Race and racial formations and categories define global systems of power and are not bound by history or culture. Nevertheless, with few noted exceptions, race as a category of analysis has largely been rejected and rendered inapplicable within Slavic, east European, and Eurasian Studies. This unwillingness to expand categories of critical analysis has created a void in our area and field of study, shaping a false sense of racelessness. Without the inclusion of race critical theories into our classrooms and scholarship, our students are left with minimal tools to address difference and social exclusion. In this article, we turn to critical perspectives to highlight some ways that race is being meaningfully incorporated into scholarship about the region. We illustrate why engagement with race and racialization is helpful for analysis, urgent, and necessary. Finally, we also address how our field can better prepare students as they engage these subjects.
In this article I explore linkages between the evolution of African-American filmic representation and the patterns of Romani representation in films from Central and Southeast Europe (CSEE). More specifically, I use the 1970s Blaxploitation movement and subsequent shift of African-American representation into films reliant on a realist aesthetic to contextualize analysis of the shortcomings of the Civil Rights Movement to provide broad integration for African-Americans. Given other similarities between the racialized positionalities of African-Americans and Roma, I argue that Blaxploitation can illuminate trends in the cinematic depictions of CSEE Roma, since the Roma Rights movement has had to contend with similar shortcomings in achieving political, social, and economic inclusion. The films I analyze in this piece include Roming (2007), Just the Wind (2012), Episode of an Iron Picker (2013), and Bravo! (2015).
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