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Lorde in Serbia: (Re)conceptualizing American and Proposing Mahala-Blackness at the Semi-Periphery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2026

Jelena Savić
Jelena Savić*
Affiliation:
Centre for Gender Reserch, Uppsala university, Uppsala, Sweden
*
Email: jelena.savic@gender.uu.se
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Abstract

Audre Lorde (1934–1992), a renowned figure in the American Black feminist canon, shaped feminist and antiracist struggles globally, including those in Europe. Drawing on Piro Rexhepi’s framing of the Balkans as a white enclosure marked by European colorblindness, non-aligned racial innocence, and semi-peripheral “desire for the West,” I use content-based digital ethnography to examine Lorde’s presence in Serbian feminist production since the 2000s. The results show that while Lorde’s figure circulates, the engagement with her work stays mainly quotational, decontextualized, and stripped of racial specificity. Relying on critical theory of blackness, especially the work of Hortense Spillers and Afropessimist thought of Frank B. Wilderson III, I argue that Lorde in Serbia does not escape the American race grammar. The symbolic use of her work signals antiracist virtue, allowing the wounded semi-peripheral white subject proximity to global liberal whiteness. At the same time, Lorde’s blackness anchored in American geopolitical dominance remains canonical, while local Roma mahala-blackness stays unacknowledged, if not impossible.

Keywords

Audre Lordeblacknesscritical Roma theorySerbiawhiteness

Information

Type
Critical Forum: Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 84 , Issue 3 , Fall 2025 , pp. 563 - 572
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - SA
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is used to distribute the re-used or adapted article and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Audre Lorde (1934–92) was a Black feminist, lesbian, poet, and activist whose work critically engaged with the intersecting structures of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia throughout the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. Born to Caribbean immigrant parents in Harlem, Lorde developed a literary and political voice that foregrounded the transformative potential of difference, resisting both the white-dominated feminist movement and patriarchal structures within the Black liberation movement. Lorde’s work became a vital part of the American feminist canon, while being socialist and internationalist in character, it also became influential beyond the US, shaping feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial movements.Footnote 1 Lorde’s impact in Europe is especially noticeable during the 1980s in Berlin, where she played a crucial role in the political transnational self-understanding and organizing of the Black German feminist movement, leading to the formation of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, ISD (Initiative of Black People in Germany), as well as the first feminist and lesbian collective by Black women for Black women named Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland, ADEFRA (Black Women in Germany).Footnote 2 Similarly, how El-Tayeb claims, “Audre Lorde’s work in particular proved to be a decisive influence” for the Dutch Surinamese and other Black activists and scholars gathered in Amsterdam during the 1980s.Footnote 3

It is no wonder that Lorde’s production has been taken up by Balkan semi-peripheral feminist and queer collectives in their shared socialist internationalism.Footnote 4 Her work on difference and sisterhood was especially relevant in the context of the Yugoslav wars (1990–2001) and the following years of ethnonationalist violence sustaining militarized masculinity and patriarchal power structures.Footnote 5 By the early 2000s, Lorde was one of the few American Black feminist authors translated in Serbia. Sestra Autsajderka: Eseji i Govori (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches) was published in 2002 in Serbian translation through the efforts of the feminist publishing house Feministička 94 and the nongovernmental organization Women in Black.Footnote 6 Her book ZAMI: Novo Čitanje Mog Imena (Zami: The New Spelling of My Name) was released in 2022, printed by the feminist foundation Reconstruction Women’s Fund (RWF).Footnote 7 These publishers have played a significant role in shaping Serbian feminism by determining the availability of feminist literature and theory. To understand Lorde within this particular local feminist context from a generally neglected Roma standpoint(s), it is worth noting that most feminist initiatives in Serbia during the 2000s retained their socialist internationalism and Yugoslav antinationalist sentiment.Footnote 8 However, although the case of Women in Black bears some resemblance in its appearance to the Black Sash movement of South Africa, feminist initiatives in Serbia have been operating in the register of nationality and ethnicity rather than race.Footnote 9

