#BiHInSolidarity/BeInSolidarity:BosnianAmericans,Islam, and Whiteness in Post‐9/11America

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

“…Although the question of whiteness has largely been underexplored in the literature on Bosnian (and other former Yugoslav) migrants, some scholars have addressed the racialized dynamics of settlement experiences, ranging from the qualified assimilability afforded to Bosnian refugees in Australia (Colic-Peisker 2005) to a tendency among Bosnians in the US to identify as white migrants in opposition to black Americans (Halilovich 2013, 217-18). In turn, Ana Croegaert (2015) writes about the murder of a Bosnian American, Zemir Begić, in St Louis in 2014, mere days after a jury decision not to indict the white police officer who shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown led to a wave of Black Lives Matter protests. Analysing Twitter responses to the murder, which included tweets by white supremacists who read Begić as white and his murder as racially motivated, as well as an explicitly anti-racist conversation that coalesced around the hashtag #BiHInSolidarity, Croegaert argues that both responses arose from the indecipherability of Bosnian Americans as racial subjects in relation to Islam and to whiteness.…”

Postcoloniality Without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies

“…6 We could ask instead "how the Balkans became white." This would echo North American and Australasian migration and labour historians such as David Roediger (2005), who show how migrants from Europe's various peripheries, including the Balkans, came to identify with, and be accepted into, whiteness: indeed, some anthropologists have already traced south-east European diasporas adjusting to new home countries' racial politics, such as Bosnians in St Louis before and during the Ferguson protests of 2014 (Halilovich 2013, 228;Croegaert 2015). Yet Miglena Todorova (2006) qualifies Roediger by arguing that migrants from Bulgaria (and by extension, I suggest, other south-east European nations) did not only encounter "whiteness" after they had travelled; at the fin-de-siècle, south-east European intellectuals' aspirations to modernity, couched in discourses of Europeanness, were already an identification with civilizational whiteness that members of ethnic majorities did not have to travel to "America" to learn.…”