CfP “Historicizing ‘Whiteness’ in Eastern Europe”

Call for contributions to publication on “Historicizing ‘Whiteness’ in Eastern Europe”.

Over the last decade, issues of migration both out of and into Eastern Europe as well as the resurgence of populism and authoritarianism have brought questions of ‘whiteness’ and its ‘defence’ into the public language of the region. However, race in general and whiteness in particular have for the most part been hidden discourses, absent from mainstream political or cultural thinking about the area itself. Despite the growing number of critical histories of whiteness both on a regional and global level, there has been little academic engagement with such questions in the study of Eastern Europe, including Russia, the USSR, or what is now the ‘post-Soviet’ space.

The publication aims to trace and theorise whiteness in Eastern Europe, and bring such analysis into dialogue with the global debates on the formation of racial orders and whiteness. The editors seek contributions that even when they concentrate on local/regional phenomena also connect these either historically or theoretically to broader issues in the literature on ‘whiteness’ as a global issue.

The editors intend to publish the collection with a major university press. The prospective volume already draws on selected papers from the proceedings of the conference “Historicizing ‘Whiteness’ in Eastern Europe and Russia” organized last summer in Bucharest within the project “Socialism Goes Global”. However, we encourage scholars who have recently engaged with the topic to join us in a field-defining publication.

Please find more information here.

Abstracts of 300–500 words, together with an accompanying short CV, should be submitted to whitenesseasterneurope@gmail.com by 3 March 2020. The selected contributors will be notified within two weeks after the deadline. Please use the same e-mail for any queries regarding the publication.