Carrying Europe’s ‘White Burden’, Sustaining Racial Capitalism: Young Post-Soviet Migrant Workers in Helsinki and Warsaw

Abstract

The opening up of sociology to postcolonial and critical race thinking has been predominantly animated by the relations between western metropoles and their (post)colonies. ‘Eastern Europe’ seems to be an uneasy fit in this discussion, being excluded from the idea of ‘Europe’; at the same time, it is not grouped together with non-European Others in terms of colonial histories. Drawing on fieldwork among young Russian and Ukrainian migrant workers in Helsinki (2014–2016) and Warsaw (2020), the article examines global connections that tie the North/West, South and East in these migrants’ imaginaries and material lives after migration. I demonstrate that Eastern European subjects are not outsiders to global racial capitalist orders but participate in sustaining a colonial project of Europe, whiteness and labour. The article argues for the importance of articulating postcoloniality of Eastern Europe vis-a-vis the West together with race to show the complicity of semi-peripheries with the global structures of racial capitalism.

Book review: Staying with doubt, not yet dancing with Azis

“…The book's understanding of whiteness does not engage with the recent body of work that has explored racial hierarchies beyond the Black/White binary in the context of postsocialism (e.g. Boatcă, 2016;Drăgan, 2019;Krivonos, 2022;Manolova et al, 2019). Moreover, those formerly under state socialism and who have been fully integrated into the European Union (EU) (even if not as fully White subjects) are inevitably part of a White enclosure (Rexhepi, 2022) that expels non-White non-European subjects.…”