Postcoloniality Without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies

Abstract

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that 'one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race' (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of 'Europe' and 'the Balkans' in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker's observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on 'balkanism' or Milica Bakić-Hayden on 'symbolic geographies' and 'nesting orientalism' did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that 'race' as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studies' latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of 'Europe' as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced.

Representations of race/ethnicity and the nation: A content analysis of televised Polish international football

“…Previous studies have signaled how studies of the CEE often overlook ‘race’ and attachments to Whiteness in the CEE (Baker, 2018; Imre, 2014). These studies show how the availability of the subject position of ‘White Europeanness’ in discourses on national identity in the region can result in the (re)production of racializing discourses and hierarchies in the Polish context, also in relative absence of racial/ethnic minorities and history of colonialism.…”

“…However, little attention has been paid to how this mutual constitution might be discursively (re)produced in sport media. Various scholars have pointed to this relative absence of explorations of ‘race’ and Whiteness in studies focusing on Poland and the CEE more broadly (Baker, 2018; Imre, 2014). The present article aims to explicitly explore how global racial formations and attachments to Whiteness and Europeanness are often latently (re)produced in quotidian cultural artefacts such as televised football.…”

De-/Re-Whitening Russianness: A Liminal Space of White Privileges Represented in Non-Summit

“…Through his comment about Central Asian immigrants, Belyakov thus demarcates ethnocentric “us” from immigrant “others,” which is successfully translated through the norm of ethnocentrism in Korean society. In this sense, Belyakov’s white talk, based on the local racialized understanding of ethnic others, can be considered a rhetorically strategic means of whitening in the way ethnonationalism may be linked to a race-conscious global postcoloniality (Baker 2018).…”

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

“…As Wekker (2016: 74) argues, 'one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race' (see also Baker, 2018). The stakes of omitting race in the discussion on postcoloniality in the East of Europe are high, considering the manner in which some terms of the postcolonial discussion have been co-opted and instrumentalized by Eurosceptic right-wing parties (Fomina, 2019;Narkowicz and Ginelli, 2021;Zarycki, 2014).…”