The Funambulist 48 - Fifty Shades of White (Ness) - Digital Version (Small Res)

THE FUNAMBULIST
Politics of Space and Bodies
N°48 FIFTY SHADES

July — August 2023
THINKING AGAINST THE
OF WHITE(NESS) U.S.-CENTRIC CONCEPTION

OF RACIALIZATION
THE FUNAMBULIST BEHIND
THE SCENES
There would be many things to add here, in
particular the ramping up of a plurilingual
infrastructure that will allow us to publish the
magazine in other languages than English in the
Dear subscribers, dear readers, future (starting with French for our 50th issue), but
I’ll leave it at that! Shivangi Mariam and I wish you
I hope that you are all well, as we enter the solsticial a beautiful summer/winter from the office!
part of the year. I’m glad that you opened this issue,
which joins some others in the list of editions we’ve Léopold Lambert
done that have the ambition to be quite precise in Paris, on June 9, 2023
the editorial argument they’re trying to articulate.
Those are always harder to put together, but as
we’re almost reaching the number of 50 issues, I
can tell you that they are also more satisfying for
me as their editor!
One friend has been enriching this issue, every

step of the way, from the choice of some of the
contributors to the careful re-reading of my
introduction and even participating in interviewing
Maile Arvin (pages 72–79). This friend is Anaïs
Duong-Pedica and I am extremely grateful to her
for this, and for our many weekly conversations that
have an impact on the magazine’s contact.
The final two weeks of putting this issue together

occurred right after a quick visit to Venice and a
longer one in Palestine. I had the chance to see
with my own eyes the installation that Venice
Architecture Biennale 2023 chief curator Lesley
Lokko had generously commissioned to us. The
display features a copy of all The Funambulist
publications (the 2013–2015 “Pamphlets” and
“Volumes,” The Funambulist by its Readers book,
and the 47 first issues of the magazine) as well
as hand-written notes (big thanks to Elise Misao
Hunchuck!) providing some “behind-the-scenes” THE ISSUE’S
snippets to visitors. This was also the opportunity
to gather in one place with many of the amazing
COVER EXPLAINED
participants of this exhibition, fourteen of whom are This beautiful piece by Polish-Roma artist
Funambulist contributors (special shoutout to our Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a part of the Out Of
advisory board member Margarida Waco who was Egypt (Wyjście z Egiptu) series (2021). This work
commissioned her own installation). constitutes a reflection on the representation
of Romani people in art, reinterpreting more
As for Palestine, as many of you know, each of particularly 17th century etchings by French
N°48 my visits there is incredibly important to me. This

time around, I went as a support to the staff of the
Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest). We spent a
printmaker Jacques Callot entitled “Les Bohémiens”
(The G*psies) or “La vie des Egyptiens” (Life of
the Egyptians). Four more artworks by Małgorzata
FIFTY SHADES beautifully rich time together and with guests from
Nigeria, Kashmir, Ethiopia, Turtle Island, South
Africa, Egypt..., meeting with incredible Palestinian
aka Gosia are visible in this issue, in dialog with
Margareta Matache’s text (pages 38–45).
OF WHITE(NESS) writers and activists, such as Budour Hassan,

Asmaa Azaizeh, Beesan Ramadan, Mahmoud
Jiddah, Ahed Tamimi and her parents, Mohammed
I first encountered her work thanks to Polish
Parisian curator Joanna Warsza—I’m grateful to
her for putting us in relation—who commissioned
El Kurd, Soheir Assad, Sahar Qawasmeh, Umar al- Gosia to create twelve monumental works for
THINKING AGAINST THE U.S.-CENTRIC Ghubari... in Ramallah, Nabi Saleh, Hebron, Lydd, the entirety of Poland’s pavilion at the Venice Art
CONCEPTION OF RACIALIZATION Haifa, and Jerusalem-Al Quds. Biennale 2022.
COVER. 32.
OUT OF EGYPT (WYJŚCIE Z EGIPTU) WHITE SKIN, WHITE MASKS:
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas ASHKENAZI JEWS IN
SOUTHERN AFRICA
6. Mitchel Joffe Hunter
ibiyanε: PHYSICAL POETRY AND
SPELLS FOR SUSTENANCE 38.
Camille Bacon GADJONESS: AN UNCOUNTED
SHADE OF WHITENESS
10. Margareta Matache
GESTURE, MEMORY, TRAUMA, Artworks by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
CENSORSHIP: A PERSONAL
RECKONING WITH 46.
INDONESIA’S HISTORIES ON PERIPHERAL WHITENESS
Sabrina Citra AND BEING CENTRAL
EASTERN EUROPEAN .52
14. Kasia Narkowicz 6.
WE THE VANQUISHED:
ON BIAFRA, THE NIGERIAN 52.
POSTCOLONY, AND THE NEED MESTIZAJE: WHEN THE SHADES
FOR RADICAL SOLIDARITIES DISSIMULATE WHITENESS
Amarachi Iheke A conversation with Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa
20. 60. .72

FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS): SELF-PORTRAITS
INTRODUCTION Julie Dowling
Léopold Lambert
66. 46.
24. UKRAINE AND THE TRAPS OF
HAVE CAUCASIANS EVER BEEN PROXIMITY TO EUROPEAN AND COVER. .66
WHITE? RUSSIAN COLONIALISM RUSSIAN SLAVIC WHITENESS
AND THE MACHINERY OF Darya Tsymbalyuk 38.
RACIALIZATION
Keto Gorgadze 72.
A FABRICATED “ALMOST
WHITENESS”: THE COLONIAL
RACIALIZATION OF POLYNESIANS
A conversation with Maile Arvin
Questions by Anaïs Duong-Pedica 14.
.10
20.
.24
.32 60.
2 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48

Nº48 NEWS FROM
THE FRONTS
Carving process of elombe 016 (2023)./ Courtesy of ibiyanε