Despite recognizing Lorde’s feminist contributions, as will be shown later, there is a noticeable neglect and distance from race in her work in Serbian feminism. This should be understood as a part of a prevailing tendency in Europe, which I would briefly reflect upon. After WWII, race was proclaimed a debunked biological, scientific, social, and political category, leading to the affirmation of the idea of color-blindness, facilitating further reliance on culturally defined notions of nationality or ethnicity; different authors have substantially criticized this already.Footnote 10 The erasure of the European colonial past and historical contribution to scientific racism ensured the post-WWII color-blind legal context.Footnote 11 Societal and institutional racist practices endured, however, leaving racialized groups and social movements deprived of hermeneutical and legal tools to make them intelligible and to address them.Footnote 12 Fatima El-Tayeb reflects explicitly on the German context, highlighting the important influence of American Black authors, such as Lorde, during the 1980s as a critical awareness point, illuminating the state of European color-blindness.Footnote 13 Despite the proposal that the Cold War left eastern Europe somewhat insulated and, for this reason, out of touch with race, which can be found in the work of Anikó Imre, recent studies document east European placement in racial politics and investment in invisibilized whiteness.Footnote 14 Furthermore, considering the Yugoslav context, as Peter Wright and Sunnie Rucker-Chang remind us, during the 1960s and 70s, non-alignment politics allowed Yugoslav countries to be exposed to global racial differences and discussions about race.Footnote 15 However, when it comes to the politics of memory, I agree with Ana Sladojević on account of Yugoslav nominal antiracism.Footnote 16 Exposure and debates about the existence of Yugoslav racism did not prevent its dismissal and relativization in practice, which might also be an issue with the contemporary attempts to revoke the Yugoslav legacy.Footnote 17 Similarly, as Sladojević argues, the subsequent ideological break with socialism added another layer of forgetfulness even to nominal anticolonial politics.Footnote 18 There are other equally critical perspectives on this part of Yugoslav history.Footnote 19 However, celebratory leftist accounts of the socialist and non-aligned past, particularly fashionable feminist idealizations and declarative inclusivity of the Yugoslavian political era that leverage today’s claims on postcoloniality, are a noticeable phenomenon.Footnote 20 The transitioning status after the fall of the Berlin Wall further reinforced the perception of east Europeans—particularly those from the Balkans—as underprivilege and victimized in relation to western and EU countries, leading at times to the self-proclaimed status of the “Negroes of Europe.”Footnote 21

From a Balkan and Roma positionality, I would agree with Piro Rexhepi on the “Balkan route” as “an overlooked site of connected global histories of race and coloniality that inform ongoing georacial imaginaries of a world of white enclosure.”Footnote 22 Seeing the Balkans as a white enclosure could explain why I, as a Roma feminist in Serbia during the 2000s, would have to leave the country to learn that colorblind Europe does not only belong to but is the birthplace of global white supremacy regimes.Footnote 23 It would also explain why it stays impossible to state, from a Roma standpoint, the obvious fact that Serbian feminism is white.Footnote 24 The color-blind nature of Serbian feminism has profoundly shaped the political and intellectual environment in which my feminist formation took place. It set the limits of my feminist worldview, leaving me to grapple with hermeneutical and epistemic poverty: an inability to theoretically grasp and articulate my own experiences of racialization. In parallel, the continued presence of Lorde’s work on race, rich in hermeneutical potential for racialized women across Europe, has remained largely unengaged. Together, these factors motivate my investigation of Lorde’s feminist reception in Serbia, which I explore in greater detail below.

Lorde in Serbia

In the following sections, I will present the findings of an analysis of Lorde’s presence in feminist material available online from the early 2000s, followed by an interpretation of the representation of American blackness that I believe emerges from this reception of Lorde. The material is collected during several months of research in 2024 through the Google search engine using keywords including Lorde’s name, titles of Lorde’s books, names of major feminist organizations in Serbia active at the time, and words like “Serbia” and “feminism” in both Serbian and English. The sample consisted of around forty items subjected to content analysis. Results include a diverse range of formats, including short announcements, calls for discussion or book presentations, information on the distribution of Lorde’s book, and a limited number of academic texts that engage with Lorde’s ideas. Predominantly, Lorde appears in this research through a short quotation in a written post, a transcribed interview, or a talk.

