When: Thursday, May 23, 2024, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PMWhere: Masaryk Room, UCL-SSEES, 16 Taviton St, London, WC1H 0BW
A part of a mini-series talk on “Contemporary Debates in Post-Socialist Theory and Practice”, a collaboration between CEREES and the University of Warwick
Piro Rexhepi (UCL) explores how overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes along the Balkan Route reinforce regional racialized relations of power. By bringing the Balkans into the complex interlacing of global racial borders and coloniality, he argues that the spatial integration of post-socialist territories and people in the last three decades into the Euro-Atlantic enclosure serves to both secure its borderlands while also recruiting Eastern European workers as means of tackling the demands for cheap labour and the decline of white demographics. These transformations raise fundamental questions about the nature of enclosures, not only as a contemporary coagulation of a white world walling of colonial-capitalist accumulated wealth within Euro-American spaces through sprawling and inter-connected border carceral regimes around the US/Mexico crossing, EU/Mediterranean passage and the Balkan Route, but also as continuities of colonial formations of race bent on bolstering white demographics at its edges.
Piro Rexhepi is the Alexander Nash fellow in Albanian Studies at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies 2023. His research focuses on decoloniality, sexuality and Islam. His recent work on racism and borders along the Balkan Refugee Route has been published in a range of mediums in and out of academia including the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Critical Muslims and the Guardian among others. He is the author of White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route, Duke University Press (2022).
Organisers
Neda Genova (University of Warwick) & Maria Chehonadskih (QMUL)