The issue of race and its compatibility and relevance to Slavic and East European Studies (SEES) has lingered in the field for over a decade now. Rather than widely engaging with the framework, SEES scholars have opted to address the inevitable fact of difference among the various populations in the region by way of “ethnicity” and “nation,” the operationally-productive terms in the local linguistic and cultural norms of the region. “Race,” on the other hand, was taken as a western concept, instrumentalized by empires, executed through power differentials between European empires and their subjects, and reinforced by “blood and bone.”Footnote ¹ Because peoples of Russia and central and southeast Europe were not directly linked to such historical frames of difference, “race” was deemed inapplicable. Consequently, the language and methodologies pertaining to race were as absent from SEES scholarship as they were from the classroom, so scholars with an interest in the subject had to seek knowledge outside the field. The rare interventions addressing the possibility of localizing “race” in SEES were primarily absent and, when they arose, were marginalized or addressed narrowly among small clusters of individuals working to advance the connections that SEES has to race. They were not, however, applied across the field as a means of widely understanding difference.

In order for “race” to become relevant to the field, significant turns in the scholarship had to occur that defined race as something beyond the limiting frame of Empire. Race had to be recognized as a “floating signifier,” manifesting locally in what Howard Winant terms “racial projects,” whereby “race” is recognized as connected to structure and culture.Footnote ² Within central and southeast European studies, the 2009 Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery article “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War” was an early introduction to this discussion.Footnote ³ It addressed the intersections of postcolonialism, postsocialism, and the meaning of “race,” defined “not necessarily on biological conceptions of race but on institutional and biopolitical mechanisms, which differentiate populations into subgroups having varied access to means of life and death” (Rainbow, 12). In post-Soviet studies, the Slavic Review special forum in 2002 introduced the concept of “racial politics without the concept of race” (Rainbow, 8). These interventions represent a shift in the discussion of difference in SEES that has broadened the conceptual frames fostering an openness to the incorporation of race studies.

Even with these additions, the reluctance remains in SEES. As such, the 2018 works Race and the Yugoslav Region by Catherine Baker and Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context edited by David Rainbow in 2019 are timely additions to the field of SEES. Rather than spending pages reviewing how race was discredited and ignored in the field, Ideologies of Race “moves beyond the question of whether race mattered in the Russian case, to consider how and why it mattered” (Rainbow, 10). Similarly, Baker asserts that “it is no longer possible—and never should have been—to contend that the Yugoslav region stands somehow ‘outside’ race. The question is where it stands, and why that has gone unspoken for so long” (Baker, 2). With such clear statements on the relevance of race in the regions and fields related to Slavic and East European Studies, Race and the Yugoslav Region and the contributions to Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context move beyond the reluctance among scholars to apply concepts of race in the field and address how global informational flows and local structural inequalities make the study of race relevant and productive for local analysis. Catherine Baker and the contributors to the Rainbow volume dismiss the notion that race as a critical frame is not simply mimicry of western concepts but rather a genuine investigation of how race can be understood through local manifestations. Both books provide much needed additions to the field of race studies in SEES and create a foundation upon which others can build. This is important because related scholarly turns continue to emerge in SEES, including coloniality and comparative frames of post- studies (postcolonial, postsocialist, postcommunist), frames that inevitably require an engagement with race and racialization. I suspect that we have only just begun to merge these fields.

Rainbow's Ideologies of Race was the result of a symposium on race in Russia and the Soviet Union at the NYU Jordan Center. It is a coedited volume with a number of contributors from various disciplinary points of view and even geographical specializations. Approaches on race in the volume include the “floating signifier” (81); acts of power and domination (85, 248); “cultural phenomenon” (94); and “race thinking” (171) as endemic to the Russian experience of empire and difference, but devoid of the local vocabulary. Also important is that the work is as local as it is comparative and draws from more well-established discourses on race and “race making” from the US, Germany, and Brazil. By including these established frames of race studies as comparators, the work highlights how race and studies of race in Russia and the Soviet Union have relevance locally and relate to larger global manifestations.