In more detail, dating to the early 2000s, I came across several announcements for the film Audre Lorde—The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992, showcased at a lesbian cultural festival in Novi Sad.Footnote 25 According to the book, there was a call for a public discussion named “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.”Footnote 26 It is categorized under the “Gender and Culture” section, highlighting the author’s poetic practice as part of a debating and reading club within the Gender Studies program established at a private Faculty for Media and Communication in Belgrade, where prominent, white, and mainstream Serbian feminist academics teach. Next, a low-quality video recording from one of Belgrade’s key alternative cultural agents during the 2000s, the Cultural Center REX, emerged, including a brief presentation of the same book.Footnote 27 The video also features a recording of a feminist performance from 2002 on the topic of disability, serving as inspiration for the book’s cover, which depicts two women using wheelchairs. The performance, valuable in its own right, has unfortunately little to do with race, disclosing feminist universalist and colorblind ideas of the positionality of an “outsider.” Furthermore, there is information about the distribution of Lorde’s second translation, which appears after one of the lectures in Subotica by the Association of Women’s Studies and Research from Novi Sad, but has nothing to do with race either.Footnote 28 Additionally, a chapter, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, already available in the existing translation, was added to a collection of workshop materials focusing on lesbian existence.Footnote 29 It appears alongside texts of Serbian lesbian feminists, a poem by Adriene Rich, and texts of white American authors like Joan Nestle, Andrea Dworkin, and Dorothy Allison.Footnote 30 Only a few actual academic works engage with Lorde’s production. One article utilizes Lorde’s ideas to examine the role of emotions in activism, but race is treated as circumstantial and, in fact, disappears from the discussion.Footnote 31 A superficial review of Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches emerges, and a more substantial review of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name follows, recognizing whiteness in Lorde’s work.Footnote 32 The most theoretical engagement with racial issues is found in several references in the work of Adriana Zaharijević, including two footnotes and one in-text mention in the book, which discusses race as part of the historiography of the concept of womanhood within the western, specifically American and English context of citizenship.Footnote 33 Finally, the majority of the links found led to the posts and materials on the websites of activist, feminist, and leftist organizations, including interviews and transcripts of activists’ speeches.Footnote 34 These sources, predominantly from recent times, employ short quotations like “the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house,”Footnote 35 usually from a universalistic feminist or leftist standpoint, referring to issues not related to race. I will offer an interpretation of these findings, moving toward understanding Lorde’s race-less presence in Serbia and in relation to an invisible Roma racialization.

Interpreting Lorde’s Blackness

Likely due to the extensive growth of the Internet in Serbia after the 2000s, search results of this research can only go so far. Nevertheless, in the following interpretation of findings, I argue that short quotational practice, more symbolic than substantive, has been a principal way of engaging with Lorde’s work in semi-peripheral feminist activism, theory, and practice. Primarily introduced by second-wave lesbian feminists, Lorde is predominantly represented through the lens of her identity as a woman, lesbian, and a poet within the framework of the white American feminist cultural, activist, and theoretical canon.Footnote 36 More engagement with her work on race and blackness in this sample is found only in Zaharijević.Footnote 37 While the book is a valuable contribution to Serbian feminism, in my reading, race appears to serve the genealogical account of the author’s primary focus: white women’s citizenship.Footnote 38 Notably, the authors do not engage in auto-reflection or motivated engagement with race, whiteness, or blackness within the context of Serbian white feminism. This is significant given that many, if not all, of these authors exemplify this very context.

In Lorde’s letter to Mary Daly—a white American radical lesbian feminist whose selection of myths in her book Gyn/Ecology provoked Lorde’s response—Lorde asks: “Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.”Footnote 39 As the words demonstrate, in the late 1970s Lorde recognized her work as instrumentally used for reflection of white women’s subjectivity, superiority, and the significance of their resistance to patriarchy, implicitly Othering Black women. Although this research is limited, the predominant quotational use of race without engagement with politics supports the claim that Lorde’s question can today equally be posed in the Serbian semi-periphery. In its own victimization, in the status of “exploited Humans,” a feminist on the Serbian semi-periphery might claim closeness to a racialized author such as Lorde.Footnote 40 However, I would invite David Eltis’s distinction between “the image of the Slave and freedom for the Slave” in understanding of whiteness in this context.Footnote 41 Frank B. Wilderson, relying on Saidiya Hartman’s idea of the eighteenth century fungibility of American blackness, clarifies the distinction, pointing to the fact that “exploited Humans” seized the image of the slave “as an enabling vehicle that animated the evolving discourse of their own emancipation,” leaving the slave behind.Footnote 42

