Nearly half a century ago, Allison Blakely produced Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought. The landmark text explored Black people’s lives and experiences in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union and how non-Black people in those spaces received them and conceptualized blackness from the seventeenth century to the 1980s. Since its publication, many of the Black characters and historical episodes adorning Russia and the Negro have become the terrains or mainstays of scholarly debates about Black life and experiences and ideas of blackness in Slavic, eastern, southeastern, and central European, as well as Eurasian societies.Footnote 1 Roughly two decades later, others took up the mantel.
In 2007, Maxim Matusevich’s edited volume, Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters, came out. This new cohort of scholars were primarily concerned with Africa-Soviet encounters in the twentieth century, a century defined by Africans’ anticolonial struggles and the early years of African decolonization. Blakely’s and Matusevich’s texts were predominantly produced by scholars primarily trained in African Studies and based in Africa, North America, and Russia. Scholars trained in SEEES were largely absent.
The geopolitical and imperial specters of Russia and the USSR have chiefly preoccupied much scholarly attention, leading to a large scholarly neglect of Black life and experiences and ideas of blackness in eastern, central, and southeastern Europe and Central Asia. Where they were addressed, they were often submerged under Russia. Until recently, academic engagement with blackness in central and southeastern Europe was scarce.Footnote 2 Despite the multigenerational entanglements with blackness and people of African descent, most of the scholarship and engagement with questions of blackness only emerged anew during the post-socialist periods.Footnote 3 Similar to the Russian and Soviet contexts, these works highlight the interest of majorities to underscore the sameness of central and southeast Europeans to Black peoples and their brotherly connections, despite experiences demonstrating the contrary.Footnote 4 Official embraces of blackness and Black people were integral to claims of solidarity and sameness in juxtaposition to western capitalist, imperial societies. However, these solidarity claims were short-lived. As east, central, and southeast European societies came to value west European belonging, they abandoned connections with and affinities for blackness.Footnote 5 Even during the heyday of socialist internationalism and claims of racial, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial solidarities, Soviet Ukrainians consistently evoked Africa, particularly the Congo, as a site of backwardness, justifying European colonial rule there, and frequently denigrated Africans to seek their own rights vis-à-vis the Soviet project and Soviet Russians.Footnote 6
For a variety of reasons, over the last decade, there has been a burst of interest in the relationship between Africa and the USSR, Africa and East Germany, and Africa and east, central, and southeast Europe, and a rediscovery and re-investigation of Black lives in SEEES. Scholars have also been re-theorizing blackness historically and contemporarily within SEEES and grappling with the contradictions of anti-Black racism with Soviet, East German, and east and central European claims of fraternal brotherhood and solidarity with Black people internationally and domestically.Footnote 7 This special issue, “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies,” is the latest scholarly addition to this trend.Footnote 8 And its authors constitute a different demography than those who wrote the aforementioned texts.
Junior, racialized, and marginalized scholars constitute the issue’s vast contributors. While they have different positionalities within the Global North academy, all are based there. It is unclear whether the debates that animate this issue interest those in the Global South or whether we failed to sufficiently reach them. Nonetheless, the contributions proportionally tackle the geographies of central, eastern, and southeastern Europe, and Eurasia. Our collection also brings to the fore discussions related to Roma and their instrumentalized “blackness” in central and southeast Europe. Unfortunately, the experiences of Black people in SEEES from Central and South America or western Europe are absent. Unlike the aforementioned volumes published by African and Black Studies’ presses or produced by scholars trained in African Studies or Black Studies broadly, many of our contributors are trained in SEEES. It highlights how Black people’s lived experiences and the idea of blackness have moved beyond the sole domains of African and Black Diasporic Studies and from the margins of ASEEES.Footnote 9
Capturing Black Life and Blackness
This issue demonstrates that ideas of blackness and the capturing of Black life in SEEES can be unraveled within and theorized from various sources and spaces. Collectively, the essays use archival materials from four different continents, underscoring the need for scholars to scour the globe to understand and theorize the Black experience and blackness in SEEES. Linguistically, they engage in oral interviews or utilize texts in Albanian, English, French, Kazakh, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Serbian. For multiple reasons—from academic disciplinary traditions and guardrails to travel challenges—written documents have become the dominant mode of discovering and thinking about Black life and blackness within SEEES. This volume is no different. Some authors utilize rich memoirs or contemporaneous writings to shed a bright light on ideas of blackness and the “Black” lived experience over several centuries. Others highlight how twentieth-century writers in Slavic, central, south, and east European, and Eurasian societies produced conceptions of Black people and blackness in newspapers, magazines, trade, and economic treaties, letter correspondences, student essay commentaries, blogposts, translations, poems, and seminar meeting minutes. The written medium became, then, an instrumental avenue for disseminating conceptions of blackness and Black life to multiple reading publics.
