The paper set out to answer how logics of racialisation and racism operate in the EU’s documents on anti-racism particularly in relation to Roma community, arguing that these policies paradoxically reproduce the racialisation they aim to dismantle. While the European Union frames racism—especially antigypsyism—as a matter of societal attitudes, the analysis demonstrates that EU institutions themselves continue to contribute to structural racism through policy language and implementation. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Critical Romani Studies the paper employs critical discourse analysis to reveal patterns of deflection, denial, and distancing within key EU documents. It shows how Roma are constructed as a racialised “other,” often aligned with other marginalised groups in ways that reinforce exclusion. By foregrounding institutional responsibility, the paper challenges dominant narratives that externalise racism and highlights how EU frameworks sustain racism, ultimately undermining their stated commitment to anti-racism and equality.

Poetry played a unique role in disseminating anti-colonial thought and solidarity. I argue that the Anthology of Black Poetry in Portuguese (1958), and its circulation in Brazil, strengthen our understanding of this process. By tracing the production and circulation of this anthology as a cultural underground of decolonization, I demonstrate how its poetry articulated a grammar of blackness that resonated with the Brazilian, Thereza Santos. This grammar provided the foundation for Santos’s political solidarity with the African struggles for independence from Portugal. In the end, I reflect on the legacy and limits of poesia negra as a basis for solidarity.

This essay examines how blackness is lived, perceived, and negotiated in (post)socialist Kazakhstan by placing the experiences of two “dual heritage” women—Aminata Uėdrаogo, a contemporary media personality, and Yelena Khanga, a Soviet and Russian-era journalist—in conversation. Prompted by a visit with Uėdrаogo in Almaty, I use autoethnographic and Black feminist methods to explore how blackness functions as both a limit and a possibility within shifting frameworks of race, ethnicity, and national belonging. While scholarship on intermarriage and ethnic mixing in Soviet Central Asia exists, contemporary experiences of people of African descent—particularly women—remain largely absent.1 Through their narratives and embodied experiences, I argue that blackness in Central Asia complicates the presumed rupture between socialist and post-socialist periods and unsettles dominant Eurocentric paradigms of race. This analysis calls for further inquiry into African diasporic presence and theorizations of blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian contexts.

This article engages with the construction of blackness in the socialist public sphere in state socialist Poland by analyzing two case studies: the visit of Kwame Nkrumah to Poland and the career of the US basketball player Kent Washington. While these two cases are embedded in different historical and political moments, they reveal how blackness was familiarized in a visually concrete yet abstract way. What were the promises that came with how blackness was constructed in the late socialist public sphere? How did they resonate within diasporic communities? Drawing on various types of sources, we argue that blackness in the public sphere was neither a danger nor the antithesis of whiteness but revered for political purposes. This framing of blackness—as postcolonial political empowerment or successful career in sport—also created unrealistically high bars for the visual incorporation of Black people.

Building on my research about racialization and marginalization, this article examines race and the global color line in terms of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism, asking how such inquiries can shed light on the ways that blackness and whiteness are configured across southeast Europe and Europe as a whole. This paper has three primary goals: the first is to probe the complexities of the meanings of blackness. The second aim is to examine antiblackness and anti-Romani racism as parallel processes configured by European whiteness. The third objective is to explore how this type of critical analysis can expand scholarly inquiry beyond the discourses that move past race as individualized and immoral, and towards more comprehensive examinations of regional and global racial logics that structure social relations.

This article addresses the underrepresentation of “blackness” within Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), which has historically concentrated on the United States, western Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Despite calls for global expansion, CWS has so far inadequately engaged with the ways in which individuals perceived as “Black” were excluded from the idealized national community in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The marginalization of blackness profoundly influenced discussions around national belonging throughout the twentieth century and continues to shape debates on race in the region today. We re-examine the significance of blackness, particularly through the racialization of Roma communities in interwar Romania and the implications of blackness elsewhere in CEE, while challenging the portrayal of this region as homogeneous and exclusively white.

This essay looks at blackness in the USSR from its contested margins. Focusing on South Africans categorized as “Coloured,” I explore dynamics of translation, solidarity, misunderstanding, and invisibility that arose when differing systems of racial classification interacted. In South Africa under segregation and apartheid, an intermediate category emerged between the dominant white minority and the subjugated black majority: Coloured. As the USSR became involved in South African anti-racist struggles, Soviet citizens did not know how to see and understand these lighter-skinned people who did not fit neatly into Soviet preconceptions about darker-skinned people of African descent. A handful of Coloured activists took on particularly prominent roles representing the plight of black South Africans for Soviet audiences, and being lighter skinned shaped their experiences of the USSR in significant ways. Traversing the realms of Soviet policy, scholarship, cultural production, and everyday interactions, we see remarkable inconsistency in how Coloureds were regarded: as invisible and also hypervisible, artificial and also real, black and also not black. This essay traces Soviet trajectories of the liminal category “Coloured” to explore the extraordinary chaos at the edges of blackness in the USSR.

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.

This article examines African American intellectual Louise Thompson Patterson’s 1932 journey to the Soviet Union as a lens through which to explore the complexities of transnational racial identity across ideological borders. It argues that Patterson’s experiences reveal both her political commitments and the contradictions of Soviet internationalism for Black women seeking alternatives to racial capitalism and gender oppression. Rather than viewing her engagement as naïve or disillusioned, the article situates it within a historically rooted, politically intentional search for liberation. The paper further contends that Soviet reactions to Patterson’s identity illuminate a rigid understanding of blackness, complicating claims of anti-racism and revealing internal hierarchies. By analyzing Patterson’s unpublished writings alongside broader historical currents, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of Black women’s transnational activism, the racial politics of the USSR, and the ongoing challenges of forging solidarity across different conceptions of race and justice.

This paper analyzes imperial Russian images of Black captivity from the mid-nineteenth century. I am concerned foremost with Karl Briullov’s formal techniques for picturing the deferential figure of the Moor. A deracinated, mobile signifier of wealth and sovereignty, the Moor depicts captivity through ornamentality: an aesthetic procedure that attests to the figure’s taming, domestication, and attempted assimilation within the narrative of Russian imperial ascendancy. The Moor belongs to everywhere and everyone yet is made to project national fealty whenever it appears. Of course, to designate a single image or figuration of the Black as “captive” is tautological: within theories of the Black’s interfacing with performance, visual, and media technologies, the compulsion to act, show, and be seen restates captivity, spectacularity, and death as preconditions for the representation of embodied Black life. I argue that in its perspectival alienation on the Russian canvas, the Moor—a generic image of the Black—both materializes Russia’s construction of a racial imaginary and alerts us to its place in global regimes of race-making.