In parallel with the musical tradition of Black “talking back” sound, I see Lorde’s “talking back” work in the Serbian feminist context as disparagingly reduced to quotational “Black noise.”Footnote 43 For white ears, her production is translated to a scratching racialized silence at the beginning or the end of a record, serving as a hushed, comforting background for local, white, semi-peripheral feminist voices. In other words, despite her strong agency and authorship, Lorde appears on the European semi-periphery in her epistemic death, read here as an element of Black social death.Footnote 44 Her agential experience and transformative knowledge born in blackness disappear. Using Hortense J. Spillers’ terms, in this epistemic capture, Lorde’s “birthed” work in “epistemic kinship” is turned into dispossessed “epistemic property.”Footnote 45 It is captured only to become, as blackness itself, an empty container, and serve discharged under white privilege as a romanticized poetic embellishment and a semi-peripheral legitimizing token.Footnote 46 White feminism already suffered severe critique for its flattening universalism.Footnote 47 If Charles Mills is right, it is part of global whiteness and the idea of white superiority.Footnote 48

Thus, Lorde finds herself here on the ground of the global, whitewashed, hegemonic notion of universal, international, color-blind feminist solidarity. Relying on the idea of the floating fungibility of blackness, my claim that Lorde’s name and the authors’ produced epistemic good is being treated as a white public good, on a white “anti-racist” feminist market, available to white women globally for their own purposes.Footnote 49 Furthermore, considering the unrestricted accessibility of the epistemic “being for the captor” in Spillers’s terms, Lorde emerges as a version of the Mammy figure: a reminiscence of home slaves providing care work.Footnote 50 In the US context, the role of the birthing doula is introduced into the health care system to alleviate the experiences of Black pregnant women in hospitals, hopefully reducing childbirth-related health risks and rising mortality rate.Footnote 51 This service includes various forms of preparation for the experience, such as the provision of information, direct interventions, and mediation with medical staff, as well as psychological and culturally sensitive care work. Often understood as a practice of Black sisterhood, it was initiated under the premise that the presence of another Black woman within white institutions would provide greater safety.Footnote 52 Many doula managing agencies, however, make this service acquirable regardless of race. The commodification of the care work of Black women made it an affordable “boutique” commodity for better-off white women.Footnote 53 Translating this practice into the feminist context, in my reading Lorde appears in her Mammy role as a nurturing birthing doula facilitating a “boutique,” blissfully racially ignorant, painless birth of a “child”: semi-peripheral, anti-racist, white, feminist competence.

Here, proximity bias and the honor by association fallacy allow quoting practices to signal non-existent racial knowledge and mastery of antiracism.Footnote 54 This further “matures” and signs up white Serbian feminists into what Spillers calls American race grammar.Footnote 55 Adjusting for the political moment and context, it might be perceived as an instrumental use of blackness, signaling proximity to what Sunnie Rucker-Chang identifies as American Black “coolness,” that is, in this case, Serbian feminist racial competence.Footnote 56 In geopolitical terms, paradoxically, the extracted value from this quotational proximity to Lorde’s work is, in practice, a semi-peripheral wage of whiteness.Footnote 57 Bearing in mind the treatment of Lorde’s work by Mary Daly and her persistent challenging encounters with white feminism, this use of Lorde’s blackness fits into a pattern of exercised entitlement and global white privilege.Footnote 58 It is a manifestation of liberal, racial, white, feminist consensus between the white Center and the semi-peripheral white enclosure.Footnote 59

Commenting on the social death experienced by the “Negro,” Wilderson invokes Fanonian blackness as a “site of absolute dereliction at the level of Symbolic” and talks about the engagement of liberal social movements with this state of blackness.Footnote 60 Being charitable, he claims “this is not to say all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.”Footnote 61 Following Rexhepi’s idea of the Balkan semi-periphery as a “guardian of the frontier of the white race and Christianity,” semi-peripheral white feminism as a part of this global civil society can hardly be expected to “dance” this “dance.”Footnote 62 Doing otherwise would introduce an unsettling “scandal” into the grammar of white and especially American hegemony.Footnote 63 Marked by European white belonging and a non-aligned, socialist, and transitioning “race innocent” stance—interestingly existing along semi-peripheral “self-colonizing tendency” and the “desire for the West”—Serbian feminist white enclosure would strive to keep up with the whiteness of the feminist Center.Footnote 64 To my understanding, by referencing Lorde to signal closeness to a racialized and antiracist author and her work in a specific, sanitized manner, Serbian feminism in this ritual part of semi-peripheral “coming of age” follows the same model of performative feminist solidarity criticized by Lorde, while upholding the borders of European whiteness.Footnote 65

