Audre Lorde (1934–1992), a renowned figure in the American Black feminist canon, shaped feminist and antiracist struggles globally, including those in Europe. Drawing on Piro Rexhepi’s framing of the Balkans as a white enclosure marked by European colorblindness, non-aligned racial innocence, and semi-peripheral “desire for the West,” I use content-based digital ethnography to examine Lorde’s presence in Serbian feminist production since the 2000s. The results show that while Lorde’s figure circulates, the engagement with her work stays mainly quotational, decontextualized, and stripped of racial specificity. Relying on critical theory of blackness, especially the work of Hortense Spillers and Afropessimist thought of Frank B. Wilderson III, I argue that Lorde in Serbia does not escape the American race grammar. The symbolic use of her work signals antiracist virtue, allowing the wounded semi-peripheral white subject proximity to global liberal whiteness. At the same time, Lorde’s blackness anchored in American geopolitical dominance remains canonical, while local Roma mahala-blackness stays unacknowledged, if not impossible.

This paper analyzes imperial Russian images of Black captivity from the mid-nineteenth century. I am concerned foremost with Karl Briullov’s formal techniques for picturing the deferential figure of the Moor. A deracinated, mobile signifier of wealth and sovereignty, the Moor depicts captivity through ornamentality: an aesthetic procedure that attests to the figure’s taming, domestication, and attempted assimilation within the narrative of Russian imperial ascendancy. The Moor belongs to everywhere and everyone yet is made to project national fealty whenever it appears. Of course, to designate a single image or figuration of the Black as “captive” is tautological: within theories of the Black’s interfacing with performance, visual, and media technologies, the compulsion to act, show, and be seen restates captivity, spectacularity, and death as preconditions for the representation of embodied Black life. I argue that in its perspectival alienation on the Russian canvas, the Moor—a generic image of the Black—both materializes Russia’s construction of a racial imaginary and alerts us to its place in global regimes of race-making.

“Blackness” in the meaning under discussion here is too elusive to consistently discern because it defies clear definition. For instance, it was not Africans who designated themselves as “black,” nor even as Africans, since their self-identification was with their own respective cultures. The concepts the term “blackness” evokes are mainly what others have associated with Africans and other people of Black African descent. In many respects the purveyors of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades committed the greatest identity theft in world history. When the concept of “blackness” is brought to earth, a common thread that runs through it is a struggle over personal and group identities. It is also at times cloaked in other cultural behavior such as xenophobia. The original European attitudes evincing “blackness” were significantly influenced by Christian tradition surrounding the so-called Curse of Ham, an age-old myth concerning human beings of darker complexion that was shared by the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious traditions and came to foster racist concepts positing inherent inferiority of Black Africans in many modern societies. Especially pertinent here, the Russian Primary Chronicle of the early twelfth century begins with an overview of the genesis of nations based on this Hamitic myth.1 Therefore, because of shared Christian traditions, Russians and other Slavs spread this concept alongside western Europeans even in the period before close direct contacts with the west were established. This is the broader historical background of the themes treated in this timely collection of essays “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies.”

This contribution explores the non-aligned era labor migration of Yugoslav men to postcolonial Zambia. Based on oral history and archival research conducted in Lusaka and Belgrade, it seeks to provide a gendered account of Yugoslavs negotiating their role as white Europeans in a postcolonial milieu and the ways in which Zambian colleagues understood Yugoslavs to have positioned themselves. Drawing upon contemporary social anthropological research from post-Yugoslav space, I argue that two modes of masculinities were in simultaneous operation and can help to make sense of the tensions inherent in the role of Yugoslav male workers in Zambia. An adventuring young Yugoslav man (frajer) might have driven fast, drunk heavily, and boasted about sexual conquests, but according to the motif of the “father,” the same person would also understand himself as a provider, whose responsible, serious, and protective characteristics would be used in assisting Zambians to develop as industrial workers.

The bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, like military and civil servants in late imperial Russia, underwent significant “aging,” with the median age rising substantially as a result of greater life expectancy. In contrast to existing scholarship, which advances a political explanation for staffing in the episcopate (above all, the high rate of turnover and transfers), this study seeks to show that demography and the service structure were the key factors. Rather than rely on the politicized memoir literature, this analysis is based on the diary of the presiding member of the Synod, which focuses on the rationale and problems in staffing the episcopate. Significantly, the diocesan bishops were not only overaged but overtasked, finding it ever more difficult to perform traditional, let alone, additional roles. All this provides a new perspective on the Church’s capacity to address the growing social and confessional challenges in late imperial Russia.