White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route

by Piro Rexhepi

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. 
 

Genres: Theory, Race, Nonfiction, Islam

200 pages, Hardcover

Published December 16, 2022

Reviews

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me a little while to finish this because it was so informative. I feel like this book gives such a good insight in society in the balkans then and now regarding ethnicity, religion and sexuality. Would recommend it to everyone interested in those dynamics in Yugoslavia (especially Bosnia en Kosova today) and other Eastern European nations. Really opened my eyes regarding islamophobia and discrimination in Yugoslavia specifically and it gave me a lot of leads to read more about it. Cannot recommend this book and his articles enough!

[Siobhan Seigne]

We read this for my Seminar on Slavic Literature and Culture, which has a specific focus on peripheralizing perspectives. We were even able to speak to the author over Zoom! Cool research. Certainly an interesting approach to decolonial scholarship.

[Mehaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been a breath of fresh air. Piro Rexhepi in 'White Enclosures' argues postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes in the Balkans protect whiteness and exclude Muslim and Roma communities. Here Bosnia and Kosova are placed under international supervision with an indefinite deferral of independence.