Anglophone academic debates around race and racism are usually related to the Euro-Atlantic economic, political and cultural sphere. Critical literature on whiteness approaches it as a system of privilege generated by the violent histories of exporting capitalist modernity from western Europe to the wider world. Together with colleagues from UK and the Balkans, I am developing an interdisciplinary research project which seeks to complicate and nuance critical whiteness studies by investigating the emergence of non-imperial, non-western modes of European self-identification that arguably began to emerge from socialist Yugoslavia during the cold war.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Non-Alignment was the official expression of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy. Pragmatic and financially oriented, Yugoslavia’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was marked by a Marxist utopianism and a political confidence generated by Tito’s military victory over fascism in south-central Europe. The armed struggle for political freedom came to occupy a central place in the Yugoslav political imaginary, as it did in a number of nation-states of the global south. NAM manifestos insisted on all nation-states’ rights to political self-determination; photographs from the cold war era show a smiling Tito (occasionally on board the state ship Galeb) with friendly black and brown (though mostly male) ‘third-world’ politicians. As Asian and African students entered Yugoslav universities, non-aligned solidarity was cast as the international version of the national policy of ‘brotherhood and unity’ in multi-ethnic federal Yugoslavia. This project in-the-making aims to think comparatively about ways in which raced aspects of decolonisation and the cold war began to be de-realised by non-alignment.

Find out about a 2022 pilot event funded by the University of Southampton and organised in partnership with the City Museum of Rijeka by clicking here.

To learn more or express an interest in participating, email [email protected]