A Note on Mahala-Blackness

This sheds light on the lost opportunity for the understanding and application of Lorde’s work in the local context, especially when it comes to racialization and blackness of Roma, to which I will refer to as mahala-blackness.Footnote 66 It should not be lost on the reader that American feminist blackness in this particular semi-peripheral context still does not quite exist in “absolute dereliction,” as Wilderson would have it.Footnote 67 On a symbolic level, although emptied, it retains a mark of geopolitical dominance by being part of western, American, liberal, progressive, emancipated feminist whiteness. When invoked, blackness represented by Lorde consequently becomes canonical—blackness proper—even though it is, by rule, effectively silenced and turned into “Black noise,” a background for white-to-white display.Footnote 68 This devouring process on semi-peripheral terms is what further qualifies Lorde for her nominal presence, and it is as such ingrained in tacit semi-peripheral white feminist grammar. In my understanding, appropriation of canonical blackness provides a certifying rite of passage for the semi-peripheral “wounded” liberal subject towards full humanity associated with western feminist, and especially American, liberal whiteness. Informed by my practical engagement since the 2000s, with few honorable exceptions, no Serbian feminist scholar has relinquished their semi-peripheral or gendered “woundedness” to engage in critical self-reflection and discussions on race and their own whiteness. The rare attempts to engage with local Roma blackness are further taken as an opportunity to claim racial expertise over Roma lives, to be an unavoidable part of semi-peripheral white feminist grammar, which I named in parallel to whiteness: gadjicaness. I have already registered gadjicaness in a tradition of epistemic devouring in race-related east European production.Footnote 69 The most recent demonstrative example is a text on gadje performative solidarity towards Roma women by Ana Vilenica and Ivana Pražić, two established Serbian feminists and leftists.Footnote 70 Drawing ideas solely from my own blog and presenting the arguments extracted from my life and often traumatizing experiences as their own epistemic achievement, this case demonstrates why the interpretative claims on blackness by gadje are of special significance to the emancipatory struggles of racialized Roma women on the European semi-periphery, yet to receive recognition on our own terms.

Jelena Savić is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, where she specializes in Critical Digital Humanities and Critical Romany Studies. Her research integrates frameworks of whiteness, decolonial, and critical race theory. She holds a Master’s in Philosophy from Central European University in Budapest, where in her thesis she examined dehumanization through the intersections of scientific racism, sexism, and speciesism. Of Serbian Roma heritage, Savić has been actively involved in Roma and feminist movements since the 2000s. In 2019, she contributed a chapter to The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge). Additionally, Savić is a poet, multimedia artivist, and blogger.

References

1 Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck, eds., Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (Amherst, 2015).

2 Audre Lorde, “Showing Our True Colors,” Callaloo 14, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 67–71; and Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis, 2011), 66.

3 El-Tayeb, European Others, 63.

4 Zsófia Lóránd, “Socialist-Era New Yugoslav Feminism between ‘Mainstreaming’ and ‘Disengagement’: The Possibilities for Resistance, Critical Opposition and Dissent,” The Hungarian Historical Review 5, no. 4 (April 2016): 854–81.

5 Catherine Baker, Bogdan Iacob, Anikó Imre, and James Mark, eds., Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race (Manchester, 2024).

6 Odri Lord, Sestra Autsajderka: Eseji i Govori, trans. Dragana Starčević (Beograd, 2002), https://www.rwfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Odri-Lord-Sestra-autsajderka.pdf (accessed August 14, 2025).

7 Odri Lord, ZAMI: Novo Čitanje Mog Imena (Beograd, 2022), https://www.rwfund.org/2022/11/20/odri-lord-zami-novo-citanje-mog-imena/ (accessed August 14, 2025).

8 Blaženka Despot, Žensko Pitanje i Socijalističko Samoupravljanje, ed., Radule Knežević (Zagreb, 1987); and Neda Božinović, Žensko Pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX Veku (1996).

9 Miloš Urošević in Bojan Bilić, We Were Gasping for Air: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy (Southeast European Integration Perspectives) (Nomos Publishers, 2012), 162.

10 El-Tayeb, European Others; Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago, IL, 1991); Alana Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (London, 2004); Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham, 2016); and Allan Pred, Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination, vol. 8 (Berkeley, 2000).

11 Mathias Möschel, “Race in Mainland European Legal Analysis: Towards a European Critical Race Theory,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 10 (October 2011): 1648–64.

12 Möschel, “Race in Mainland European.”

13 El-Tayeb, European Others; Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”; Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe; Wekker, White Innocence; Pred, Even in Sweden.

