Articulations of race and genealogies of encounter among former Yugoslav migrants in Britain

ABSTRACT

While the question of race has been largely underexplored in the study of postsocialist Europe, the logic of coloniality remains at the heart of Europeanness, complicating the assumption that migrants from the region only encounter racial difference once they arrive in a “multicultural” society. The article contributes to recent debates on racializing Central and East European studies as well as the literature on migrant encounters with difference by examining the articulations of “race” and coloniality among migrants from former Yugoslavia in Britain. On the one hand, interactions with fellow migrants are frequently imbued with racialized hierarchies that equate Europeanness with whiteness and modernity. On the other hand, the history of Yugoslav solidarity with decolonizing nations provides an alternative archive that refutes claims of British “openness” and recognizes unexpected forms of intimacy, highlighting a genealogy of encounter that extends the spatiotemporal scope of debates about migrants’ responses to racialized difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• migration
• former Yugoslavia
• Central and Eastern Europe
• encounter
• coloniality

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, where I carried out the fieldwork on which this article is based. Thank you also to Carrie Benjamin for her insightful comments on a draft version and to my two anonymous referees whose thoughtful feedback helped strengthen the arguments.

Notes

1 All names used are pseudonyms.

2 Given the difficulty of naming the language(s) formerly known as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian, I refer to this as “Bosnian” when speaking of self-identified Bosnians, “Serbian” when speaking of self-identified Serbs, etc.

3 Only one person in my research ever referred to themselves as “white”. While not all former Yugoslavs (within the region or in diaspora) are in fact white, whiteness remains the de facto assumption.

4 I use the broader term “Central and Eastern Europe” rather than “South-East Europe”, which is more specific to former Yugoslavia. I view the two as overlapping imagined cartographies speaking to similar issues around the invisibility of “race”, although some remain specific to the Yugoslav region (Baker 2018, 29).

5 While in-depth analysis of my interlocutors’ diverse ethno-national and other positionalities, and their reasons for migrating, is beyond the scope of this article, researching “former Yugoslav migrants” across self-identified ethno-national groups can reveal a number of commonalities as well as differences (Munro 2016).

6 The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was proclaimed in the midst of the Second World War under Partisan leader Marshall Broz Tito, who remained its president until his death in 1980. SFRY, which was officially based on the principles of “brotherhood and unity” between six constituent republics, the socialist concept of “workers’ self-management”, and an internationalist policy of non-alignment, disintegrated in the early 1990s. The wars that unfolded in Croatia and Bosnia (and later Kosovo) became traumatic emblems of Yugoslavia’s collapse and were frequently ascribed to reductive notions of “ancient ethnic hatreds”. For a detailed account of the conflicts, see Glenny (1996); for a review of factors contributing to Yugoslavia’s demise, see Dragovic-Soso (2007).

7 With the exception of Slovenia and Croatia, the post-Yugoslav states are not (yet) part of the European Union.

8 While the insight that whiteness eludes the analytic gaze has been crucial to “critical whiteness studies”, Sara Ahmed (2007) reminds us that for people of colour living in white-dominated spaces, whiteness has never quite been imperceptible.

9 Although Nowicka (2017) uses the term “cultural repertoire” rather than “cultural archive” to describe transnational constructions of Polish racisms, her usage appears broadly similar to Wekker’s.

10 See however Mayblin, Piekut and Valentine (2016), who note that “through the postcolonial epistemological optic racial hierarchies […] go hand in hand with ideas of civilisation” even in “racially homogenous Polish society” (72).

11 See also Balogun (2017) on the historical exploits of the Polish Maritime and Colonial League.

12 The terms for “English” and “British” were largely used interchangeably. A striking exception occurred on two separate occasions when interlocutors used “British people” to indicate a racially inclusive term as opposed to the presumed whiteness of “English people”. Whiteness, however, is not enough to confer Englishness: none of my interlocutors considered themselves English, while some did speak of being “British” by virtue of citizenship.

Additional information

Funding

The initial research was funded by the Marie Curie Initial Training Network (FP7 People: Marie-Curie Actions) ‘Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging’ [Project ID 289672]. Additional research and publication of this article were made possible by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.