CATHERINE BAKER AND THE POOSTSSOOCICIALA ISST,T, PPOSSTT-CONNFFLLICCT,T POPOSTS COOLOLONNIIALA ? Race and the Yugoslav region THEORY FOR A GLOBAL AGE Series Editor: Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex Globalization is widely viewed as a current condition of the world, but there is little engagement with how this changes the way we understand it. The Theory for a Global Age series addresses the impact of globalization on the social sciences and humanities. Each title will focus on a particular theoretical issue or topic of empirical controversy and debate, addressing theory in a more global and interconnected manner. With contributions from scholars across the globe, the series will explore different perspectives to examine globalization from a global viewpoint. True to its global character, the Theory for a Global Age series will be available for online access worldwide via Creative Commons licensing, aiming to stimulate wide debate within academia and beyond. Previously published by Bloomsbury: Published by Manchester University Press: Connected Sociologies Gurminder K. Bhambra Debt as Power Tim Di Muzio and Richard H. Robbins Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism Subjects of modernity: Time-space, Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson disciplines, margins Saurabh Dube On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions Frontiers of the Caribbean Joan Cocks Phillip Nanton Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution John Dewey: The Global Public and and Cultural Production in the Its Problems Global South John Narayan Edited by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections Robbie Shilliam Democracy and Revolutionary Politics Neera Chandhoke Race and the Yugoslav region Postsocialist, post-conflict, postcolonial? Catherine Baker Manchester University Press Copyright © Catherine Baker 2018 The right of Catherine Baker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 5261 2660 3 hardback ISBN 978 1 5261 2662 7 paperback ISBN 978 1 5261 2661 0 open access This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence. A copy of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Contents Series editor’s introduction vi Preface viii List of abbreviations xi Introduction: what does race have to do with the Yugoslav region? 1 1 Popular music and the ‘cultural archive’ 31 2 Histories of ethnicity, nation and migration 57 3 Transnational formations of race before and during Yugoslav state socialism 94 4 Postsocialism, borders, security and race after Yugoslavia 122 Conclusion 166 Bibliography 189 Index 229 Series editor’s introduction In this exceptional book, Race and the Yugoslav region: postsocialist, post-conflict, postcolonial?, Catherine Baker brings together her exten- sive scholarly expertise on former Yugoslavia with theoretical work in postcolonial and postsocialist studies to offer us a novel and distinc- tive insight into how the region is configured by, and through, race. Moving beyond a simple engagement with key concepts from within postcolonial theory to describe the current situation of the Balkans, Baker is more interested in examining how global colonial histories have themselves been integral to the formation of geopolitics and culture there. She argues, for example, for the Yugoslav region to be understood as entangled with more extensive histories of coloniality and, thus, as shaped by ‘transnational racialized imaginations’ as many other parts of the world. Baker skilfully fulfils the task she has set out for herself by first investigating what the demographic transformations of, and in, popular culture reveal about the historical legacies of coloniality and racialisation in the region. She locates the discussion of the cultural archive also in the question of how, as a consequence of the Non-Aligned Movement, people were able to move into and through spaces historically constituted as white. She then goes on to examine the multiple and intersecting connections of ideas and peoples within the historical contact zone of the Balkans. She weaves together discussions of historical migrations and myths of nationhood to present a complex and compelling account of the longer history of the region. In this way, Baker is adeptly able to highlight the ways in which historically constituted racial formations organise the ground of Yugoslav politics in the present. One of the key aims of the Theory for a Global Age series is precisely to ask what difference theory makes, and is made to theory, when we start from places other than the Euro-centred West. Here, Baker uses postcolonial theory to better understand a region seen to be unmarked Series editor’s introduction vii by processes of colonialism and uncovers both a richer history of the region and the basis for sharpening theoretical concepts and categories in the process. It is an outstanding contribution to the series, providing new insights, theoretical clarification and a rich narrative. Gurminder K. Bhambra University of Sussex Preface This book has a single author but rests on many shoulders, often those whose position in the political economy of academic knowledge is more marginal than mine. I owe the perspective I have been able to express in this book to two women in particular: the feminist writer and cultural critic Flavia Dzodan, whose writing first confronted me with very different meanings of ‘Europe’ from those that dominated the study of the Yugoslav region and my own experience, and the philosopher Zara Bain, whose explanations of her research on the critical race theory of Charles Mills first suggested to me that the spatialised hierarchies of modernity with which the literature on ‘balkanism’ was so familiar were also part of global formations of race. These interactions, through online platforms in the early to mid-2010s, came about at a novel moment in the history of digital media and feminism, yet the perspectives they enabled me to form were not in themselves new: Anikó Imre and Miglena Todorova elsewhere in east European studies, and Dušan Bjelić and Konstantin Kilibarda in post-Yugoslav studies themselves, had all written on race, whiteness, postcoloniality and postsocialism before I had even begun questioning the absence of race in the debates to which I was contributing. I hope that their work will be cited at least as often as this book. My first rough notes of topics a book like this might cover were written while listening to Julija Sardelić (who directed me towards Imre’s work on whiteness and antiziganism) discuss her research on post-Yugoslav Romani minorities at a workshop organised by the Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the Former Yugoslavia project at Edinburgh in June 2013. In 2014, the ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’ campaign by students at University College London challenged me and other academics to rethink how we could redesign our teaching to integrate race into topics where, due to the structural whiteness of the academy itself, it had traditionally been erased. Talking to postgraduates including Olivia Hellewell and Laura Todd in Russian and Slavonic Preface ix Studies at Nottingham after I first presented an early version of this book’s argument, in March 2015, showed me that arguing for race to be explicitly part of the agenda of post-Yugoslav studies invited others to re-reflect on racialised representations they had encountered in their own research. The contributions of all participants at a workshop on ‘“Race” and Racialisation in the Study of South-East Europe’ I held at Central European University in February 2016, at the invitation of the Department of Gender Studies, reflected a combination of situated knowledge and critical engagement that it would be rare to find at any other university, and were decisive in persuading me that the argument should be book-length. Amid a suddenly expanding body of research on postcoloniality and race in Yugoslavia, conversations with Srđan Vučetić, Jelena Subotić and Sunnie Rucker-Chang across several conferences – and a guest lecture at the University of Cincinnati – in 2016 enabled me to sharpen the book’s claims from questions into potential answers. This book appears in the ‘Theory for a Global Age’ series thanks to the enthusiasm of Gurminder Bhambra at a time when it has probably never been more politically urgent to understand how global coloniality and the marginalisation of postsocialist Europe have interlocked. While writing this book, I have been indebted to the encouragement and critical feedback of Elissa Helms, Marsha Henry, Konstantin Kilibarda, Jelena Obradović-Wochnik, Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Julija Sardelić, Paul Stubbs and