While the written medium dominates our writers’ collective source base, others in this collection move beyond it in fascinating ways. Some writers use oral interviews to uncover Black people’s experiences in the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, and Poland. Others employ autoethnography and social media, such as podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube, to unpack and understand the experiences of Black women and contestations over blackness, Africanness, and identity. Finally, others capture how Black people and ideas of blackness functioned and maneuvered within art and visual media, such as cartoons, cinema, familial portraits, musical troupes, paintings, plays, promotional advertisements, and television. In this sense, for multiple centuries, Black life and notions of blackness have been captured in the cultural, intellectual, political, and social spheres of SEEES.
Despite not reading each other’s pieces prior to publication, the papers communicate with each other in unique ways. Focusing on African American Louise Thompson Patterson’s well-known trip to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and lesser-known 1960s sojourns, Tatsiana Shchurko’s essay looks at how African American women engaged with Soviet conceptions of “racial and gender justice.” Shchurko shows that Patterson’s encounter with Soviet Central Asia shaped her expanding definition of blackness as rooted in shared diasporic transnational histories of oppression and resistance, that blackness was “intersectional.” Through a deep dive into Thompson’s writings, Shchurko laments Soviet (mis)understandings of what constituted Black.
Ironically, while Soviet scholars have critiqued the “imposition” of western theories of race into SEEES, they replicate American conceptions of blackness to critique Soviet constructions of blackness. What SEEES and Euro-American centric scholars might consider the quintessential form of blackness, dark-skinned West Africans, in southern Africa, were classified as Coloured.Footnote 10 In what is now Ghana, anyone with mixed European heritage was called Obroni (white), contrasting with US definitions of “Negro,” anyone with an eighth of African/Negro blood.Footnote 11 Missing from our conversations is how Africans conceptualized who was “black” or what “blackness” meant back home. By shifting our framework of blackness from American legal and social categories to ones from Africa, particularly South Africa, Hilary Lynd’s essay, looking at how the Coloured South African, Alex La Guma, was racialized in the USSR, demonstrates that Soviet officials’ understandings of blackness aligned more closely with western and southern African constructions. Lynd’s essay is a much-welcome intervention in the SEEES literature on blackness and race.
Alexa Kurmanov begins her essay with a personal anecdote about an individual in Kazakhstan referencing a positive experience of a male African student in the USSR in the 1960s to counter her accounts of anti-Black racism. Through an autoethnographic and ethnographic examination of Aminata Uedraogo (a Burkinabé-Kazakh woman) and an in-text re-reading of the memoir of an African-Black-Soviet-Russian-Jewish woman, Yelena Khanga, Kurmanov critically engages with how womanhood, blackness, and desire operate within Central Asia, particularly in post-socialist spaces, and the Soviet Union. Kurmanov demonstrates that Kazakhness, and its proximity to blackness, are contested continuously in Kazakh popular media–Instagram and podcasts. Kurmanov’s and Shchurko’s pieces remind us that the “Black” or “African” SEEES experience was not simply male; it has always been and continues to be very gendered.Footnote 12 Yet, Olga Nechaeva’s piece tackles the romanticized idea of the male African student who encountered no racism.
