What Does Race Have to Do with the Yugoslav Region?

Catherine Baker
Online lecture, 30′

In English
Free admission

In Yugoslav region, shifting, ambiguous identifications with symbolic histories and geographies of race include identifications with “Europe” as a space of modernity, civilisation and whiteness, but also analogies drawn between “Balkanness” and “blackness” in imagined solidarity, as well as the (today mostly forgotten) race-blind anti-colonialism of Yugoslav Non-Alignment. And yet, we often hear that the Yugoslav region has nothing to do with race – and vice versa. The region has ethnicity, and has religion: legacies of nation formation, forced migration and genocide that invite seeing its past and present through the lens of ethnopolitical and religious conflict. However, “race”, or the politics of racialisation and whiteness which constitute it, is rarely a subject of study for the Yugoslav region. Why is that so?

In her lecture, Catherine Baker will argue that the Yugoslav region is not “outside” race. On the contrary, it is deeply embedded in transnational racialised imaginations and therefore a global history of coloniality. The question is where it stands, and why that has gone unspoken for so long.

At 14.30 the lecture will be followed by artist talks (in English) by Lina Akif and Christian Guerematchi, moderated by Samar Zughool. (Selma Selman's artist talk is cancelled).

This lecture will be live-streamed.

Organisation: City of Women as part of the European project BE PART co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, in co-operation with Škuc Gallery; support: Creative Europe, Ministry of Public Administration, Municipality of Ljubljana.