4 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 5
ibiyanε: PHYSICAL POETRY AND
SPELLS FOR SUSTENANCE
CAMILLE BACON
This text, by Camille Bacon, is a rare feature on a design have recently come to understand
practice in the pages of The Funambulist. The creative spirit
through which Martinique-based studio ibiyanε engages with their work as both cartographical
its work will, however, be familiar to our readers, as it draws
from Black radical imagination and a commitment to the notion
and poetic.
of relationality between the material, the symbolic, the ritual,
the oniric, the corporeal, and the object’s autonomy… After drawing from Black Quantum Futurism as
well as several other texts that ground their haptic
Somatic practitioner Prentis Hemphill notes that “a methodology in the crucible of the Black radical
measure of liberation will be found in our capacity imagination, ibiyanε think of their artworks as
for intimacy.” If we consider the design industry’s maps that aid both themselves and their audience
infamous exaltation of ostensible “individual” in imagining and actualizing material conditions,
genius and the Western genealogy from which ideological frameworks and spells for sustenance
such an ideology emerged, we may also consider that extend the viability of the breath that circulates
the work of ibiyanε—a design studio comprised of within and between all life forms.
Tania Doumbe Fines and Elodie Dérond—and their
commitment to thinking and making together as With this in mind, the nomer “ibiyanε,” which
an embodiment of the “capacity for intimacy” that is derived from the Batanga word “to know one
Hemphill speaks of. In the world of ibiyanε, the another,” succinctly articulates one of the pair’s
material and spiritual environment serves as a core concerns: that their work contributes to the
guide, collective rest is a requisite part of the fecund actualization of a lived reality in which all living
soil of a life well lived, sanctuaries for gathering beings are adequately resourced and cared for.
are plentifully available and dutifully maintained, To this end, their work has, from the outset, been
and we all possess a place to wander and lift our deeply influenced by their respective backgrounds
Fig.1 Fig.2
burdens up to the sky. Materialized from their and heritage as people of African descent. As
collective sensibilities is an imagined land where Dérond exuberantly notes, their racination in afro-
dreamers prevail. centric ways of being “nourishes” their creative
practice from end to end. For example, their first
ibiyanε was seeded in Montreal in 2020, when project involved the construction of an African the diligent study of texts on African sculpture, With this context in mind, ibiyanε
the two made their first pieces of what they then birthing chair, which have been used across including the eponymous book by Ladislas Segy.
understood as “sculptural furniture,” thereby millenia to bring those giving birth greater comfort Such study allows them to place themselves within is, all in all, invested in creating
highlighting the work’s functional and aesthetic
prowess. The resulting forms were shown in two
and which Fines notes were a seminal part of the
Cameroonian domestic visual landscape she grew
a broader continuum of makers and within an
ancestral framework that can be considered a
forms alongside and through which
exhibitions: Black Experience isn’t a Spectacle up in. Their heritage also informs how they source citational practice of sorts, in that they explicitly their audience can partake in
(curated by Venessa Appiah of afila.si) and and sculpt their material of choice (wood) and how recognize that their work emerges from a specific
Wet Metal (organized by Éditions 8888). After they relate to it as a teacher of sorts, which will be set of histories, just as the wood they coax into new
contemporary rituals of connection
leaving Montreal in the Winter of 2020, the pair discussed further below. forms emerges from landscapes that once aided and (either with themselves, another, the
now dwell in Dérond’s rapturous homeland of abetted liberatory acts of maroonage.
Martinique and have since shown in New York, Moreover, ibiyanε’s work is interested in excavating land, or the divine) such as prayer,
Miami, and now, Milan. and nurturing what the pair described as “new Amidst their time spent studying, Dérond and
imaginaries” in which the development of Doumbe-Fines realized that sculptures are not
conversation, and rest.
relational intelligence (i.e. the individual and merely objects that stand sedentary and silent in
Across nearly three years of collective practices needed “to know one another” space. Rather, they are objects that can think, act, Rest and reverence, in particular, have been on
sustained co-dreaming, Fines and in a mode that does not demand the reduction or and feel all on their own. Moreover, if we consider Fines and Dérond’s minds lately. Thus, on the
exploitation of either party) is a tantamount priority. sculpture to be a mode of ritual object, such vessels occasion of “Love Letters,” ibiyanε presents a
Dérond have developed a sincere On a practical level, they bring this ideological are then also objects through which we may access headrest, elombe 016, a form reminiscent of the
commitment to bear on a formal level through catharsis and guidance from above. sprawling rhizomes that comprise the Martinican
cadence of creative exchange and

mangrove. This work serves, in tandem with a Alas, for elombe 016, ibiyanε wished to not only pay
newly commissioned poem, as an homage to those homage through form, but also through process.
who have supported ibiyanε’s practice and shaped Normally, they coat the sculptures in chemicals to
Fig.3
their worldview as a duo since they began working maintain their structural integrity. Now, however,
together. More specifically, the headrest honors they have employed the natural protective
those ibiyanε calls “dreamers,” i.e. those who are properties of shea butter to coat the headrest just as
invested in “capturing ancestral knowledge and/ their ancestors would have. Additionally, they are
or practices, and crafting the world they want learning to make their own dye.
to live through, while also echoing the elements
of our sculptural method of learning, archiving, elombe 016, taken in tandem with ibiyanε’s work to
remembering, and ultimately releasing.” date, demonstrates a continued interest in world-
building through a mode of experimentally poetic
The devotional nature of this work comes to bear in storytelling and communion with both the mundane
how, exactly, Fines and Dérond went about sourcing and the miraculous dimensions of life itself. To
and sculpting the material. After an arduous work think, feel, and convene in the midst of ibiyanε’s
day, they decided to go to the beach to access a work is to behold a collection of prayers that take
palmful of renewal and chose, specifically, a cove on material form: an invitation to raise one’s hands
in Tartane, located on the North-Eastern peninsula. up to the heavens in praise of our earthly condition
On their journey back home, they happened upon and to call our fingers forward as we chart forth
branches that had either fallen or been cut from a realities that love us back. ■
canopy of Spanish Lime trees and felt an impulse
to take two large pieces back with them, which ibiyanε extends gratitude to the dreamers Karl Obakeng
Fig.4
they later intuitively shaped into what is now Ndebele, Pascale Chroné, Karine Numa, Venessa Appiah,
elombe 016. Here, they were interested in allowing Adama Keïta, Albert Balon, Camille Bacon, Nene Myriam
the process to unfold organically through a mode Konate, Glowzi, Sandrine Doumbe , René and Chantal Dérond,
of collaborative improvisation. Together, they let etc. Thank you also to esteemed collaborators Jean Michel
the wood exert its own agency, listening when it Gadoua and Anna Carnick.
resisted their push, and allowing the material itself
to tell them how it wanted to look, be and feel. “The Camille Bacon is a Chicago-based writer who is building a
wood just took over,” notes Fines, reflectively, with “sweet black writing life” as inspired by the words of poet
a tranquil and all-knowing smile stretched gently Nikky Finney and the infinite wisdom of the Black feminist
across her face. tradition more broadly. Through a methodology that straddles
rigorous research and divinely derived oration, she aims to
Of all their work to date, elombe 016 is perhaps excavate how aesthetics can catalyze a collective reorientation
most resolute in its existence as a collaboration towards relation, connection and intimacy and away from
between ibiyanε’s dual consciousness and that of apathy and amnesia. Ultimately, her work serves as the
the raw material itself. Hence, it also bears noting external embodiment of her commitment to amplifying the
that amidst Dérond’s study of pre-colonial sculpture, wayward ingenuity of the Black creative spirit. She currently
they learned not only of the aesthetic dimensions manages McArthur Binion’s studio in Chicago, IL and formerly All photos are courtesy of ibiyanε
of headrests, but also the ancient protocols through held positions at GRAY Gallery, Chicago, IL, and The Studio Fig.1 elombe 015 (2023).
which they were made and used. Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Fig.2 elombe 016 (2023).
Fig.5 Fig.3-5 Carving process of elombe 016 (2023).