Two chapters explore how the US and the Soviet Union relied on the mythologies of their exceptionalism to construct their disparate imaginaries despite the role of race. That is to say, one did not exist without the other. The chapter “The Matter of Race” by Alaina Lemon specifically addresses how “exceptionalist thinking” informed both the frames and mechanisms of race and race-thinking in both the US and the Soviet Union (60).Footnote ⁴ As she notes, “Soviet repression of Jews, American lynchings … competed to depict racial equality at home and to ascribe racism to the enemy” and answer “would capitalism or communism better furnish human ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’” causing scholars “to avoid discussing phenomena that were, in fact, entwined” (60). That racial categories were at play in both settings is germane to understanding the connections. It is from this fundamental point that Lemon establishes how race functioned in the Soviet Union, “not from corporal signs such as complexion or bone structure but from the kinds of contact with inanimate objects—those with gold teeth or those tucking dollar bills into their shirts are not white” (61).Footnote ⁵ According to this logic, race became a sign or a way to understand an individual's relationship with material reality and the access that one had or did not have with various spaces. By way of contrast, according to Lemon, race in the US was informed by physical somatic difference enforced by legal obstacles, codified by Jim Crow segregationist laws. In contextualizing race between the US and the Soviet Union, the chapter mediates between the personal and scholarly and infuses the text with vibrancy through highlighting embodied experiences intersecting with the contemporary materiality of Russia and the United States.

In one example, Lemon reflects on disparate experiences of “white” American students and “students of color” who “were shocked by the racially inflected comments that they encountered (and by the cheerful ways such comments were offered)” to contextualize the complicated understanding of “American” and the ways that “white” people and “people of color” not only experienced their time while traveling in Russia, but also the way the varying relationship(s) that the students had with power when Russians asked the students if they were afraid of their own police (66–67). Reading this anecdote and the sections that followed about the connections between the privilege and ignorance of “those who never lived on the excluded sides of segregation” was surprising and inspired further reflection (67). What these uncomfortable interactions reveal is an engagement with global universalisms about “race” and how the racisms and stereotypes associated with phenotypical differences circulate in Russia to signal irreconcilability. In relating this to the Soviet period, Lemon notes, “people labeled non-European did face exclusion, racialized violence, and occupational discrimination, [but] their experiences with shortage of material and infrastructural breakdown were in line with those of other Soviets” (69). Given the reflection on the experiences of the “students of color” in Russia, it would be interesting to know how those non-European populations would respond if asked about their relationship with local law enforcement. Would their distrust and fear for the police mirror that of the American students of color? How would this translate from the Soviet period into the contemporary? Would these same relationships with materiality remain? These questions are unanswered in the chapter. Otherwise, the answers would have attested to the impact of racial thinking and the contemporary meanings of “Black,” a subject that Lemon addressed in a much earlier 1995 article titled “What are they Writing about us Blacks? Roma and “Race” in Russia?,” which points not only to the constructions and meanings of race, but also to the lived material reality of race, which has an impact on interactions, experiences, and access to “life and death” for people of color in post-Soviet Russia. This difference between “white” and “non-European” people in experiencing race may point to a change over time in the understandings and implications of somatic difference and “race” in Russia, although this discussion arises elsewhere in the volume. Understanding the structural underpinnings of race and the daily implications for living as a member of a “raced” population helps to establish fundamental frameworks for how we might analyze the implications for the study of “race” in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia.

The intricacies of these differences are explored in Part Four of the volume. Chapters address Russia and race in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries regarding its Asian populations and foreign otherness in the Soviet Union, with representation of the experiences of what the author terms “mixed people” in Central Asia and the complications of a Soviet system that required them to “possess a single ‘official’ nationality” (209). These stories are compelling and reveal the “difficulty of having a subjective identity that is not externally validated” (219), which, in at least one example in the chapter, is the result of the individual's physiognomy being deemed incompatible with what a “Russian” should look like. The discussions of somatic difference represent only a portion of the articles. Others in the volume address the ideas of racial thinking as related to what we now term “hybridity,” which serves as a counter to “pure forms” or an embrace of “nationalist and even racist science” and how these constructs inform the ways that individuals see themselves and form their national or even racial identities. Similar questions emerge in relation to Jewish and Siberian populations in the volume and aid in understanding how various ideologies of race have had an impact on some of the larger minority populations in the Soviet Union. Chapters engaging in this dialogue include “Racial Purity vs. Imperial Hybridity: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire” by Marina Mogilner and “Racial ‘Degeneration’ and Siberian Regionalism in the Late Imperial Period” by David Rainbow.

