The films Valley of Peace (1956), Jagoš i Uglješa (1976), Tit for Tat (1978), and A Great Guy at Heart (1981) represent exceptions among the Yugoslav film canon because they include Black actors among their casts. Given that the majority of Yugoslavs were racialized as “white,” the Black actors in these films emerge as a type of filmic device, providing social commentary on the post-World War II geopolitical priorities of Yugoslavia, including antiracism, international nonalignment, and Third World solidarity. Film was easy to distribute and consume and it became integral to the creation and maintenance of post-WWII Yugoslav culture. Through its content, storylines, and plot, an image of the idealized national Yugoslav body emerged that included Black men. In this article, I analyze the aforementioned films against the backdrop of the goals and traditional frames of Yugoslav cinema to highlight and offer insight into the uses and symbolism of blackness on screen.

This article engages with the construction of blackness in the socialist public sphere in state socialist Poland by analyzing two case studies: the visit of Kwame Nkrumah to Poland and the career of the US basketball player Kent Washington. While these two cases are embedded in different historical and political moments, they reveal how blackness was familiarized in a visually concrete yet abstract way. What were the promises that came with how blackness was constructed in the late socialist public sphere? How did they resonate within diasporic communities? Drawing on various types of sources, we argue that blackness in the public sphere was neither a danger nor the antithesis of whiteness but revered for political purposes. This framing of blackness—as postcolonial political empowerment or successful career in sport—also created unrealistically high bars for the visual incorporation of Black people.

This article is a comparative study of Fedor Dostoevskii and Martin Heidegger’s messianic nationalism as understood in terms of their conceptualization of primordialism and racial purity. It offers, and further invites, a critical lens especially on Dostoevskii’s prejudices, viewing them as systematic rather than isolated. This article endeavors to offer a comprehensive exploration of the novelist’s essentialist premises through Heidegger’s philosophical framework of similar views on the “other.” Both authors claim that certain “truths” could only spring from the people, whether narod or das Volk. I argue that Dostoevskii and Heidegger arrive at similar warped visions of national destiny due to their formulation of the so-called primordial “call of conscience” and its attachment to their preferred poets. The point of my interdisciplinary effort here is to demonstrate that their racial bias is not limited to incidental remarks but that these biases are deeply embedded in the authors’ broader intellectual projects.

This article closely examines the diary of Ivan Khripunov (1923–1942?), a peasant teenager from the south of Russia. I argue that in his diary, Ivan did not narrate his self with the use of Soviet language but rather aspired to develop as a narrator, learning how to write according to Soviet guidelines to then pursue a writing career. I rely on Iurii Lotman’s theory of communication, which allows me to regard the diary simultaneously as a “message” (representation of the diarist’s experiences) and a “code” (the diarist’s self-instructions on how to make sense of those experiences). The article is divided into three parts: in the first section, I discuss Ivan’s claim that his diary was a chronicle and explore how Socialist realist categories shaped his writing. In the second section, I analyze his autobiography written as one long diary entry and modelled after Maksim Gorʹkii’s autobiographical novel My Childhood (1914). I show that Ivan intended to assemble his future writer’s reputation on Gorʹkii’s example. Lastly, I look into a fictional story The Death of Vasilii Rebrov, also incorporated into the diary to solidify the creation of Ivan’s narrator-self.

This article argues that the late Soviet period saw a new form of Ukrainian nationhood emerge, one based less on ethno-historical commonalities than on territorial and institutional cohesion. Combining Michael Billig’s notion of “banal nationalism” with Alexei Yurchak’s analysis of “hypernormalized authoritative discourse,” it shows that Soviet Ukrainian leaders reproduced the assumption of Ukrainian nationhood even as they deprived it of concrete political and cultural content. While First Secretary Petro Shelest still promoted ethno-historical topoi alongside pride in Ukraine’s republican quasi-statehood, his successor Volodymyr Shcherbytsʹkyi preferred an image of Ukraine as a productive economic space free of ethnic specificity. Late Soviet Ukrainian banal nationalism left traces in everyday life, whether in sports reporting, school curricula, or in a specific visual language combining institutional emblems with politically empty ethnic symbols. During perestroika, late Soviet banal nationalism was appropriated and instrumentalized first by the national-democratic opposition, and later by “national communists.”

This article investigates the history of displaying nuclear energy from the 1980s to the present by tracing the cultural biography of a scale model of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, which operated in Lithuania between 1983 and 2009. By reconstructing the model’s trajectory, from its initial role as a promotional exhibit in Soviet-era industry showcasing to its contemporary status as an artifact of nuclear cultural heritage, the study highlights a shift in the politics and practices of exhibiting the atom, as well as evolving theoretical frameworks and cultural discourses surrounding nuclear energy. The author argues that the model’s movement through industrial, technological, artistic, and heritage domains, along with its diverse functions, has rendered it a techno-political actor that, alongside human and institutional agents, plays a significant role in shaping the dynamics of nuclear culture.

