White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route

by Piro Rexhepi

Overview

For all its history of intersecting empires, the Balkans has been rarely framed as a global site of race and coloniality. This, as Piro Rexhepi argues in White Enclosures is not surprising, given the perception of the Balkans as colorblind and raceless, a project that spans post-Ottoman racial formations, transverses Socialist modernity and is negotiated anew in the process of postsocialist Euro-Atlantic integration. Connecting severed colonial histories from the vantage point of body politic, Rexhepi turns to the borderland zones of the Balkans to trace past and present geopolitical attempts of walling whiteness. From efforts to straighten the sexualities of post-Ottoman Muslim subjects, to Yugoslav nonaligned solidarities between Muslims of the second and third world, to Roma displacement and contemporary emergence of refugee carceral technologies along the Balkan Route, Rexhepi points not only to the epistemic erasures that maintain the fantasy of whiteness but also to the disruption emanating from the solidarities between queer- and transpeople that fold the Balkans back into global efforts to resist the politics of racial capitalism. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478023913
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/16/2022
Series:	On Decoloniality
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Piro Rexhepi is Lecturer at Southern New Hampshire University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Nonaligned Muslims in the Margins of Socialism: The Islamic Revolution in Yugoslavia  43
2. Historicizing Enclosure: Refashioned Colonial Continuities as European Cultural Legacy  70
3. Enclosure Sovereignties: Saving Missions and Supervised Self-Determination  90
4. (Dis)Embodying Enclosure: Of Straightened Muslim Men and Secular Masculinities  107
5. Enclosure Demographics: Reproductive Racism, Displacement, and Resistance  128
Afterword  151
Notes  157
References  161
Index  181

What People are Saying About This

European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe - Fatima El-Tayeb

“To my knowledge, White Enclosures is the only study that systematically explores the history of racialization of Muslim and Roma communities in Eastern Europe. The Balkans thus emerge as a key site of the continued production of whiteness as a means of suppressing forms of solidarity that would threaten its continued dominance. This immensely important and insightful book is very much needed at exactly this point in time.”

Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, Decoloniality - Paola Bacchetta

“Piro Rexhepi is at the forefront of Balkan studies. In this brilliant book he presents an important, engaging, and exciting read that makes theoretical and empirical contributions to a range of fields and conversations.”

Editorial Reviews

"This book not only challenges Bosnian and Albanian dominant political discourses, which for decades have refused to acknowledge the unequal power dynamics between the Balkan periphery and the European centre. It also is a long overdue book. For it takes these Muslim-majority populations, despite their closeness to whiteness, as a starting point for imagining a different world in which internationalist solidarity among the oppressed is possible."--Adem Ferizaj "Left East" (3/14/2023 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

"This book not only challenges Bosnian and Albanian dominant political discourses, which for decades have refused to acknowledge the unequal power dynamics between the Balkan periphery and the European centre. It also is a long overdue book. For it takes these Muslim-majority populations, despite their closeness to whiteness, as a starting point for imagining a different world in which internationalist solidarity among the oppressed is possible."

Left East - Adem Ferizaj