14 Anikó Imre, “Eastern Europe:The Time of The Gypsies, The End of Race” (New York, 2005), 79–103, Ch. 18; and Baker et al., Off White.

15 Peter Wright, “‘Are There Racists in Yugoslavia?’ Debating Racism and Anti-Blackness in Socialist Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 81, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 418–41; and Sunnie Rucker-Chang, “‘Black’ Student Migration and the Non-Aligned Movement in Yugoslav Space,” The Slavic and East European Journal 64, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 352–73.

16 Ana Sladojević, “Ponovno Promišljanje Antikolonijalizma Kao Jugoslovenske Vrednosti u Kontekstu Istorijskog Nesvrstavanja,” in Ildiko Erdei, Branislav Dimitrijević, and Tatomir Toroman, eds., Jugoslavija, Zašto i Kako? trans. Mirjana Adaŝević and Iva Živković (Belgrade, 2019), 209–14.

17 Ibid., 211.

18 Ibid., 212.

19 Jelena Subotić and Srdjan Vučetić, “Performing Solidarity: Whiteness and Status-Seeking in the Non-Aligned World,” Journal of International Relations and Development 22, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 722–43; Ljiljana Kolešnik, “Practices of Yugoslav Cultural Exchange with Non-Aligned Countries,” in Paul Stubbs eds., Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries (Montreal, 2023), 176–202.

20 Mitja Velikonja, Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz, trans. Olga Vuković (Ljubljana, 2008); Bojana Videkanić, Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945–1985 (Montreal, 2019); Jasmina Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!”: Feminist Performance Politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester, 2022); and Paul Stubbs, Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries (Montreal, 2023).

21 Marina Hughson Blagojević, “Non-‘White’ Whites, Non-European Europeans and Gendered Non-Citizens: On a Possible Epistemic Strategy from the Semiperiphery of Europe,” in her Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery: A Gender Perspective (Belgrade, 2009), 27–64.

22 Piro Rexhepi, White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality Along the Balkan Route (Durham, 2022), 7.

23 Charles W. Mills, “White Supremacy as Sociopolitical System: A Philosophical Perspective,” in Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva eds., White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (New York, 2003), 35–48.

24 I invoke here the heated discussion at the Faculty of Media and Communication during the organized workshop with Françoise Vergès on her visit to Belgrade in 2022, to which I was invited on the initiative of the French Cultural Center. I stated that Serbian society is racist and that racism is not only reserved for right-wingers and the nationalistic government pushing migrants into closed camps, but that it also appears in the feminist movement, which is by definition white. I was referring to the fact that Roma women are rarely included in any form, especially not finding themselves on decision making places in feminist organizations and initiatives. This simple fact about the absence of Roma women in feminist structures provoked the frustration of Serbian feminists, and I was specifically forbidden to claim this by Djurdja Trajković, the representative of the previously mentioned publisher of Lorde’s book, the Reconstruction Women’s Fund, on account that “there are some women who try to help Roma women.” This type of reaction, invisibilizing structural issues coming from the donor, is not uncommon in my experience; rather, it is standard. This donor indeed funds some projects supporting Roma women, making this lack of critical self-reflection even more problematic, placing the reaction in the context of white fragility, see Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston, 2018), 245–53.

25 NLO, Jelena, “Umetnost Radi Akcije 5 Lezbejski Aktivistički Festival,” BalConn… s pogledom na ljubav, October 19, 2012, at htpps://www.balconn.com/site/dnevnik/vijesti-aktivizam/srbija/1106-umetnost-radi-akcije-5-lezbejski-aktivistiki-festival.html (accessed August 15, 2025); Beta, “Lezbejski aktivistički festival Umjetnost radi akcije u Novom Sadu,” Nezavisne novine, November 1, 2012, at https://www.nezavisne.com/novosti/ex-yu/Lezbejski-aktivisticki-festival-Umjetnost-radi-akcije-u-Novom-Sadu/165567 (accessed August 15, 2025); “Feminizam Antipod Nacionalizma,” Udruženje žena Peščanik, December 17, 2014, at https://udruzenjepescanik.org/aktuelnosti/feminizam-antipod-nacionalizma/ (accessed August 15, 2025).

26 “Tribina: Odri Lord: ‘Sestra Autsajderka,’” Dom Omladine Beograda, September 19, 2013, at https://domomladine.org/debate/tribina-odri-lord-sestra-autsajderka/ (accessed August 15, 2025).

