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AbstractThe article develops the notion of restless bodies to explore the interaction between regimes of social reproduction and freedom of movement. The notion captures the methodological difficulty to account for 'return migration' and goes beyond the isolation of a singular migration determinant. The author relies on two empirical cases. The first draws on one hundred interviews with 'return migrants' in Bulgaria. The second is based on fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2015 in Germany. Both show how the political economy of movement is characterised by a contradiction between fixity and motion in the context of capital accumulation and fading welfare state. The concerns at hand are raised both because of their methodological importance but also as a potential instrument that could supplement ongoing policy debates in the field of EU social security portability coordination.

Following Christina Schwenkel's call to attend to different temporalities in the study of the Vietnamese diaspora, I examine three historical representations of workers sent to Bulgaria between the early 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s. These representations mediated Bulgarian-Vietnamese interstate relations: first, workers in relation to internationalist duty; second, workers in relation to financial debt; and finally, the workers as racialized, indebted subjects. My goal is twofold. Firstly, I turn my attention to the role and the figure of the Vietnamese worker under the ethos of actually existing socialism and navigate through the socialist rationalities that stood behind their arrival in Bulgaria. Second, I trace how representations of Vietnamese workers have changed from upholding the moral duty of socialist internationalism to becoming a labor force destined to repay Vietnam's debt. This shift took place within a framework of changing power configurations that remodeled the extraction of surplus labor by relocating debt risks from the Vietnamese state to Vietnamese workers. I then trace the production of the indebted subject, which materialized in a historic type of racialization of the Vietnamese people, and which proved indispensable to Bulgaria's transition to a market economy.

Nikolay Aretov, Zhelani i plasheshti: Chuzhdite zheni i muzhe v bulgarskata literature na gulgia devetnadeseti vek (Desired and frightening: Foreign women and men in Bulgarian literature of the long nineteenth century), Sofia: Queen Mab, 2023, 280pp., BGN 20 (paperback), ISBN: 978-954-533-208-1.
Eloisa Betti, Leda Papastefanaki, Marica Tolomelli, and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Women, Work and Activism: Chapters of an Inclusive History of Labor in the Long Twentieth Century, Work and Labor: Transdisciplinary Studies for the 21st Century, vol. III, Budapest: CEU Press, 2022, xiv +354 pp., $95.00/€80.00/£68.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-963-386-441-8.
Francisca de Haan, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World, London: Palgrave, 2023, 701 pp., €213.99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-3-031-13126-4.
Milena Kirova, Bulgarskata literature prez XXI vek (2000–2020) (Bulgarian literature in the twenty-first century (2000–2020)), Part I, Sofia: Colibri, 2023, 287 pp., BGN 24 (paperback), ISBN: 978-619-02-1200-3.
Ina Merdjanova, ed., Women and Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity, New York: Fordham University Press, 2021, 336 pp., $35 (paperback), ISBN: 9780823298617.
Katja Mihurko Poniž, Biljana Dojčinović, and Maša Grdešić, Defiant Trajectories: Mapping Out Slavic Women Writers Routes, Ljubljana: Forum of Slavic Cultures, 2021, 96 pp., free online publication, https://www.fsk.si/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/WWR_DefiantTrajectories.pdf (accessed 3 July 2023), ISBN: 978-961-94672-7-5.
Jasmina V. Milanović, Žensko društvo 1875–1942 (The women's society, 1875–1945), Belgrade: Institute for Contemporary History, The Official Gazette, 2020, 638 pp., RSD 2.970, ISBN: 978-86-519-2579-8.
Valentina Mitkova, Pol, periodichen pechat i modernizatsia v Bulgaria (ot kraya na XIX do 40-te godini na XX vek) (Gender, periodicals, and modernization in Bulgaria (from the end of the 19th century to the 1940s)), Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2022, 261 pp., BGN 20, ISBN: 978-954-07-5588-5.
Agnieszka Mrozik, Architektki PRL-u: Komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce (The architects of the PRL: Communist women, literature, and women's emancipation in postwar Poland), Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, Lupa Obscura, 2022, 532 pp., PLN 59 (paperback), ISBN: 978-83-66898-84-4.
Miglena S. Todorova, Unequal under Socialism: Race, Women, and Transnationalism in Bulgaria, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021, 218 pp., $31.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-4875-2841-6.
Zhivka Valiavicharska, Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021, 275 pp., $36.46 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-2280-0583-4.
Susan Zimmermann, Frauenpolitik und Männergewerkschaft: Internationale Geschlechterpolitik, IGB-Gewerkschafterinnen und die Arbeiter- und Frauenbewegungen der Zwischenkriegszeit (Policies for women and men's trade unions: International gender politics, female IFTU unionists, and the labor and women's movements of the interwar period), Vienna: Löcker, 2021, 717 pp., €39.80 (paperback), ISBN: 978-3-99098-026-2.