This volume foregrounds racial difference as a key to an alternative history of the Central and Eastern European region, which revolves around the role of whiteness as the unacknowledged foundation of semi-peripheral nation-states and national identities, and of the region’s current status as a global stronghold of unapologetic white, Christian nationalisms. Contributions address the pivotal role of whiteness in international diplomacy, geographical exploration, media cultures, music, intellectual discourses, academic theories, everyday language and banal nationalism’s many avenues of expressions. The book offers new paradigms for understanding the relationships among racial capitalism, populism, economic peripherality and race.
An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.
Table of Contents:
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Note on the cover image
Introduction: racial disavowals – historicising whiteness in Central and Eastern Europe – James Mark, Anikó Imre, Bogdan C. Iacob and Catherine Baker
1 Wilson’s white world: the foundation of Central-Eastern European nation-states after World War I – James Mark
2 The ‘racial contract’, ‘whiteness contract’, and Central Europe – Bolaji Balogun
3 Not quite white: Russians as Turanians in nineteenth-century Polish thought – Maciej Górny
4 Racial thinking among Czech anthropologists: the case of Vojtech Suk – Victoria Shmidt
5 ‘Hungarian Indians’: race and colonialism in Hungarian ‘Indian play’ – Zoltán Ginelli
6 Peripheral whiteness and racial belonging and non-belonging: accounts from Albania – Chelsi West Ohueri
7 The aesthetics of alternation and the returns of race: Poland and the Jewish Question – Sudeep Dasgupta
8 Retailored for a Soviet spectator: racial difference and whiteness in the films of the 1930s to the early 1950s – Irina Novikova
9 ‘With the help of the great Russian people’: the (invisible) whiteness of Soviet anti-colonialism and gender emancipation from Central Asia to Khartoum – Yulia Gradskova
10 The whiteness of ‘Christian Europe’: the case of Hungary – Paul Hanebrink
11 Alien at home, white overseas: the Polish interwar Maritime and Colonial League and the ‘Jewish Question’ – Marta Grzechnik
12 Midsommar and the production of white fantasy – Anikó Imre
13 In pursuit of Western modernity: Russian-speaking migrants claiming whiteness in Helsinki – Daria Krivonos
14 The ‘perpetual foreigner’ in Serbia: on being marked and unmarked in a ‘raceless’ state – Sunnie Rucker-Chang
15 Re-routing Eastern European whiteness: relational racialisation and historical proximity – Spela Drnovšek Zorko
16 Through the Balkans to Christchurch: Southeast Europe and global white nationalist historical mythology – Catherine Baker
Index
About the Author :
Catherine Baker is Reader in 20th-Century History at the University of Hull.
Bogdan C. Iacob is Researcher at the 'Nicolae Iorga' Institute of History, Romanian Academy
Anikó Imre is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.
James Mark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter.
Review :
'With Off white no one can any longer doubt that race and racism are central features of Central and East European societies and their histories. Researchers and teachers of the modern state across the region now have an authoritative and compelling resource to address these questions. This is a significant contribution both to racial and East European studies.'
David Theo Goldberg, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine
'Struggling to break free from the tenets of outdated area studies, Off White is an ambitious and timely collective endeavour showcasing a wide spectrum of historical and current perspectives on race and whiteness in Central and Eastern Europe. Using rich and detailed case studies, the authors zoom in on the complex and contradictory regional racial dynamics. This collection is an important milestone in critical race studies, as well as in the historiography of Central and Eastern Europe. A volume to be celebrated.'
Madina Tlostanova, Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms, Linköping University, Sweden, author of What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?
'This exciting and sophisticated collection fundamentally challenges the tendency of the study of whiteness in the United States to regard racial identity and hatred as being learned by immigrants after their arrival. It describes a varied and troubling history of whiteness prior to and then parallel to racial learning in the United States. The chapters show how deeply claims to whiteness mattered in the past of central and eastern Europe, underwriting anti-Jewish and anti-Roma policies, mixing race and class, and giving elites a way to envision belonging in Europe. Off white is a revelation and a delight on many different levels.'
David Roediger teaches American studies at University of Kansas. His books include Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White
'Contributing to this recent interdisciplinary debate, “Off White” can be rightly regarded a milestone on the way to locating Central and Eastern Europe in a global history of ‘race’. The volume is based on the conference “Historicizing ‘Whiteness’ in Eastern Europe and Russia”, which took place in Bucharest in 2019, and brings together an impressive number of authors who have all been working for years on the relevance of racial logics and practices in Eastern Europe. With a weighty introduction by the editors and a total of 16 case studies, the volume is so extensive that the contributions cannot all be mentioned separately in this review. Nevertheless, they are all warmly recommended reading.'
H/Soz/Kult
'Blending history, sociology, visual culture studies and media analysis, the book offers multidimensional analysis by bringing together different methodological approaches to the study of whiteness, race and racialisation in Central and Eastern Europe, showing how the region is intertwined with both historical and contemporary global racial orders. The book provides a great theoretical depth and empirical richness to the intersection of European studies, race theory and international relations. Analysing Central and Eastern Europe’s relationship with whiteness and racialisation in both historical and contemporary contexts, this study is a valuable source of reference not only for academics, but also for policy makers and activists.'
Ramiz Abbaszada, Journal of Contemporary European Studies
'The volume demonstrates how deeply whiteness and race have been and continue to be present in the region, and how – just like in other parts of the world - they have influenced scholarship on East-Central Europe. Even though the region is often granted a narrative of complete innocence, it has not remained untouched by globally racialized thinking. This anthology is of interest not only to researchers in Eastern and East-Central European studies but also embeds the region within the broader discourse of critical race theory. It is therefore recommended to anyone engaged with questions of racism and global power structures.'
Anastasiia Marsheva, Journal of East Central European Studies
