Catherine Baker, Bogdan C. Iacob, Anikó Imre and James Mark (eds.) Off white: Central and Eastern Europe and the global history of race

Catherine Baker, Bogdan C. Iacob, Anikó Imre and James Mark (eds.) Off white: Central and Eastern Europe and the global history of race. Manchester: Manchester University Press 2024. ISBN: 978-1-5261-7220-4

This volume foregrounds racial difference as a key to an alternative history of the Central and Eastern European region, which revolves around the role of whiteness as the unacknowledged foundation of semi-peripheral nation-states and national identities, and of the region's current status as a global stronghold of unapologetic white, Christian nationalisms. Contributions address the pivotal role of whiteness in international diplomacy, geographical exploration, media cultures, music, intellectual discourses, academic theories, everyday language and banal nationalism's many avenues of expressions. The book offers new paradigms for understanding the relationships among racial capitalism, populism, economic peripherality and race.

CONTENTS

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

Note on the cover image

Introduction: racial disavowals - historicising whiteness in Central and Eastern Europe - James Mark, Anikó Imre, Bogdan C. Iacob and Catherine Baker

1 Wilson's white world: the foundation of Central-Eastern European nation-states after World War I - James Mark

2 The 'racial contract', 'whiteness contract', and Central Europe - Bolaji Balogun

3 Not quite white: Russians as Turanians in nineteenth-century Polish thought - Maciej Górny

4 Racial thinking among Czech anthropologists: the case of Vojtech Suk - Victoria Shmidt

5 'Hungarian Indians': race and colonialism in Hungarian 'Indian play' - Zoltán Ginelli

6 Peripheral whiteness and racial belonging and non-belonging: accounts from Albania - Chelsi West Ohueri

7 The aesthetics of alternation and the returns of race: Poland and the Jewish Question - Sudeep Dasgupta

8 Retailored for a Soviet spectator: racial difference and whiteness in the films of the 1930s to the early 1950s - Irina Novikova

9 'With the help of the great Russian people': the (invisible) whiteness of Soviet anti-colonialism and gender emancipation from Central Asia to Khartoum - Yulia Gradskova

10 The whiteness of 'Christian Europe': the case of Hungary - Paul Hanebrink

11 Alien at home, white overseas: the Polish interwar Maritime and Colonial League and the 'Jewish Question' - Marta Grzechnik

12 Midsommar and the production of white fantasy - Anikó Imre

13 In pursuit of Western modernity: Russian-speaking migrants claiming whiteness in Helsinki - Daria Krivonos

14 The 'perpetual foreigner' in Serbia: on being marked and unmarked in a 'raceless' state - Sunnie Rucker-Chang

15 Re-routing Eastern European whiteness: relational racialisation and historical proximity - Spela Drnovsek Zorko

16 Through the Balkans to Christchurch: Southeast Europe and global white nationalist historical mythology - Catherine Baker