Race and Coloniality in Eastern Europe
Spring semester 2021/22

Lecturer: Andreja Mesarič, PhD
Email: andreja.mesaric@ff.cuni.cz

Course Description
The course covers a range of topics connected to issues of race, colonialism and coloniality in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe. Students will be challenged to reflect critically on the processes that contribute to the construction of racial categories and how they shift over time. They will discuss historical and contemporary processes of racialisation in relation to people coming from outside the region as well as the racialisation of Eastern European Roma, Jewish and Muslim populations. They will be encouraged to reflect on the significance of whiteness in different Eastern European contexts and the peripheral nature of Eastern European whiteness in a broader European context. Furthermore, the course challenges the view that Eastern Europe lacks a history of colonialism by examining the region’s various colonial entanglements through scientific exploration, missionary work and trade, among others. By employing the concept of coloniality, the course also encourages students to engage with how colonial power dynamics have shaped the region and its relations with the wider world beyond specific histories of territorial colonisation.
Through the course students will learn to:
• Think critically abut the processes that contributed to specific constructions of race in a range of Eastern European contexts
• Understand how constructions of race relate to other social categories of difference such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and class
• Understand how whiteness underpins Eastern European nationalisms
• Understand the peripheral and contested nature of Eastern European whiteness within a broader European context
• Learn to apply critical perspectives on race in analysing migration processes within, to, through and from Eastern Europe
• Think critically about boundary making and othering more broadly
• Recognise coloniality as distinct from colonialism and learn how to apply the concept in analysing power inequalities within and beyond Eastern Europe

Course Requirements and Grading
The grade will be based on:
-20% class attendance and participation
-80% final exam (for BA students)
-80% final essay (for MA students)
Participation: You are expected to prepare for each class by reading the assigned articles or book chapters (1-2 per class). You are expected to share your critical evaluation of the readings in class discussions. This includes reflecting on the following questions:
• What argument(s) is the author making?
• Do you agree or disagree with the argument(s) and why?
• What is the paper aiming to achieve?
• How does it expand our knowledge of race and coloniality in Eastern Europe?
• How does it relate to the rest of the literature we have discussed?
Exam: BA students are required to pass a written exam asking them to reflect on a series of questions related to the course material. Details of what the exam will look like will be discussed in class towards the end of the semester.
Essay: MA students are required to write an essay on a topic related to the content of the course in the length of 3000 words. You will be able to choose from a selection of topics offered by the lecturer. You can also propose your own topic related to the content of the course, however, this will need to be approved by the lecturer. In your essay you are expected to engage with a minimum of 10 books or articles from the weekly course readings and additional recommended literature list.

Weekly schedule
Week 1: Questioning Eastern European colonial and racial exceptionalism
Week 2: Symbolic geographies of Eastern Europe
Week 3: Eastern European involvement in European colonial expansion
Week 4: 19th century encounters with non-Europeans and the history of racial thinking in EE
Week 5: Racialization of Roma in Eastern Europe
Week 6: Racialization of Jews in Eastern Europe
Week 7: Muslims and racialisation in the Balkans
Week 8: Cold war era relations between Eastern Europe and “the Third World”
Week 9: Recent and contemporary migration within Eastern Europe
Week 10: Contemporary migration to and through Eastern Europe and the EU border regime
Week 11: Coloniality of power between Europe’s “East” and “West”
Week 12: Peripheral whiteness of Eastern Europeans
Preliminary reading list
Baker, Catherine. “Postcoloniality without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies.” interventions 20, no. 6 (2018): 759-784.
Baker, Catherine. Race and the Yugoslav Region. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Bakić-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31.
Bartulin, Nevenko. The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia. London: Brill, 2013.
Bickert, Matthias and Chelsi West Ohueri. “Football on the Fringes of Europe: Black African Players and their Livelihoods in Albania” in Diversity of Migration in South-East Europe. 2016.
Bjelić, Dušan. “Toward a Genealogy of the Balkan Discourses on Race.” interventions 20, no. 6 (2018): 906-929.
Boatcă, M. (2006). “No Race to the Swift: Negotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present Eastern Europe.” Human Architecture: Journal of Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5, no. 1 (2006): 91-104.
Böröcz, J. (2001). “Introduction: Empire and Coloniality in the “Eastern Enlargement” of the European Union.” In Böröcz and Kovacs (eds.) Empire‘s New Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement. Telford: Central Europe Review, pp. 4-50.
Böröcz, J., and M. Sarkar (2017). “The Unbearable Whiteness of the Polish Plumber and the Hungarian Peacock Dance around “Race”.” Slavic Review 76, no. 2 (2017): 307-314.
Chari, Sharad and Katherine Verdery. “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War.” Comparative Studies in History and Society 51, no. 1 (2009): 6-34.
Chioni Moore, David. “Is the Post- in Post-colonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Post-colonial Critique.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–128.
Danewid, Ida. “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History.” Third World Quarterly 38 (7): 1674–1689.
De Genova, Nicholas, 2018, "The “migrant crisis” as racial crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?" Ethnic and racial studies 41, no. 10 (2017): 1765-1782.
Dzenovska, Dace. 2013. "Historical Agency and the Coloniality of Power in Postsocialist
Europe.” Anthropological Theory 13 (4): 394-416.
Fox, Jon E., Laura Morosa̧nu, and Eszter Szilassy. “The Racialization of the New European Migration to the UK.” Sociology 46, no. 4 (2012): 680–695.
Gagyi, Agnes. “‘Coloniality of Power’ in East Central Europe: External Penetration as Internal Force in Post-Socialist Hungarian Politics.” Journal of World-Systems Research 22, no. 2 (2016).
Ghodsee, K. R. (2019). Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity During the Cold War. Durham: Duke University Press.
Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
Gržinić, Marina, editor. Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018.
Imre, Aniko. “Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: The Time of the Gypsies, the End of Race.” Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Alfred López, ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.
Jezernik, Božidar. Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers. London: Saqi, 2004.
Karkov, Nikolay. “Decolonizing Praxis in Eastern Europe: Toward a South-to-South Dialogue.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 7, no. 2 (2015): 180-200.
Kóczé, Angéla and Márton Rövid. “Roma and the politics of double discourse in contemporary Europe” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 24, no. 6. (2017): 684-700.
Kóczé, Angéla. “Transgressing Borders: Challenging Racist and Sexist Epistemology” in Roma Activism: Reimagining Power and Knowledge, eds. Sam Beck and Ana Ivasiuc. New York: Berghahn, 2018.
Koobak, Redi and Raili Marling. “The decolonial challenge: Framing post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe within transnational feminist studies.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 4 (2014): 330-343.
Kuus, M. “Europe’s Eastern expansion and the reinscription of Otherness in East- Central Europe.” Progress in Human Geography, 28, no. 4 (2004): 472–489.
Majstorović, Danijela, and Zoran Vučkovac. 2016. “Rethinking Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Post-Coloniality.” Journal of Language and Politics 15, no. 2 (2016): 147– 172.
Mignolo, W., and Tlostanova, M. Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Columbus: Ohio State University, 2012.
Mildnerova, Kateřina. Namibian Czechs: History and Identity of the Namibian Children Raised in Czechoslovakia. S.l.: LIT VERLAG, 2021.
Mudure, Mihaela. “Blackening Gypsy Slavery: The Romanian Case.” In Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. Heike Raphael-Hernandez (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2004.
Neuburger, Mary. The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Parvulescu, Anca. “European racial triangulation” in Postcolonial transitions in Europe: contexts, practices and politics. London: Rowman and Littl