Transnational formations of race before and during Yugoslav state socialism

Abstract

and migration, ideas of race, as well as ethnicity and religion, have demonstrably formed part of how people from the Yugoslav region have understood their place in Europe and the world. The region’s history during, and after, the era of direct European colonialism differed from the USA’s, France’s or Brazil’s; but this did not exclude it from the networks of ‘race in translation’ (Stam and Shohat 2012) which ran and run across the whole globe, not just around the postcolonial Atlantic. Among the political, social and cultural ‘legacies’ that the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova (2005a: 69) argues give regions like the Balkans their intellectual coherence are, therefore, formations of racialised difference in areas to which the Yugoslav region has historical connections – even though Todorova’s own work on Balkan history is ambivalent about the utility of race. Perceptions that south-east Europe is distinct enough to be ‘a region’ arise, for Todorova, when historical experiences associated with specific regimes (and their collapse) intersect with constructions of territory. ‘The Balkans’, one such region-as-legacy, depends on the idea that the legacy of Ottoman rule in Europe still explains something about it; ‘Eastern Europe’ often stands for the perceived legacy of the collapse of multi-national long-nineteenth-century but was really, Todorova suggested, based on perceptions of the legacy of state socialism (2005a: 69–73). These perceptions themselves have often, wrongly, been bases for treating eastern Europe as inherently lagging behind the West – and yet it is precisely the history of fin-de-siècle European scientific racism, 3