Focusing on the experiences of two African male writers—Malian Gaoussou Diawara and Ethiopian Fikre Tolossa—at the Gorʹkii Literary Institute in the 1960s and 70s, Nechaeva explores the contradictions, perhaps intentional amnesia, in her subjects’ public memoirs that denied racism’s existence in the USSR. Through a deep dive into Russian archives and their Soviet peers’ memoirs, Nechaeva uncovers a darker story, that the two Africans had, in fact, been subject to “exoticization, discrimination, and racist behavior” at the Gorʹkii Literary Institute. How, then, do we understand or approach this ambivalence in scholarly discourses and quests for the “truth” about Africa-Soviet encounters and the reception of Black people in SEEES? Nechaeva’s essay, then, straddles the space between “personal disillusionment and the enduring appeal of the Soviet ideal” of anticolonialism and socialist solidarity.Footnote 13 Perhaps this particular contradiction can be explored in the two essays centering on blackness and Black people in Poland.
Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ and Margaret Ohia-Nowak examined the positive and unprecedented reception of two famous Black figures—Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah and the African American basketball star Kent Washington—in Poland in the 1960s and 80s, respectively, versus how everyday Black people were treated in Poland. In so doing, they argue that blackness was an integral and “prominent” component of Poland’s public and private spheres, which functioned in concert and contradiction. Their essay destabilizes the idea that “blackness was an irrelevant category in socialist societies” by demonstrating all the ways it penetrated the Polish reading and viewing publics. Maciej Duklewski’s and Łukasz Zaremba’s essay furthers this point, showing how anti-Black racism or degrading ideas of blackness were present within Polish society before, during, and after its socialist days. They decry Poland’s “version of ‘white innocence.’” Through a historical analysis of blackface in Poland’s entertainment industry, particularly by linking its origins and participation to a “transnational colonial imagination,” Duklewski and Zaremba tie Polish blackface culture, which would assume its own distinct character, directly to American blackface, with its inbuilt and constantly evolving anxieties over culture, modernity, colonialism, and racial hierarchies.
Alexandra Chiriac also examines how performers and performances become inflection points on ideas of blackness and windows into Black lived experiences in Romania. Chiriac’s essay challenges scholars of east central Europe to look to the archive’s absences and silences to find examples of constructions and understandings of blackness as they relate to race and racialization in the region. In the article, Chiriac recounts her adventure in learning more about two Black American performers who made lives for themselves in Romania in the 1920s. What first appears as a passing image without context becomes an entry point to interrogate how racial formations and anti-Black racism emerge and structure Romanian society.
The next three essays turn our attention to how ideas of blackness come to incorporate Romani people, a people without immediate genealogical ties to Africa.Footnote 14 The concept of Romani “blackness” has circulated transnationally for generations, reflecting the social ostracism of the community as much as it does their perceived phenotypical difference from white majorities. The idea even penetrates some Romani communities themselves, where designation as “white” or “Black” is based on skin tone and their presumed societal privilege or disadvantage.Footnote 15 Anti-Roma racism, then, emerges in structural and everyday forms. And, as scholars have recently noted, Romani “blackness” provides an emic structuring of the racialized hierarchy in Europe, particularly in those spaces without sizable populations of African and/or African diasporic people.Footnote 16 “Romaphobia” remains the last acceptable form of racism; anti-Roma racism has become so normalized that it is, essentially, a “common sense” way for majority white populations to interact with members of Roma communities.Footnote 17
Centering Romania, Marius Turda and Bolaji Balogun show how Roma people in central and eastern Europe from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century were racialized and inscribed as “black” and “primitive” through newspaper cartoons and the eugenics movement. They highlight how non-Romani Romanian ethnographers and physicians distinguished between “nomadic ‘black’ (schwarze Zigneuner) and the ‘white’ assimilated Roma (weisse Zigeuner).” They argue that the ongoing construction of Roma blackness is an intentional effort by non-Roma peoples in Romania to claim whiteness and cultural belonging in relation to western Europe.