GESTURE, MEMORY, TRAUMA,
CENSORSHIP: A PERSONAL
RECKONING WITH
INDONESIA’S HISTORIES
SABRINA CITRA
In this personal text, Sabrina Citra navigates between colonial us freedom! Logically we don’t even stand a chance
memory, postcolonial state narratives, and a reckoning with against their ‘military’ power. All that firearm
the fabricated, if not fictitious, dimension of nationhood after pales in comparison to the spirit of our people.
the fight against colonialism has ended. Through a mindful look That is what I know to be a miracle, Sabrina. That
at gestures and rituals, she articulates how this mythology is is God’s miracle for Indonesia.” These stories had
inscribed within the memories of their bodies. been likened to the narratives of creation within
mythology, propelling the violences that had been
Being of a diaspora had afforded me the distance endured by the nation’s forebearers as necessary
to think about my Indonesian-ness, while being sacrifices to birth a postcolonial Indonesia. My
raised in Jakarta has granted a closeness to the mother’s ritual of storytelling had inherited a belief
community and land that automated a sense in the “sacred” genealogy of nationhood.
of belonging to the nation. I had believed that
“nationhood” would articulate my relation with
the motherland (encapsulated in the national The trajectory of her stories aligned
language as Ibu Pertiwi), rather than an “identity” with the narratives of national
that must be explicitly defined. However, the first
years of living abroad had enforced an assertion history that signified colonization
to recognize my national identity by the demands
of state administration, as my Indonesian-ness had
as the phenomenon that had unified
been reduced to the passport that I had carried the different ethnic groups across
and my precarious status as an “immigrant.”
The following instances had awakened me to the archipelago to reclaim their
Fig.1
the volatility of “nationhood” as a concept that
affirmed my being. Upon my return to Jakarta, my
Indonesia.
identity became a subject of criticism among my memorize legislative documents and its regulations, salute the flag while singing the national anthem.
community for I had been deemed “less Indonesian” The urgency for independence had established the the Constitution of Indonesia and Pancasila The following gestures have been tradition within
for challenging national epistemologies, in nation-building project to (re)build a postcolonial (“philosophy” of Indonesia), as well as a range of the flag ceremony, which has been unchanged for
particular national history and language. These Indonesia that removed colonial influences within patriotic songs and its accompanying histories. The decades since the nation’s independence in 1945.
collective experiences have clarified (or rather, their proclamation of an Indonesian identity. This range of these materials explicated the multiple These rituals of remembrance had been imposed
complicated) my ideas of “belonging”’ in the context involved the destruction of any public symbols that contexts of statehood that demands its citizens to to accustom Indonesians to realize their moral
of nationhood. In this text, I sought to explore it valorized colonial rule (across Jakarta), as well adhere to their specific duties, adjusted to each responsibility (towards their forefathers, as well as
through the encounters and experiences that I had as the creation of a national history, language, setting. To this day, I cannot recall any moment that for one another) to remain in unity.
with the histories of Indonesia. monuments, and museums. Decoloniality had required me to recite or remember the Constitution,
materialized in Indonesia’s newfound culture, Pancasila, or any legislative policies beyond Upon reflection, the national histories had proven
At the age of nine, my mother often narrated stories forming a “rooted” expression of a national (read: examinations, but the memory of songs had proved the existence of an Indonesian historiography
of decolonisation against the Portuguese, the Dutch, Indonesian) identity. useful for flag ceremonies. My teachers had taught that blends oral, textual, and visual narratives
and the Japanese. She described their battles in us the lyrics for the national anthem and patriotic with embodied experiences which broadened
folklore, claiming their victories to be God-given: Identifying as an Indonesian did not come without songs about the national flag—such as “Berkibarlah the temporality of historical knowledge to exist
“They came in with their firearms and all we had the terms and conditions that demanded an Benderaku” (“Fly Free, My Flag”) by Ibu Sud in beyond its recollection of “past events” towards
was our bambu runcing. Under the name of God, adherence to its civic duties. The years of schooling 1947—which were eventually sung during its its enlivenment in present-day time. Granted, I do
our people raised their spears and went into battle. had molded me to become a “good,” law-abiding procession. When the flag was raised, participants not want to ignore the political context within the
Imagine this, these spears of bamboo had brought citizen through civic studies, when I was taught to were required to maintain an upright posture and following narratives that instrumentalized history

