Articulations of race and genealogies of encounter among former Yugoslav migrants in Britain

Abstract

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Swedish surnames, British accents: passing among post-Soviet migrants in Helsinki

“…According to this critique, "Eastern Europe" is a product of colonialist othering by Western Europe and, like the Oriental, has been constructed as a violent and primitive Other. In other words, the region's relation to Western Europe is always addressed through "ideologies of Eastness", that is, through references to "eastern" aspects of the region's imagined identity (Zarycki 2014). "Eastern Europe" is theorized as a product of Western elites and the Enlightenment, the foundations of which are entangled with practices of colonial dominance beyond the European continent (Wolff 1994;Sušová-Salminen 2012).…”

“…In addition, Finnishness, as an opposite to Russianness, was gradually constructed during the process of building Finland into an independent Western nation belonging to the Western European cultural tradition (Keskinen 2014). "Ideologies of Eastness", to borrow from a slightly different discussion (Zarycki 2014), have been used to racialize and portray Russians as Eastern, more traditional and less advanced Others in Finland.…”

“…In critical theory of race, the former "second world" is often a blank space on the map (however, see Böröcz 2017; Baker 2018; Krivonos 2018; Zorko 2018). Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is "too white" to be considered a postcolonial subject, yet is always "lagging behind" and "catching up" with Western Europe (Blagojević 2009;Zarycki 2014). Some research conceptualizes Eastern European migrants as "contiguous Others" (Dzenovska 2014; see also Lowe 2015), occupying a complex position in relation to whiteness and Europeanness.…”

Comparing the racialization of Central-East European migrants in Japan and the UK

“…In post-Brexit Britain, meanwhile, "orientalist hierarchies" have placed Poles, who represent the largest CEE community in the UK, in a liminal position: "more 'western' than Commonwealth or Middle Eastern populations, but not as western as other, nearer, Europeans" (Botterill & Burrell, 2019, p. 25). At the same time, such experiences of "ambiguous whiteness" (Lapiņa & Vertelyte, 2020) do not exempt CEE migrants from reproducing racialized hierarchies and exclusions in the pursuit of attaining full European whiteness (Drnovšek Zorko, 2019;Krivonos, 2020;Tudor, 2017).…”

“…Anton suggests that there is a more cosmopolitan whiteness which is supposedly shared by Westerners, yet not typical for Asians, even those with shared Soviet history. 9 While the category of 'foreigner' is often used inconsistently in general discourse, as it was by the interviewees, the cases above demonstrate how interviewees implicitly specify its tacit connotations and how the gaikokujin is often synonymous with whiteness, as well as the role played by tropes about racial Others ("tribal kind of people") in maintaining racialized distinctions (Drnovšek Zorko, 2019).…”