Abstract
This chapter sets efforts to research race in the (post-)Yugoslav region in the context of what Kimberlé Crenshaw has termed today’s ‘post-post-racial’ times, in which progressives who might have believed that global society was on an inevitable course towards overcoming racism have now had to confront its open resurgence. From the perspectives of Crenshaw and other critical race scholars whose work has opened up new possibilities to understand south-east Europe within the global politics of race, however, the persistence of structural racism as a historical legacy of colonialism and the enslavement of Africans means that the ‘post-racial’ moment was already an illusion. Movements to ‘decolonise the university’ and its knowledge production, which have significantly influenced my own working environment as a white anglophone scholar of south-east Europe in the UK, share this structural perspective. The chapter explains the significance of these movements, and struggles in related disciplines to confront sympathies with white supremacism, for researching race after Yugoslavia in a moment where Islamophobic narratives justifying violence against Muslims in the region have become points of identification for the far right worldwide.
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Notes
- 1.
I thank Susan Cooper, one of the SSEES postgraduates I taught in 2011–2012, for asking the question that led me to find this article and wonder why it did not seem to fit into prevailing conceptual frameworks for studying ethnicity and nationalism in south-east Europe—another early step towards researching the global politics of race.
- 2.
The closest it came was a passing reference to ‘supranational partnerships like the Non-Aligned Movement’ emerging through decolonisation processes (Behm et al., 2020: 177).
- 3.
For its annual conference in 2020, the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) announced it had organised a special workshop on ‘Race, Ethnicity and Equality in Slavonic and East European Studies,’ led by Professor Sarah Badcock of the University of Nottingham, to enable colleagues to share experiences of ‘the drive to “decolonise the curriculum”’ (Neumann, 2020).
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Baker, C. (2021). The Call Is Coming from Inside the House: Researching Race After Yugoslavia in ‘Post-post-Racial’ Times. In: Radeljić, B., González-Villa, C. (eds) Researching Yugoslavia and its Aftermath. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70343-1_12
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