lost or removed in articulating the periods of mass granted them the freedom to safely explore these
violence in Indonesia, ranging from the Papuan topics and they would risk censorship, if it were
referendum, the 1965 murders of hundreds of produced in a different context.
thousands of Communist party members and their
affiliates, as well as ethnic violences that were To publicly detail histories that challenge the
endured by Chinese-Indonesians. very idea of “nationhood” has become a difficult
exercise for Indonesians, especially those who
It is a privilege to have encountered academics and are disconnected from their own memories I have
artists such as Brigitta Isabella, FX Harsono and embodied its belief as I have been bound by my
Betty Adii of Udeido Collective whose works have birthright to Ibu Pertiwi, carrying her histories
offered clarity towards the insularity of national as my own. Even as I write this, I feel a guilt for
history. Their research challenges the image of an failing to provide you, reader, the “truth” of the
equal, just, and united Indonesia produced in its (violent) histories contained from the public sphere.
narratives (that we have naturalized) , excluding My positionality as an Indonesian writer does not
any experience, events, and memories that were grant me the liberty to place myself as a “voice of
deemed unsuitable to the trajectory of nationhood, clarity” to write on their behalf, as I only stand as
including the violence that is faced by marginalized a witness of their memories. I can only hope that
communities. This began with Mba Brigitta who there will be a time for them to choose their way of
produced a paper entitled “Hantu Topeng Kelono, remembrance. ■
Hantu Burung Kasuari, dan Hantu Ngung
Ngung Ngung Cakcakcak: Tiga Hantu Tari Sabrina Citra is a researcher whose interests intersects
Yang Bergentayangan Dalam Narasi Identitas between the subjects of aesthetics, cultural studies and
Kebudayaan Nasional” (“The Ghost of Kelono, postcolonial history. Her work has been published in
Fig.2 The Ghost of the Kasuari Bird and The Ghost of Photoworks UK, Jogja Biennale, and Gal-dem. Since her
Ngung Ngung Ngung Cakcakcak: Three Ghosts of Masters, she has previously coordinated research for
Dance that Haunt the National Cultural Identity”), Decolonize the Art World and King’s College London. She is
to materialize a nationalist mode of belonging, but I aerobics) everyday before class would start. Did where she positions herself as a ghost to produce currently based in Jakarta and working as a strategist, whilst
want to recognize the physicality that is demanded you know a Japanese soldier would lead our critical re-reading of dance performances that were pursuing research on the “exotic gaze” that has been attached
from historicizing. routine? And he would go “Ichi, ni, san!” (“One, deemed a threat against the “wholeness” imbued in to the making of a Southeast Asian aesthetic. Her next work
two, three!”), he said as he gave me a demonstration the aesthetics of a national identity. interlopes across theory, poetry, photography and dance.
of his exercise routine from seventy years ago.
Our bodies have become sites of He credited the Japanese for inciting his hobby of Following this, Pak Harsono searched across Java
praxis or what I loosely refer to as a exercising, which he believed was one of the habits to find the mass burial sites of Chinese-Indonesians
worth inheriting. My questions regarding the latter who were victims of ethnic cleansing, which had
“living archive” that utilizes memory issue had always made him uncomfortable, but he eventually led him to encounter their families who
was insistent on sharing the memory that he could retold the stories of their fathers and mothers’
as a vessel to contain the entangled recall. He had always been grateful for his young deaths. The oral histories had acted as inspiration
relation of knowledges that merges age, as it had saved him from Rōmusha (Japanese for his numerous works called Berziarah ke
colonial system of forced labor) and he briefly spoke Sejarah (Pilgrimage to History) and Memelihara
its distant past with its present-day of his friends who he barely saw since they had Hidup, Menghentikan Hidup (Preserving Life,
reactions and receptivity. been enlisted to partake in forced labor: “I only saw
them when I had gone home from school. They
Terminating Life), where he produced his own
reflections with the lost memories that he had(n’t)
would typically go home in big groups but one day, inherited as a Chinese-Indonesian.
I had sought to implement the following mode of I saw one of my friends return home by himself and
historicizing to understand my family’s experiences he wore nothing but a rice sack.” On the other hand, Betty took it upon herself to
in colonized Indonesia. My Oma (“grandmother” utilize her installation called Dystopian Reality:
in Dutch) refused to speak on the matter because I had learned from my conversations with my Opa The Agony of Existence to raise awareness of what
it had triggered unwanted memories of her family, that there exists a difficulty within the retelling she calls the “power dynamic” of the militia that
but my Opa (“grandfather” in Dutch), who grew of traumatic histories in Indonesia due to the had endangered the lives of Papuan women. In a
up during the Japanese Occupation, was willing to two reasons: firstly, there is a disability to recall letter that she had written to me, she articulated
share the stories that he remembered. He recalled past experiences among those who had endured her intention to materialize the “realities from
his history in fragments: blending his ‘mundane’ and lived through these histories and, secondly, memory and collective trauma” that had never Fig.1 Three young Indonesians on a street. Two of them are Republican volunteers
experiences with Japanese soldiers alongside their censorship remains rampant in the publication and been inscribed in the narratives of nationhood. I from Sulawesi, members of the armed youth organization KRIS, on leave in
Yogyakarta, December 1947. / Photo by Hugo Wilmar (Dutch National Archives/
cruelties that he bore witness to. He was always writing of histories that discerned the violences had presumed the importance of recognizing the Spaarnestad Collection).
happy to recall the memories of the former: “At of the nation. Beyond the context of colonial categorization of their work in the fields of art and Fig.2 A vision of nationhood in Markas Laskar Rakyat (The People’s Basecamp) by
school, we would have Senam Pagi (morning occupation, there had been stories that were either cultural studies, as I believe that these fields have Sudjojono (1964).

WE THE VANQUISHED:
ON BIAFRA, THE NIGERIAN
POSTCOLONY, AND THE NEED
FOR RADICAL SOLIDARITIES
AMARACHI IHEKE
In this personally-charged text, Amarachi Iheke analyzes the This text is not concerned with legitimizing Biafran
politics of the postcolonial state in Nigeria, in particular the nationalisms at large or providing a historiography
eastern part of the country, where the myth of reconciliation of the struggle for Biafran statehood. Literary
after the 1967–1970 Biafran war fails to conceal the inertia of accounts of the Nigeria–Biafra war, including
state violence. Envisioning emancipatory futures, she also Chinua Achebe’s There was a country (2012), Wole
questions what radical solidarities look like in this context. Soyinka’s The Man Died (1972), Buchi Emecheta’s
Destination Biafra (1982), and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s
As I write to you from Marseille, in the home of Sozaboy (1985) to name a few, illustrate how Cold
my wonderful Bambara host, I am swaddled in War and African decolonial nation building politics
reminders of a romantic childhood in Umuahia, at play instrumentalized both Biafran nationalism
Eastern Nigeria. Having not returned home for and the development of a “legitimate” Nigerian
several years now after my Father’s passing, I feel nation state. These regional and global political
called upon by the Eastern Nigerian countryside, contexts shed light on the various motivations
woven into Fatou’s decorative cane mats, etched of an emergent Nigerian political class and
on mud and wax prints, echoing through Salif Biafran nationalists alike. Accommodating these
Keita’s Tomorrow. I feel my late Father’s presence complexities is essential not only to understand the
urging me to do some necessary grief work, story of Biafra, but also to normalize contradiction
not only for him, but in many ways for my and inconsistency in narrating colonial afterlives.
community of tradespeople, cultivators, educators, Fig.1
and spiritualists. A community that was once a
symbol of anti-imperial and anti-state resistance In the Biafran story, there are no Seeing the war necessarily as imperial production, Ojukwu’s declaration of a Biafran nation, stretching
in the Biafran nationalist project, now reflects the neat binary identities of perpetrator I take as point of departure the existing ethnically across the Bight of Biafra, what transpired in the
sobering violent dispossessions of the Nigerian antagonistic lines carving out the Nigerian “colony state’s ruthless three year counter-insurgent war,
postcolony. Stories too harrowing that they often and victim, but the nature of state proper,” as North and South Protectorates and signaled the formation of a Nigerian postcolony.
read as folklore, of pogrom, state-orchestrated the strategic assignment of warrant chiefs, the Arguably, the turning point of the conflict and
famine, and a punishing “victor’s justice” as post-
violence deployed by a fledgling likes of my paternal grandfather. Similarly, there death knell for the Biafran nationalist project,
conflict reconciliation, fundamentally shaped and Nigerian postcolony remains a key were fraudulent truth commissions that silenced was the use of famine as a genocidal instrument
indeed radicalized me as a child. Certainly, losing the women of the 1929 Aba Revolt and made de of war by the Nigerian state, propped up by
my Father as custodian of this history had kept defining character of the conflict. facto insurgents of us all as colonial subjects, British and Soviet sponsors. For the first time,
me from engaging with the familiar inherited our assaulted ecosystems, captive deities that lie war was brought home in the global broadcast
traumas of Biafra for some time now. In many The present day volatility of the Biafran identity estranged in the British museum… The precursory of chronically malnourished infants, masses of
ways, revisiting Biafra here in this text for me itself within the multi-ethnic eastern and traces of Biafra are indeed too many to recount. gaunt bodies huddled in Irish Catholic refugee and
feels like a return. A return to a political landscape southeastern region, is testament to historical Unquestionably, it is from the indirect bureaucracy relief camps, civilian casualties strewn across the
that holds and continues to reverberate all the negotiations around victimhood, as such, Biafran of British coloniality, its fragmentations and what rainforest. These stories of an emergent mercenary
messy contradictions of (post)colonial victimhood. nationalist agitations and the conflict itself must Soyinka regards as Nigeria’s negotiated—rather state as postcolony, alongside parables of the wily
A return to a call for radical empathy which be situated within a context of coloniality. A than collectively struggled for—independence in chameleon, the leopard and the hare co-existed in
allows us to acknowledge shared violations at the reflection of the intentional historical opacity and 1960 that Biafra emerges. The ethno-religious my childhood imaginary.
hands of the Nigerian post-colony, from Biafra to revisionism that surrounds Biafra discourse, I tensions inherited from empire’s fracturings
ENDSARS. A return to an advocacy for radical am frustrated to no end by the erasure of British ultimately sounded the war gong in 1966 as anti- Equally, I am particularly amazed by how strongly
solidarity, where in acknowledging collective but coloniality in understanding the genesis of the Igbo pogroms perpetrated by both civilians and the these images and narratives resonated globally and
differing struggles, we can still make space for 1967–1970 war between the Nigerian state and state military in Northern Sabon Gari (foreigners’ across time. My travels around Europe have found me
each other, to feel and be with our vanquished Biafran nationalists and the nature of violence quarters), triggered a mass Igbo exodus back talking about the Biafran genocide with strangers,
condition(s). that embedded it in international consciousness. to their eastern homelands. Soon after Colonel friends and colleagues alike in Valencia, Marseille,

