Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial?

"This is about ‘race’ in the Yugoslav region, as its title indicates. It’s a critique of this narrative which says that there were no racialized politics in Yugoslavia, that Yugoslavia was situated in a region that was never colonial, that there were no issues around racial politics. What Catherine was the first to do was to take ideas that were not originally hers, that come from a global scholarship on racial formations, on the complexities of racial identifications, and apply them brilliantly to the case of Yugoslavia, even before socialist Yugoslavia. The key term is ‘white, but not quite’. So, looking at identities situated between black identities, and hegemonic white identities. This is really important and complicated, the shifting racial politics of the Balkans. Maria Todorova’s book on Balkanism, Imagining the Balkans , where she applies Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism to the Balkans, points out in a footnote that ‘this is not about race’. Well, it’s not about race, if you see race in essentialist categories, but it’s absolutely about race, if you see race as culture, and hierarchies—whiteness, not-quite whiteness and various kinds of blackness. So what Catherine does beautifully is take that and apply it to so many different things. In the Non-Aligned Movement, she talks about race blindness. There’s also the way in which black students come to Belgrade and are both allowed to be a voice in politics, but also get subjected to some racist abuse. You get some Yugoslav politicians who really understand Africa. You get others who are very racist about Africa. She also weaves in music. Some of her best work is on the Eurovision Song Contest. She finds obscure YouTube videos in which you have rappers from Serbia using tropes from some African music. It is an incredibly brilliant book. Catherine is doing more work now on Yugoslavia and Rijeka’s involvement in the sugar trade. So I’m looking forward to more on this and I actually want to work with a number of people on the racial politics of the Non-Aligned Movement because I’m not sure the Yugoslavs fully got this. There were ideologies of Pan-Africanism, ideologies of Negritude, Black Power, you certainly have black Marxism. This really interests me Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kaunda, Senghor on Negritude. How far did these actually get into Yugoslav consciousness and politics? Not so much I fear. I talk about a de-racialized anti-racism because the Yugoslavs were very happy to pass resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia. But did they really see racial capitalism as a global force? I’m not sure. You can find speeches and phrases from Tito in which he seems to understand the racial dynamics. And then you’ve got others in which he says that it’s not just about race. It’s fascinating and Catherine captures a lot of this in a beautiful weaving of elements that are normally not brought together."