Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-75dct Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-01T22:41:19.024Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Moment of Reckoning: Transcending Bias, Engaging Race and Racial Formations in Slavic and East European Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Sunnie Rucker-Chang Open the ORCID record for Sunnie Rucker-Chang [Opens in a new window]  and
Chelsi West Ohueri
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Keywords

BiasRaceRacializationSoutheast EuropeWhiteness
Type
Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 216 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Jonathan Khan, Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York, 2017).

2. Ani Kokobobo, “What’s in a Name? Are We Slavic, East European, Eurasian, or All of the Above?” NewsNet. 6, no. 4 (September 9, 2020): 17–18, available at https://www.aseees.org/news-events/aseees-blog-feed/what%E2%80%99s-name-are-we-slavic-east-european-eurasian-or-all-above (accessed May 7, 2021).

3. Bjelić, Dušan I., “Toward a Genealogy of the Balkan Discourses on Race,” Interventions 20, no. 6 (August 2018): 906–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

5. Andrić, Ivo, The Bridge on the Drina (Chicago, 1977)Google Scholar.

6. Kitromilides, Paschalis M., “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans,” European History Quarterly 19, no. 2 (April 1989): 149–192CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Banac, Ivo, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, 1984)Google Scholar.

8. Rusinow, Dennison I., Yugoslavia: Oblique Insights and Observations (Pittsburg, 2008)Google Scholar.

9. Baker, Catherine, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (London, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Rory Yeomans, “Of ‘Yugoslav Barbarians’ and Croatian Gentlemen Scholars: Nationalist Ideology and Racial Anthropology in Interwar Yugoslavia” in Marius Turda and Paul J Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest, 2007), 83–121.

11. Michael Stewart and Márton Rövid, eds., Multi-disciplinary Approaches to Romany Studies (Budapest, 2011).

12. Möschel, Mathias, Law, Lawyers and Race: Critical Race Theory from the US to Europe (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Mills, Charles W., The Racial Contract, 7th ed. (Ithaca, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham, NC, 2016).

15. Michelle Christian, “A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 2 (April, 2019): 169–85.

16. Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 35, no. 1 (2009): 21–42.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford, 2018).

20. David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Europeanization,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, no. 2 (March 2006): 331–64.

21. Chelsi West Ohueri, “On Living and Moving with Zor: Exploring Racism, Embodiment, and Health in Albania,” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 40, no. 3 (April 2021): 241–53.

22. Ibid.

23. Catherine Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester, 2018).

24. For more on this subject see Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC, 2002); Alison Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, DC, 198); Robert Robinson, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (Washington, DC,1988); Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, NJ, 2010); Meredith L. Roman, Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928–1937 (Lincoln, NE, 2019).

25. Junaid Akram Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham, NC, 2011).

26. Nikolay Zakharov and Ian Law, Post-Soviet Racisms (London, 2017).

27. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York, 2015).

28. David Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal, 2019).

29. Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II 1st ed. (New York, 2001).

30. Sunnie Rucker-Chang, “Challenging Americanism and Europeanism: African-Americans and Roma in the American South and European Union ‘South’,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 16, no. 2 (June 2018): 181–99.

31. Videkanić, Bojana, Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945–1985 (Montreal, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region; Huub van Baar and Angéla Kóczé, eds., The Roma and Their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe (New York, 2020); Migelna S. Todorova, “Race and Women of Color in Socialist/Postsocialist Transnational Feminisms in Central and Southeastern Europe,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 16, no. 1 (2017): 114–41; Chelsi West Ohueri, “On Living and Moving with Zor: Exploring Racism, Embodiment, and Health in Albania,” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 40, no. 3 (April 2021): 241–53.