Paris, Nuremberg, and of course at home in London. of Igbo ethnonationalism in structuring a Biafran narratives recounted earlier, are quite easy to Biafra as colonial afterlife is poignant
I suppose my surprise reflects a disheartening national identity. Securing Biafra as a refugee understand, acknowledge, and empathize with.
rejection of history that is commonplace in Nigeria nation by a predominant Igbo political elite intent These intergenerational victimhoods in relation to not only in holding up a mirror to
today. Rather than an intentional widespread civilian
ignorance, on the contrary, such a rejection speaks
on capitalizing off a Biafran nation state, often
carried deadly implications for minoritized groups
the postcolony’s violence are not only valid but also
contemporarily relevant, as along with denying
Empire and the Nigerian postcolony,
to the postcolony’s inability to take responsibility for in the region through forced conscriptions and genocide claims, the state never stopped punishing but more importantly to ask ourselves
its violations and indeed practice what it preaches various other intimidation tactics. However, the the East and the South-East. Socio-economic
in the pithy post-war statement of “No Victor, No fact that the last Biafran head of state, Major underdevelopment and an absence of necessary
how do we not abandon each other?
Vanquished.” On that note, I vividly remember General Philip Effiong, was Ibibio reminds us that post-conflict repairs in the region even until today
my beloved late Godfather who supported the collaboration between Igbo and non-Igbo groups remain bitter post-war conversations back home How can we extend ourselves to one another within
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the region was indeed present and is still in Umuahia. Violent anti-Igbo rhetoric and attacks a suffocating state which routinely disposes of the
wartime relief programs, taking my brother and active. Understanding Biafra as colonial afterlife during the recent national elections served as a governed? These questions are also continentally
I around the only standing national monument in therefore requires that space is made for these reminder of how deeply embedded official post-war relevant and we need only look at the experience
memory of the war. Based in rural Umuahia and fractures in victimhood, where the context of narratives are in “national consciousness.” of our neighbors over in South Cameroon who find
maintained by local historians, it is important to note an operative post-colony reproduces and exploits themselves similarly grappling with the tensions
the location (and remoteness) of this singular site of those very same colonial frictions between groups. Beyond neo-Biafran separatism, the ghosts of Biafra of building solidarity despite the pervasiveness of
(national) memorialization, and the fact that the state These antagonisms show up contemporarily as were evidently present in the ENDSARS protests of French and British colonial legacies.
has relieved itself of responsibility for its upkeep, as the postcolony routinely silences demands for 2020. Despite a global health crisis, Nigerian youth
quite telling. In other words, this is your history, not truth-seeking around the war, which would reveal came together to address the ugly face of the carceral In light of assertions of postcolonial harm,
ours. This is Biafran and specifically Igbo history, not ethnoplural victimhoods. Additionally, it works state that, through the militia Special Anti-Robbery identifying ourselves as pawns in Nigeria’s (neo)
a collective national history. My Father’s generation to maintain half-truths of a Biafran project led Squad (SARS), terrorizes, maims, and kills regular folk imperialisms helps us develop capacities for
as Elders of the community certainly felt and still by a stubborn Igbo community in isolation, who across the country. I am still reeling at our capacity necessary ethnoplural solidarities and indeed
do feel that sentiment ring true as symbolic of their refused to get onboard with the project of a great to stand up, be counted and boldly assert a right to revolutionary empathy. It is difficult not to feel rage
vanquishment. It is a commonly held view across the independent Nigeria. life. To say over and over again to the postcolony, for my late Father, Godfather, and their generation
East and South-East, particularly among the Igbo, “Stop Killing Us!” The protests brought to a global who never received such empathy or justice for
that the state wanted Biafrans to pay for attempting to Such official narratives along with a collective audience the extent to which the Nigerian postcolony the pain they endured, but I feel renewed hope
undermine its newly won legitimacy in independence. aversion to this painful history, has fueled securitizes civilians as a threat, but most importantly for evolving possibilities in solidarity building.
A fragility towards history and its relegation to the current day agitations across eastern and it said something to Nigerians about claiming a Therefore, short of a call to arms and in defense of a
the victims of history itself, is certainly not new to southeastern Nigeria to revive Biafra. Among nonnegotiable humanity. Just as anticipated and in shared colonial and postcolonial victimhood, I claim
the Nigerian postcolony. Rather, it is necessarily groups such as the Indigenous People of Biafra a repeat of history, the state drew its only hand, by a collective We the vanquished. We the structurally
symptomatic of structural violence. In the context of (IPOB), Eastern Security Network (ESN), and squashing protestors like roaches under the literal violated. We the undercommons. To claim a collective
postcolonial victimhoods in the Nigeria–Biafra war, Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign cloak of darkness at the Lekki Toll Gate. “We” is to assert a shared dispossession by empire
there is little to no capacity to speak of Biafra as State of Biafra (MASSOB), young people have been and its extensions in the contemporary Nigerian
shared history, talk less of a willingness to accept and engaged in various acts to subvert and undermine While the online and physical agitations of the postcolony. This I believe would be a collaborative
empathize with historic state harm suffered by Igbo the Nigerian postcolony. Rallies, pamphleting and ENDSARS movement signaled the revolutionary building block for radical inclusive solidarities and
and minoritized Ibibio, Efik, Ijaw, and Ogoni to name even local collective action to establish health chickens coming home to roost, there remains indeed continued resistance. ■
a few. This is why I address the Nigerian nation space facilities, schools, and various other infrastructures plenty of work to be done to seize the moment and
explicitly as postcolony, molded and continuously have been met with the swiftest and deadliest develop necessary ethnoplural radical solidarities. Amarachi Iheke is a doctoral student at King’s College London
molding itself in the image of empire. In the Nigeria- martial force, as part of the state’s default no- This is no easy feat of cours e. As previous issues and the coordinator of the Africa Research Group. She is
Biafra war, it efficiently demonstrated its tendencies engagement policy. My former primary school of this magazine have touched upon, solidarity currently investigating radical indigenous reconciliatory
to subjugate using all violent genocidal infrastructure was even a site of such state-civilian clashes, building in the context of colonial afterlives, imaginaries in the Azanian context through sonic and poetic arts.
at its disposal. resulting in many lives lost senselessly. The current involves active listening and acceptance of
imprisonment of Nnamdi Kanu, infamous IPOB shared but not competing experiences of harm. A
As mentioned earlier, the story of Biafra within leader who is labeled as an insurrectionist by the necessary first step would be to develop empathy
a postcolonial and anticolonial framing is full of state, certainly points to an insecurity around for those historically dehumanized by drawing
its contradictions and contestations, especially Nigerian nationhood and the threat Biafra still throughlines between an experience of genocidal
where claims to a singular or prioritized poses to the postcolony. Without exploring their violence, the absence of post-conflict repairs, and
victimhood are concerned. Being Igbo myself, I respective complex claims, the intergenerational contemporary extended struggles to challenge the Fig.1 Nigeria’s National War Museum in Umuahia in the southeastern region of the
feel a responsibility to emphasize the dominance hurt that these groups speak to in the inherited Nigerian postcolony. country. / Photo by Sam Iheke (April 2018).

