CEED Feminisms Reading Group – January
Join us in reading excerpts from the book White Enclosures, Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route by Piro Rexhepi.
Book summary: 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.
No prior reading is required, as we will read together aloud during the session – one person and one paragraph at a time. There is also no need for any prior knowledge on the topic. Copies of the text will be provided on the day.
*The readings are drawn from a bibliography compiled as part of a project run by Cell Project Space and the Feminist Duration Reading Group in 2023-2024, with support from the British Art Network.