27 “Šaputave Devojke I i II” YouTube video, 22:55, a recording of the plays Šaputave devojke I (1997) and Šaputave devojke II (1999), as well as the presentation of Audre Lord’s book “Sestre autsajderke” (2002), posted by Kulturni centar REX, June 14, 2022, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwOy_ygBic4 (accessed August 15, 2025).

28 M. Bašaragin, “Održana predavanja Ženskih studija u Subotici,” Ženske studije i istraživanja, November 12, 2022, at https://www.zenskestudije.org.rs/aktivnosti/419-obrzana-predavanja-zenskih-studija-u-subotici (accessed August 15, 2025).

29 Lord, Sestra Autsajderka; and Lepa Mlađenović and Tijana Popivoda, eds., Bezuslovno Prijateljstvo Sa Samom Sobom: Materijali Sa Radionica Sa Lezbejkama u Sarajevu 2011 (Sarajevo, 2011), https://fondacijacure.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/bpsss.pdf (accessed on August 15, 2025).

30 Lord, Sestra Autsajderka; and Mlađenović and Popivoda, Bezuslovno Prijateljstvo Sa Samom Sobom.

31 Melanija Lojpur, “Uloga Emocija u Politikama Identiteta,” in Adriana Zaharijević and Katarina Lončarević eds., Feministička Teorija Za Sve: Zbornik Radova Sa Konferencije “Neko Je Rekao Feminizam? Feministička Teorija u Srbiji Danas” (Belgrade, 2018), 337–94.

32 Darija Žilić, “Odri Lord: Sestra autsajderka (Prikaz knjige),” Kruh i ruže 21 (2003): 57–58; and Maja Milatović, “‘The Love of Women, Kind as Well as Cruel’: Feminist Alliances and Contested Spaces in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name,” Genero 18 (2014): 31–50.

33 Adriana Zaharijević, Postajanje Ženom, ed. Slavica Stojanović (Belgrade, 2010), 139, 141, 152.

34 Jelena Lalatović, “Feminističko Lice Otpora,” Marks21, January 23, 2017, at marks21.info/feministicko-lice-otpora/ (accessed on August 15, 2025); “Ja sam kvir osoba, i svima nam treba zakon o rodnom identitetu,” Geten, August 29, 2022, at https://www.transserbia.org/resursi/video/2010-ja-sam-kvir-osoba-i-svima-nam-treba-zakon-o-rodnom-identitetu (accessed on August 15, 2025); Samantha Cole, “Lik je drkao na maloletne likove iz japanskih stripova i objavio svoje nalaze u akademskom časopisu,” Vice, August 18, 2022, at https://www.vice.com/sr/article/like-je-drkao-na-maloletne-likove-iz-japanskih-stripova-i-objavio-svoje-nalaze-u-akademskom-casopisu/(accessed on August 15, 2025); Vasilije Filipović, “Žene i Glasanje: Osnovno Pravo Ili Borba Koja Traje?,” Ide Glas, March 8, 2022, at https://ideglas.rs/2022/03/08/zene-i-glasanje-osnovno-pravo-ili-borba-koja-traje/ (accessed on August 15, 2025); Marija Ratković, “Drugarice: Šest knjiga,” Journal.rs, November 27, 2023, at www.journal.rs/kultura/kolumna/drugarice-sest-knjiga/ (accessed on August 15, 2025); OsnaŽene, “Kako mediji (ne) treba da izveštavaju o feminicidu: OsnaŽene o senzacionalizmu koji zanemaruje dostojanstvo žrtvi,” ELLE Serbia, March 8, 2024, https://elle.rs/Aktivizam/a47295/kako-mediji-ne-treba-da-izvestavaju-o-femicidu.html (accessed on August 15, 2025); and Glif Redakcija, “Šta Čitaju Oni Koji Pišu: Jelena Anđelovska,” Glif, Portal Za Književnost i Kulturu, February 28, 2024, at https://www.glif.rs/blog/sta-citaju-oni-koji-pisu-jelena-andelovska/(accessed on August 15, 2025).

35 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters’ House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, 1984).

36 This became a clearer point thanks to a conversation with Dubravka Djurić, a Serbian feminist poet, theoretician, and performer teaching at the Faculty of Media and Culture. We also collaborated in the “School for Theory and Poetry” at the Association for Women’s Initiative in Belgrade, engaging in feminist anti-racist work from the early 2000s to the present.