This article examines Bronisława Niżyńska’s (Bronislava Nijinska) ballet, Pieśń o ziemi (1937), in the Polski Balet Reprezentacyjny’s (Polish Representative Ballet) inaugural 1937–1938 season. The Polski Balet Reprezentacyjny was an ensemble instituted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to represent the Second Polish Republic as cultural diplomats. Domestic reviews betray conflicting opinions regarding Niżyńska’s role as an artistic representative of the Second Polish Republic. Therefore, this article argues that tepid reception of her choreographic work reveals an underlying hesitancy towards accepting her as a national artist. At the center of these questions remains the puzzling consideration of Niżyńska, who was situated between Europe’s modernist ballet tradition, heavily shaped by Russian émigrés, and Polish national culture. Examining Niżyńska’s choreographic praxis and complex biography suggests the reconsideration of Niżyńska as a purely Russophone artist, bringing to the fore the hitherto underexplored Polish dimension of her identity.

Although blackface minstrelsy is considered to be one of the first American pop culture products, its circulation in central and eastern Europe is relatively unknown. This article engages with the history of blackface performance and imagery in Poland, treating it as a lens granting insight into ways of imagining blackness in the region. It focuses on the interwar period as a time of rapid adaptation of colonial imagination with its global racial hierarchies in the public sphere of the newly independent country. Against the ideology of “colonial exceptionalism” and “white innocence” based on an assumption that Poland—as a state with no history of overseas colonies and Black slavery—is free of anti-black racism, we describe the active involvement of large groups of society in transnational colonial imagination, developed especially in the sphere of entertainment. The article not only demonstrates the existence of the tradition of blackface in Poland and reconstructs its distinct character but also suggests structural determinants that continue to affect ideas about blackness in Poland today.

This essay explores possibilities for theorizing blackness in relation to modern art and performance in Romania by tracing the trajectories of two African American men who spent significant time in the country. Dancer Bob Hopkins performed with Romanian entertainment troupes for a decade before being deported, while entertainer and cabaret manager Peter Johnson settled in Romania and continued to perform for factory workers under state socialism. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic (1993), the essay centers the experiences of Hopkins and Johnson, providing new perspectives on transatlantic cultural exchanges. It further examines the participation of Romania, and eastern Europe more broadly, within global racial hierarchies and formations, drawing on recent scholarship. It concludes by considering the challenges of such research and interrogating the (im)possibility of recovering traces of the Black experience in Romania, while nonetheless advocating for a reckoning with the specters of past histories.

The question of the genre of The Kolyma Stories continues to perplex readers: the tales resemble fiction and are at the same time intended to serve as document, evidentiary proof of the evils of Stalinism. In this article I reconsider Walter Benjamin’s “Storyteller” essay, arguing that Shalamov is, in significant ways, a Benjaminian storyteller, updated to catastrophically unfree conditions minus any nostalgic lens. Taking Shalamov’s prose not just as document and fiction, but more specifically, as document and story allows for a deeper understanding of his creative process, aesthetics, and how his prose is intended to act on the reader. Shalamov becomes a storyteller in part to break free from what he saw as the didactic tradition of the Russian novel. I compare Benjamin’s notions of storytelling to Shalamov’s concepts of “new prose,” and then scrutinize Shalamov’s contradictory stance on whether his stories contain “lessons” (advice is central to Benjamin’s framework). I touch on the fusion of document and folktale in several stories, referring to Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Finally, I examine “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” (1970–71), which, I argue, demonstrates how skazka and story function in relation to memory and advice.

Victor Pelevin’s novel Generation P has attracted both popular and academic interest for its ability to capture the zeitgeist of Russia in the 1990s and a generation searching for a new identity in the ruins of the Soviet Union. However, one element has been largely ignored by scholars: the role of fungi and, specifically, the entheogenic mukhomor. Here we discuss the history of mukhomor in the Russian context and demonstrate how Pelevin’s representations of mukhomor advance the novel’s critique regarding the reinvention of Russia’s identity after the fall of the Soviet Union. We argue that via its mukhomor-induced hallucinations, the novel ironizes the imperial narratives which sought to restore a mythical but allegedly authentic Russian past. The novel plays with the idea that if there is a future that can qualify as authentically Russian, then it should be one where the very notion of Russianness is abandoned. What renders this future authentically Russian is the genetic origin of mukhomor in the Russian hinterland, the very element which enables a vision of the world as such, devoid of symbolic order and of all identities.

This article addresses the underrepresentation of “blackness” within Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), which has historically concentrated on the United States, western Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Despite calls for global expansion, CWS has so far inadequately engaged with the ways in which individuals perceived as “Black” were excluded from the idealized national community in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The marginalization of blackness profoundly influenced discussions around national belonging throughout the twentieth century and continues to shape debates on race in the region today. We re-examine the significance of blackness, particularly through the racialization of Roma communities in interwar Romania and the implications of blackness elsewhere in CEE, while challenging the portrayal of this region as homogeneous and exclusively white.

Building on my research about racialization and marginalization, this article examines race and the global color line in terms of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism, asking how such inquiries can shed light on the ways that blackness and whiteness are configured across southeast Europe and Europe as a whole. This paper has three primary goals: the first is to probe the complexities of the meanings of blackness. The second aim is to examine antiblackness and anti-Romani racism as parallel processes configured by European whiteness. The third objective is to explore how this type of critical analysis can expand scholarly inquiry beyond the discourses that move past race as individualized and immoral, and towards more comprehensive examinations of regional and global racial logics that structure social relations.