THE FUNAMBULIST N°48
Roma activists protesting in front of the Russian embassy

in Bucharest on May 16, 2022. / Photo by LCV.
FIFTY SHADES
OF WHITE(NESS)
THINKING AGAINST THE
U.S.-CENTRIC CONCEPTION
OF RACIALIZATION
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS):
INTRODUCTION
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT
Welcome to the 48th issue of The Funambulist. approach race solely through a
Following the paths traced by some recent issues,
it attempts to articulate a rather precise editorial regime of visibility (i.e. what’s ‘visible’
argument, offering what is hopefully a productive
dialog between different contributions. The general
to us) and second, race is a space-
argument behind this issue is that if we are to time (i.e. racializing processes always
consider whiteness at the global scale, we require
a more complex understanding of it than the one
have to be understood contextually).
constructed in opposition to white supremacy in
the United States. To a certain extent, this U.S.-
based concept makes sense as an interpretative From here, it is easy to understand that the “shades
framework within their settler colonial context—in of whiteness” discussed in these pages are not literal
the way it flattens whiteness into a single “shade” shades that would follow the logics of colorism,
when various European migrant groups colonized but rather, degrees of proximity to whiteness,
stolen Indigenous lands. Yet, nuances produced by proportional to the exercise of political power.
the distinct political trajectories of each group prior
to becoming settlers exist, and should be dignified Nothing speaks more to the necessity for context
with deeper analysis (cf. Mitchell Joffe Hunter’s than the word “Caucasian,” as used by the U.S.
contribution about Askhenazi Jews settling in bureaucracy to designate European settlers on
South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century). the land it occupies. How did West Asian people
Furthermore, for other contexts, it is crucial to (Abkhazians, Armenians, Chechens, Ossetians, and
strongly nuance the way processes of racialization many more…), who have been racialized by the
operate and read them through a highly Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and still today by
contextualized (both geographically and temporally) the Russian Federation and other European states,
framework, rather than through a U.S.-centric lens. end up in the category of whiteness in the U.S.
settler colony, created by the British, French, and
This is certainly not to say that whiteness is Spanish empires? Unsurprisingly, the answer to this
necessarily more complex than what it seems to question involves 19th century theories of colonial
be, especially within geographies where the very science and the collaboration of European empires,
structures of colonial racialization were invented as described by Keto Gorgadze in the following
(i.e., Western Europe). This is also not to say that pages. The complexity of racialization appears
there aren’t processes of racialization that would not even more clearly when considering Armenians
fundamentally overcede the “fifty shades of white” specifically: while the Turkish ethnocratic state and
described in this issue’s title: antiblackness and the its Azeri proxy perpetuate the Ottoman murderous
structural racism against Roma people (as described violence against them, their strong presence in
by Margareta Matache in this issue) certainly western diasporas, their relationship to Christianity,
constitute the most ubiquitous of these processes in and their apparent proximity to Europeanness often
Europe—although, tellingly Roma people are usually place them in the delicate situation of witnessing
perceived as white in U.K. and U.S. contexts. the symbolic and opportunist seizing of their
struggle by white supremacist agendas. In parallel,
some of their Maronite neighbors (in particular
The distinctions this issue intends in the diaspora in France) seem to accommodate
to make is that we understand themselves quite well within the analog whitening
myth of their descendance from Phoenicians (a term
whiteness is fundamentally produced forged by the Greeks, externally from the peoples it
Fig.1
designated), claiming to be unaffected by fourteen

by two affirmations: first, we cannot centuries of Arab presence.
20 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 21

