Imperialisms and racial capitalism in South-East Europe: A conversation about White Enclosures by Piro Rexhepi

Even though extensive bodies of scholarship proclaim white supremacy, racial capitalism, and coloniality to be global structures, South-East Europe is one of the regions often invisibilized in such conversations. Piro Rexhepi has been one of the thinkers at the forefront of scholarship on race, coloniality, and racial capitalism in this region. His latest book, White enclosures (Duke, 2022), represents a cutting-edge exercise in rewriting South-East Europe into global histories of racial and capitalist regimes of exploitation, and their ongoing present-day unfoldings. Complementing Piro’s perspective, Sofija Stefanovic knows the struggles against extractive imperialism in the South-East of Europe intimately. Her experience in organizing and reimagining anti-capitalist abolitionist worlds is part of globally-oriented and locally-embedded struggles which tackle dehumanising exploitation in South-East Europe. 

The Catalysts for Decolonization research lab is delighted to host a conversation between Piro and Sofija, on all things racial capitalism, imperialism and racism in the South-East of Europe, with the book White Enclosures as an important intellectual starting point. Please join us for what promises to be an intellectually stimulating conversation. Lunch will be provided. 

More information about the speakers and the book: 

Piro Rexhepi holds a PhD in Politics from University of Strathclyde. His research is focused on questions of coloniality, migration, gender and sexuality. He is the author of White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route (Duke University Press).

Sofija’s PhD research weaves questions of extractivism, digital surveillance, coloniality, and abolition feminism together with building solidarities from within the Balkan environmental justice movement. She organises primarily with ZBOR, a transnational Balkan platform for resource sharing, political education and direct action.

“For all its history of intersecting empires, the Balkans has been rarely framed as a global site of race and coloniality. This, as Piro Rexhepi argues in White Enclosures is not surprising, given the perception of the Balkans as colorblind and raceless, a project that spans post-Ottoman racial formations, transverses Socialist modernity and is negotiated anew in the process of postsocialist Euro-Atlantic integration. Connecting severed colonial histories from the vantage point of body politic, Rexhepi turns to the borderland zones of the Balkans to trace past and present geopolitical attempts of walling whiteness. From efforts to straighten the sexualities of post-Ottoman Muslim subjects, to Yugoslav nonaligned solidarities between Muslims of the second and third world, to Roma displacement and contemporary emergence of refugee carceral technologies along the Balkan Route, Rexhepi points not only to the epistemic erasures that maintain the fantasy of whiteness but also to the disruption emanating from the solidarities between queer- and transpeople that fold the Balkans back into global efforts to resist the politics of racial capitalism.” (Source: https://www.dukeupress.edu/white-enclosures)