视角重新思考当代地缘政治想象。我首先简要考虑一下使西方去中心化的理论事业如何忽视了非东方非西方的界限。然后，我转向两个匈牙利例子，作为东欧阐明东西方之间界限认同的案例研究：首先是著名作家彼得·纳达斯的小说《平行故事》（Párhuzamos történetek），然后是匈牙利极右翼总理维克多·奥尔班的演讲2022 年 7 月在伯伊莱图什纳德举行的会议。这些例子表明，话语抹除的模式集中了匈牙利人身份的紧张关系，即匈牙利人是否属于欧洲，其方式在政治光谱的左端和右端都惊人相似，尽管后果截然不同。换句话说，东欧的消灭不仅仅是一个理论上的问题，而是一个理论问题。它产生了强大的政治影响——一方面是疏远，另一方面是民族沙文主义暴力。