The chapters in this work prove Howard Winant's assertion that race and racism are “simultaneously flexible and structural construct[s]” that have been instrumentalized, understood, and constructed for generations in Soviet and Post-Soviet space.Footnote ⁶ These questions, while broadly applicable, are contextualized within the specific time and geographical contexts of the Soviet Union and Russia, which until relatively recently would have seemed unlikely, incongruent, and, in some intellectual circles, impossible.

This same reluctance to embrace race studies as a valid mode of analysis undergirds the logic and rationale behind Baker's important and timely volume, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? In the volume, Baker explores the Yugoslav region and its various entanglements with global and local formations of race. The book is comprehensive and reflective, as the author admits her initial “sense that race was not something south-east European studies ‘needed to know’” (2). This engagement with Baker's personal journey and her exploration of the validity of race studies to the region track the slow movement of the field's engagement with race, starting from the post-conflict and postsocialist period following the 1990s, when cultural studies were “deeply informed by a translation of postcolonial theory into a way of explaining the historic and present-day structural peripheralization of the region and its people” (1). From this starting point, Baker moves to an exploration of how race has been relevant to the region, including its most immediate connections during the socialist period by way of the Yugoslav leadership and the strategies of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito and the Nonaligned Movement (NAM).

Baker is known for her work on music, nationalism studies, and the Yugoslav wars. The impetus for this work emerged while she was researching music in Croatia and happened upon a tabloid with the English headline “DJ is so black” (2). This “attention to his skin colour and Guinean heritage” violated both Baker's upbringing and her training in southeast European studies theory because there was a paucity of theorical frames to confront the intent behind the headline. As such, Baker set out to address the position of race in the Yugoslav space and the meaning(s) of such an engagement throughout the various histories of Yugoslav space. Once establishing her motivation, the work moves swiftly from that initial position of questioning whether to how race functions to inform a broader understanding of the regional global connections. Baker finds that race resonates powerfully despite traditional forms of belonging in the region expressed through one's “nationality,” similar to the Russian and Soviet experience. Before setting her own path, however, Baker acknowledges that the regional connections to race were first discussed by scholars with roots in the region. These scholars include Dušan Bjelić, Aniko Imre, Konstantin Kilibarda, Julija Sardelić, and Miglena Todorova, who first recognized the structures and regional uses of race as not only relevant but necessary to understand the interplay of difference in the region. That individuals from the region were willing to include race studies into their analyses speaks to its viability in regional studies. The reluctance of individuals from outside the region to employ such frames speaks, perhaps, more to the positionality of the individual researcher than the utility of race studies to SEES.

Baker's volume raises other important questions about Yugoslav racial solidarity and the liminal space that the country occupied by way of the NAM, which “permitted some Yugoslavs to identify Yugoslavia with Africa” (110). While this solidarity relied on race, similarly to the solidarities of the Soviet period explored in a number of chapters in the Rainbow volume, race was part of a broader discussion of decolonization and Yugoslav independence outside of blocism, and was thus a facet of Yugoslav marginality as well. As such, Baker thoughtfully complicates the discussion of race and its relevance in Yugoslavia as something unique to the post-conflict Yugoslav condition: in Bosnia there was even language used of being “treated like Africans” (169). This use pushes the boundaries of understanding race and racialization, particularly as it is regularly articulated by way of a global color line, despite the fundamental understanding that race is the result of structural and power imbalances of which the color line is only one aspect. Although this “Blackness” refers to European populations that code as white, its reference is meant to evoke an awkward solidarity in the marginalization that people of color face. The connections made between the former Yugoslav populations and a metaphorical state of Blackness speaks volumes to the circulation of ideologies that position color as foundational to the transmission of race and its articulation. This use of African that effectively codes as Black also emerges in the work through Baker's discussion of “black cool,” which highlights the shifting meaning of “Black” as having a direct relationship with African-American culture and cultural products, but still linked to the somatic connection to Blackness (49). In addition, she highlights the local affiliations with race through a number of local examples, including the history of the Afro-Albanian population in Ulcinj, Montenegro, a black local population whose ancestry lies in the seventeenth century Ottoman slave trade, whose very existence disrupts the local understanding of identity.