The contextuality of race is made evident when A contribution missing from this issue—although Far from being in solidarity with their struggle for The concept of “white privilege” is particularly
considering “white” Eastern Europeans. As Kasia it was planned—has to do with the national land and against resource extractivism, we have illustrative of this. At best, it is a tautology that
Narkowicz shows in her contribution, “white” Poles refusal to assimilate to European whiteness. Such lost count of cultural projects that seem to only fails to recognize that whiteness is precisely
can simultaneously incarnate one of the main a refusal could be found in the sustained Irish see Sámi Indigeneity as a peculiar paradox of an the system that constructs a position of political
targets of British racist speeches surrounding the anti-colonial struggle, although it would require Indigenous people “looking white.” domination through racialization. At worst, it
campaign for “Brexit,” be racialized as Other yet much critique. More convincingly is the key role defines “white” solely based on visual recognition
still be perceived in proximity with whiteness in played by Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement In parallel, a colonial process imagined by and on the individualist level, designating a
contrast to Black and other non-white immigrants during the 1960s and 1970s. Initiated by Kwame Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in Abya Yala political condition for those who are likely to be
within a western European context such as Sweden, Nkrumah, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, (the Americas) was to drown Indigeneity into spared from recognition-based violence (such as
all while calibrating the standard of whiteness in Sukarno, and Josip Broz Tito, its first summit took whiteness by forming national racial projects police brutality for instance). In doing so, it crowns
Poland’s structural racism and brutal contribution to place in Belgrade in September 1961. The “treason aiming at the intermixing of Indigenous peoples a value system constructed upon the degree to
Fortress Europe. It also shows us how whiteness is to whiteness” advocated by Noel Ignatiev (1992) and European settlers. As we discuss with Mónica which one is subjected to this type of violence.
not solely anchored into a regime of visibility: it also is elevated at a national level here, in a strong G. Moreno Figueroa, this is called “mestizaje” Although the concept of white privilege is certainly
infiltrates the perception of people’s names, accents, commitment to solidarity with nations refusing to in Spanish, and it has become a paradigm to aimed at supporting people who are the most
the use of a “foreign” language, etc. Furthermore, align with neither the western capitalist bloc nor approach racial identities (or rather, the supposedly directly and intensely affected by racialization, it
race does not solely operate within a geographical the Soviet Union and its allies. But such a “treason” lack thereof) in Latin America. But mestizaje is does not constitute a sufficient foundation for an
context: its temporal component is also crucial to is also contingent on time, with the racist mass merely an ideology of whiteness that skilfully anti-racist project in itself.
consider. murders of Bosniaks and Albanian Kosovars by dissimulates the still-operating conditions of settler
Serbian militaries and paramilitaries in the 1990s, colonialism and structural racism against both I hope that these imperfect considerations might
If we stay in Poland for a second: let’s consider or more recently, the construction of a border Indigenous and Black peoples. Such dissimulation influence your reading of this issue before
how busses of Ukrainian refugees, fleeing the 2022 wall at the Schengen limits between Slovenia and is further deployed by the prominence of the drawing any conclusions, in the spirit of trust that
Russian invasion of their country, were given a safe Croatia, while the latter marks the limits of the U.S. epistemology of whiteness that flattens all characterizes our relationship between readers,
passage deep into the European Union. Contrast this European Union, excluding the rest of what used to communities south of its colonial border into one contributors, and editor(s). Such a spirit allows
with how West Asian exiles had to risk their lives be Yugoslavia. racial identity, blurring the political line between for hesitation, vulnerability, and at times failure,
and health through the forests bordering Belarus southern European settlers and Indigenous peoples. which are necessary to walk the path we’re
and Poland, despite fleeing similar circumstances Questions pertaining to the relations between walking together. With this in mind, I wish you an
in different contexts, due to being attributed a Indigeneity and whiteness are also central to the These questions raise another more complex and excellent read. ■
further proximity (or none) with whiteness. Much issue. By this, I do not mean the claims made delicate one, which goes back to the critique of
has been written (often in 280 characters) about by white supremacists groups in Europe that reading race solely through a regime of visibility: Léopold Lambert is the founding editor of The Funambulist.
this contrast, caused by an assumed definitive delusionally claim the term “Indigenous” for the question of what came to be called “passing.” I He is a trained architect and the author of four books analyzing
Ukrainian whiteness, as Darya Tsymbalyuk themselves. Rather, these relationships ought to have to admit that I certainly have no confidence the political violence of the built environment, in particular
discusses in her contribution. Observing that a be studied for the way European colonizers deem in making this question any less complex. In in Palestine, Algeria, Kanaky, and France’s banlieues. Those
significant number of Ukrainians are, in fact, not some Indigenous peoples to be in closer proximity to challenging race’s regime of visibility/recognition, include Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of
white, although important, is beyond the point here. whiteness, in contrast with “darker,” “more savage” while also paying respect to the fact that this Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), and États d’urgence: Une
What seems crucial to understanding however, peoples. This is the case of Polynesians in contrast visibility is precisely what makes darker-skinned histoire spatiale du continuum colonial français (PMN, 2021).
is that this whiteness granted to Ukrainians by with Melanesians, as described by Maile Arvin in people more targeted by racist violence, reflections
western European and North American narratives a conversation with Anaïs Duong-Pedica (who has that go further than individualistic and sometimes
is temporal and conditional. Insisting on the helped me in many ways to put this issue together), self-indulgent accounts are rare.
precarious and opportunist (for western states) but also of Amazighs in contrast with Maghrebi
nature of this ‘positive’ racialization (on which Arabs. In the colonial enterprise of the “civilizing
Ukrainians have very little control) seems to me mission,” based strongly within scientific racism, The notion of being more targeted
more productive than the characterization of Europeans thus created racial hierarchies that
the Russian colonial invasion and the Ukrainian indicated who was more likely to assimilate and is important because, although it
resistance to it as a fight between two embodiment move one shade closer to European whiteness—but does determine crucially significant
of whiteness, a claim made to suggest that the never giving the colonized the full extent of political
global anti-racist movement should not engage. For power afforded to whiteness. Some reminiscences aspects of one’s life, it also speaks to
many Ukrainian refugees living within western of such an ideology (on a less dramatic level) can
European societies built on structural racism, a be found in the current fetishization of Sámi people
how we often approach race through Fig.1 Armenian fedayi who volunteered in self-defense militias against the Ottoman
mass murders of Armenians at the turn of the 20th century. The person on the right
durable existence remains precarious. within various spheres of cultural production. an economy of suffering. is Eghisapet Sultanian (circa 1895).