Chelsea Ohueri’s essay directly engages with how Egyptian and Roma communities in Albania use the terms “white hands” or “white side”(dorë e bardhë) and “black hands” or “black side” (dorë e zezë) to indicate an individual’s visual proximity to whiteness, revealing the globality of the Du Boisian color line.Footnote 18 Ohueri, similar to other contributors to this issue, addresses the troubles past scholars in the field have had in acknowledging racial formations and racialization in central and southeast European countries. Moreover, like others, Ohueri challenges the field to move beyond its self-constructed exceptionalism and allow the reality of blackness and whiteness, in its local and transnational manifestations, to inform how we understand and engage with difference and marginalization in southeast Europe and Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ohueri argues that anti-blackness and anti-Roma racism are “co-constitutive processes, as European whiteness is defined against blackness and Romaniness.”
Savić turns to the Black intellectual Audre Lorde’s works to address how Serbian feminist circles omit the Roma perspective and employ only superficial engagement with Lorde as a symbol of “black cool.”Footnote 19 She further articulates their selective engagement with Black female perspectives as a form of “epistemic devouring,” creating a case for connecting Roma perspectives to what she terms “Mahala blackness,” or “the racialization and Blackness of Roma.” In this way, Savić demonstrates the elastic nature of blackness as a “social condition.” And in so doing, Savić engages with French historian and politician, Pap Ndiaye, about how blackness affects populations beyond the African diaspora who are racialized as Black.Footnote 20
Last, but certainly not least, Mina Magda’s piece explores how imperial Russian portraits captured “the problem of rendering the free(d) but servile black body within a Russian imperial landscape.” Magda argues that the Russian aristocracy employed the image of the “moor” in self-fashioned portraits to represent “Russia’s civilizational ascendancy and imminent arrival at the scene of modernity.” The article shows that the Black figure—a servant—was drawn as an ornament “to Russia’s agrarian economy and estate” while being cast aside from the canvas. In this sense, Magda’s and Turda and Balogun’s essays communicate with each other, demonstrating how non-Black peoples in SEEES employed Black people’s images and blackness to fashion societal self-meanings in relation to western Europe, modernity, and whiteness.
In sum, these essays demonstrate that Black people (their existence) and ideas of blackness in SEEES can be found in multiple spectres and arenas. These essays and work on this subject matter over the last half century certainly debunk ideas that the absence of American chattel slavery or African colonies secluded SEEES communities from ideas of blackness, Black people, or that Black people have been absent from these communities. These papers demonstrate how ideas of blackness and anti-blackness move between and within human-constructed borders and languages. The question then goes beyond their absence or novelty, but to how integral these figures and ideas of them have been to SEEES over the centuries.
Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor at Rice University. He is the author of Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War Projects (Cambridge, 2025) and co-edited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Su Lin Lewis. He is currently co-editing the two-volume Cambridge History of African Political Thought and has published articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History, and the Journal of West African History.
Sunnie Rucker-Chang is the Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Culture, Associate Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, and Interim Chair of African and African American Studies at the Ohio State University. She works, writes, and researches on the social construction of race and culture as it relates to privileged and marginalized communities in Europe, especially central and southeast Europe. In her research, Rucker-Chang focuses on how literature and film contribute to culture and nationalist identities, especially in the creation and maintenance of racialized communities in southeast Europe and how the demographics of a field can affect pedagogy and community participation. Her research and projects have been funded by the American Association of University Women, American Councils, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The US National Security Agency, Taft Research Center, University Research Council, and US Russia Foundation.
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