37 Zaharijević, Postajanje Ženom.

38 Adriana Zaharijević, review of Gender, Nation, and Women Politicians in Serbia and Kosovo: A Political Ethnography, by Gordana Subotić, Comparative Southeast European Studies 72, no. 2 (June 1, 2024): 270–72; Adriana Zaharijević, “Dissidents, Disloyal Citizens and Partisans of Emancipation: Feminist Citizenship in Yugoslavia and Post-Yugoslav Spaces,” Women’s Studies International Forum 49 (March–April 2015): 93–100; Adriana Zaharijević, “Being an Activist: Feminist Citizenship Through Transformations of Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Citizenship Regimes,” CITSEE Working Paper 2013/28 (Rochester, NY, 2013), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2388703 (accessed August 15, 2025); and Zaharijević, Postajanje Ženom.

39 Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daily,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY, 1984), 68.

40 Frank B. Wilderson, “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics,” in his Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Illustrated edition (Durham, NC, 2010), 19.

41 David Eltis, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation,” The American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (December 1993): 1399–1423.

42 Wilderson, “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics,” 19.

43 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT, 1994).

44 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, 1st ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

45 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 68.

46 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 65–81.

47 Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30, no. 1 (November 1988): 61–88; Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988), 271–313; Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daily”; Lorde, “The Master’s Tool Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Comments at “The Personal and the Political” Panel (Second Sex Conference, New York, October 29, 1979),” in Cherrie Moraga Gloria Anzaldua and Toni Cade Bambara, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Second ed. (New York, 1983), 98–101; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From the Margin to Center (New York, 2015).

48 Mills, “White Supremacy as Sociopolitical System.”

49 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

50 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67; Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass, 2007).

51 Jennifer C. Nash, “Birthing Black Mothers: Birth Work and the Making of Black Maternal Political Subjects,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 47, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2019): 29–50.

52 Nash, “Birthing Black Mothers,” 38.

53 Ibid.

54 Proximity bias refers to the cognitive tendency to favor or connect strongly with individuals, ideas, and information that appear in physical or contextual proximity. In this case, when used, Lorde’s quote affiliates the user of the quote with Lorde as a Black woman, an anti-racist author, and activist. Honor by association is a fallacy in which the positive characteristics of one entity are attributed to another solely because they co-occur. In this instance, the user of Lorde’s quote by the act of quoting gains an undeserved association with Lorde’s expertise in anti-racism, without necessarily engaging in substantive learning or in fact demonstrating an understanding of race and anti-racism. In colloquial terms, it resembles name-dropping, a social tactic used to impress and gain social advantage. In this context, it also carries a racialized dimension.

55 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

56 Rucker-Chang, “‘Black’ Student Migration.”

57 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91, https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised ed edition (Verso Books, 2007).

58 For encounters see Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography, First Edition (Crossing Press, 1982); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984); For global white privilge see Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997); Peggy McIntosh, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in Gender through the Prism of Difference, Third edition, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn et al. (Oxford University Press, 1988).

59 Rexhepi, White Enclosures.

60 Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (92) (2003): 25.

61 Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” 25.

62 Rexhepi, White Enclosures, 15.

63 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 75.

64 Blagojević, “Non-’White’ Whites, Non-European Europeans and Gendered Non-Citizens: On A Possible Epistemic Strategy from The Semiperiphery of Europe,” 34.

65 Rexhepi, White Enclosures.

66 A majority of European Roma live in mahalas, which are similar to American slums and favelas, extremely segregated and dilapidated settlements at the margins of the European cities, disconnected from them symbolically, socially, politically, and economically. As mahalas not only determine life for Roma in geopolitical terms but also symbolically configure a place of belonging on a mental map of gadje, I use it to mark the specificity of Roma racialization and delineate it from other types of European blackness.

67 Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” 25.

68 Rose, Black Noise.

69 Jelena Savić, “The ‘Darker Side’ of East European (Post)Coloniality: The Case of Roma,” (keynote conference paper presented, Relational Approaches to Romani Racialization(s), Prague, 2024), at https://www.eu.avcr.cz/export/sites/eu/.content/files/RA-Conference-Programme_FINAL.pdf.

70 Ivana Pražić and Ana Vilenica, “Gadji Feminism(s) in Serbia: Racial Privilege and ‘Intersectional’ Solidarity in an Eastern European Semiperiphery,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 44, no. 2 (2023): 70–97.