One important difference between Baker's and Rainbow's works is the source of the theoretical framework. Whereas Rainbow's work uses a variety of theories informing global formations of race as the foundation of the argument, Baker's work on race emerges in concert with feminist theory and critical whiteness studies, a trend which has offered a means to discuss difference and the nation in Europe where theory on race has been minimal. This difference shows the variation in sources and how, in the absence of acceptable European theories of race since WWII, American Critical Race Theory (CRT) helped to fill the void.

Whereas historical realities and the trajectory of the Yugoslav region and Soviet space differed greatly, they intersect with regard to their diverse populations. Both sets of populations include considerable numbers of people who belong to groups classified as “Roma.” The emergence of European Critical Race Studies has been essential to the discussion of the marginality of Roma particularly as it relates to their (self)definition as black in eastern Europe.Footnote ⁷ Yet it is difficult to write about race in eastern Europe without addressing the marginalized position of Romani peoples. In fact, some of the earliest discussions of race in the aftermath of the fall of communism and socialism focused primarily on that population. This trend continues and works addressing the position of people considered Roma have embraced the methodologies and logic of CRT, as there are many connections between Roma and the various raced populations who are the focus of CRT scholars. Baker's work aligns most closely with those trends, whereas Brigid O'Keefe's chapter “The Racialization of Soviet Gypsies: Roma, Nationality Politics, and Socialist Transformation in Stalin's Soviet Union” in Rainbow's work discusses the position of Romani populations in the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev to illustrate the historical uses of race (133). During the Soviet period, when the norm was a belief that “all human beings could be ‘improved’ and ‘remade’,” including Romani peoples, Roma could not escape the state's dominant position that used stereotypes to define them. Further demoralizing was that Roma in the Soviet Union had to “self-exoticize” and perform their culture and identity to participate meaningfully in society. Through specific examples of the theater unions and party membership, O'Keefe concludes that the “reliable path to self-Sovietization,” or the unarticulated norm, “was the persistent delegitimization of themselves” (154). This reality of the stereotype becoming instrumentalized as truth presents the fact of race, even if scholars have not previously viewed it as such and it further advances the need to reanalyze these previously held accepted truths and conclusions.

This review began with a discussion about the reluctance of scholars in SEES to engage with race, with the recognition that there have been changes and that even though reluctance remains, the space for inclusion of race studies is increasing—a fact proven by these two important volumes. While this may be true, Baker reminds us that “accounting explicitly for race, racialization and whiteness does not suddenly unmake existing approaches to postsocialist marginalization and exclusion” (186). The fact of difference has been a consistent discussion in the literature. If we have made space for understanding these regions by way of their diversity and hybridity, “nesting Orientalisms” in the case of Yugoslav space, or “nations and nationalities” in the Russian and post-Soviet case, is it really such an intellectual stretch to incorporate broader means of analysis? As both volumes attest, former Yugoslav and Soviet countries have been affiliated with empires and decolonial movements. While we have historically used other vocabulary to articulate these connections, the language of race provides a means to create even deeper connections, and solidarities. It also allows us as scholars to step from behind the cloak of exceptionalism and understand that if we can recognize the same power imbalances and normalizing frames of race as articulated in other geographies, we can recognize them in post-Yugoslav and post-Soviet space and engage in a dialogue about these phenomena to open our scholarship to new vistas, new ways of seeing. This openness could facilitate an infusion of diverse scholars eager to contemplate and share their own experiences with race in these regions. The volumes by Baker and Rainbow illustrate how to move beyond the question of whether to statements of how, and I look forward to the dialogue that follows.