SubjectsPostcolonial and Colonial Studies, Sociology > Migration Studies, European Studies 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.
"This book not only challenges Bosnian and Albanian dominant political discourses, which for decades have refused to acknowledge the unequal power dynamics between the Balkan periphery and the European centre. It also is a long overdue book. For it takes these Muslim-majority populations, despite their closeness to whiteness, as a starting point for imagining a different world in which internationalist solidarity among the oppressed is possible." — Adem Ferizaj, Left East “To my knowledge, White Enclosures is the only study that systematically explores the history of racialization of Muslim and Roma communities in Eastern Europe. The Balkans thus emerge as a key site of the continued production of whiteness as a means of suppressing forms of solidarity that would threaten its continued dominance. This immensely important and insightful book is very much needed at exactly this point in time.” — Fatima El-Tayeb, author of European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe “Piro Rexhepi is at the forefront of Balkan studies. In this brilliant book he presents an important, engaging, and exciting read that makes theoretical and empirical contributions to a range of fields and conversations.” — Paola Bacchetta, coeditor of Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, Decoloniality