HAVE CAUCASIANS EVER BEEN
WHITE? RUSSIAN COLONIALISM
AND THE MACHINERY OF
RACIALIZATION
KETO GORGADZE
In an issue dedicated to decentering the U.S. epistemology medical colonial endeavors. How has racialization of
of whiteness, a contribution delineating the rather surprising Caucasians facilitated the conquest in the 18th–19th
conflation of the terms “white” and “Caucasian” felt centuries and ensured control over territories?
necessary. Keto Gorgadze describes how such a conflation The term “Caucasian,” having been referred to
Fig.1 Fig.2
came to be, as well as the processes of racialization actual simultaneously white and non-white people in two
Caucasians have been subjected to and continue to be colonial contexts, reveals a complexity of race-
subjected to by Russian imperialism. making strategies and allows for a decentering of
the U.S. epidermal paradigm of race.
In 1879, a soldier participating to the Russian the idea of race as a social construct. This was a The Caucasus territory is divided into two parts—
conquest of the North Caucasus portrayed In 2022, a podcast called “No to Racism!” was significant shift that helped to dismantle the notion North and South Caucasus—by the mountain
Caucasians as such: “A mountaineer (gorets), a slave released in Russian. In it, anti-racist activists and of race as a biological category that naturalizes the range. The North Caucasus is included within
to tradition, is prideful, insidious, cunning, and people who had experienced racialized violence hierarchy between people based on physical features. Russian borders, comprising federal subjects that
systematically ignoble; he is not devoid of natural shared their perspectives and strategies for However, the discourse of the social construction of are referred to as “republics,” a term rooted in the
mental abilities, but these abilities have been given resisting racism in Russia. This led to a heated race, by portraying it as something that does not Soviet history of positioning the parts of former
a false direction in the environment in which they debate among the activist community about which exist in reality, reduces it to a set of stereotypes, USSR as seemingly autonomous. In reality, Russia
developed.” Coopted and decontextualized in the groups can be identified as racialized and non- representations, and prejudices. Understood as is highly centralized and these so-called federal
U.S. racial paradigm, the word “Caucasian” has white. One of the arguments put forward was such, race functions as an epistemic concept that subjects do not possess any actual autonomy. The
been designating an identity of white settlers. that Caucasians cannot be considered a racialized influences the lived experiences of racialized South Caucasus is formed by Armenia, Azerbaijan,
This tradition is rooted in Johann Friedrich group because the term “Caucasian” in the U.S. communities. Therefore, eliminating the construct and Georgia, which became independent states
Blumenbach’s racial theory, which is based on skull means “white.” Even in Russia, where people are should lead to the disappearance of injustice. after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Despite
measurements and classification. The skull of a aware of the racist killings of Caucasians, their Various colonial situations produce different social being independent, Georgia faces Russian colonial
Georgian girl, gifted to Blumenbach by Russian criminalization, difficulties in renting apartments, constructs, as illustrated by the ambivalent use of occupation of 20% of its territory (Abkhazia and
physician Georg Thomas Asch, became a model for and finding jobs because of their origins, names, the term “Caucasian” in U.S. and Russian contexts. South Ossetia). Armenia grapples with both the
whiteness in this epistemology. and appearance, U.S. epistemology has a significant This ambiguity and the obvious artificiality should violence of Azerbaijan and Turkey’s collaboration
influence on the conceptualization of race. lead to the eradication of racial violence against and Russia’s political manipulations regarding
actual Caucasians. Yet, it is not happening neither in military aid. The borders between these different
While Russia started its colonial Russia, nor in Western countries. territories in the North and South Caucasus are
expansion in the North and Predominantly the light skin of traceable. However, various communities reside not
This highlights the necessity of employing only within the borders of their regions, but across
South Caucasus, enabled by the Caucasians hinders shaping their an alternative conceptualization of race that the entire Caucasus.
racialization of the indigenous experience as racialized, even emphasizes its materiality and exposes the
mechanisms of production of racialized subjects, Indigenous communities of North and South
communities, Blumenbach placed though in Russia they are often which enables colonial control. Daniel Nemser, Caucasus are ethnically diverse. Among them are
a researcher of colonial infrastructures in Latin Abkhazian, Adyghe, Armenian, Azeri, Balkar,
Caucasian “beauty and bodily called “Cherniy,” which translates to America, suggested that “race itself may operate Chechen, Circassian, Dagestani, Ingush, Kabardian,
symmetry” at the apex of the racial “black” and is the same word used to as a sort of infrastructure, a sociotechnical relation Karachay, Kartvelian, Ossetian, Talysh peoples.
that enables the ongoing functioning of specific Some of them form their own ethnic families like
hierarchy in his racist theory. designate Afrodescendant people. machineries of extraction and accumulation.” Armenians, Vainakhs or Kartvelians, while others
(Infrastructures of Race, 2017). In this regard, belong to broader Turkic and Persian groups.
the transfer of a Georgian woman’s skull from St. The question of ethnicity may be perplexing as it
This would not have happened without Russia’s On the other hand, the proliferation of literature on Petersburg to Göttingen reveals the nature of the is commonly acknowledged as a cultural concept
access to the territory and the collaboration between racism and translocal anti-racist movements has race-making process through the machinery of rather than a racial one. In the U.S. context, ethnicity
Europeans and Russians in their scientific and led to widespread acceptance and consolidation of death management. discourse sprung from the liberal reflections on

physician in the General Staff of the army that
invaded the Caucasus, and was therefore part of
Consequently, the inherent
the colonial system. The skull he transmitted to inclination towards epidemics
Blumenbach belonged to a young Georgian woman
who had been taken captive by Russian troops became associated with a specific
and subsequently died in Moscow, most likely due
to a venereal disease. Nell Irvin Painter contends
geographical area, naturalizing the
Fig.3
that “the woman whose skull gave white people perception of the “filthy” Caucasian,
a name had been a sex slave.” (The History of
White People, 2010). The fact that this girl was in a who was ordered to be isolated and
European immigration and the status of these not colonial system. Dmitriy Romanovskiy, a general of
white enough, but still white people, and then the Russian army and essayist, classified Caucasian
vulnerable position, with the risk of becoming a sex examined before any contact could
slave, enabled the invaders to use her skull as an
absorbed the racial discourse for some time by ethnicities and called them “races”—Indo-European,
equating white migrant experiences to racialized Turkic, and Ural-Altai—while highlighting that
object of circulation, and thus of an anthropological be made.
collection in Göttingen. Focusing on this aspect
ones, which actually constituted disregard of white Russians do not belong to any of them. Over
instead of the orientalist and mythologized notion
supremacy as a racial domination. Subsequently, the time, the difference gradually turned into a solid To “combat” epidemics, an intensified control over
of “Caucasian female beauty” that oversimplifies the
ethnic paradigm of race was rightfully criticized and hierarchy achieved by the objectification and the indigenous population was introduced: the
cultural and physical differences among indigenous
the concept of ethnicity was clearly distinguished controlled mobility of bodies. borderline, also known as the “quarantine guard,”
communities, provides a better understanding
from the one of race. was aimed at protecting Russia from “Caucasian”
of their racialization. Race, functioning as
diseases, while facilitating the conquest. It marked
Ethnicity has a different nature in the context Active conquest of Caucasus infrastructure itself, made it possible for this body to
a new level of death management, as it turned
be replaced and trafficked.
of various projects of Russian colonialism: it is by Russians started from the into an economic blockade caused by limitations
intended not to distinguish “shades of whiteness,” on the mobility of indigenous peoples and further
but to create non-whiteness. People with proximity 1760s onwards by annexation of As military actions during the conquest dragged starvation. Hence, as a boundary for Caucasians,
to whiteness do not have ethnicity in the eyes of on, infections, mass diseases, and epidemics spread it rendered boundlessness for Russians. The line
Russians, or more precisely, it is not so important.
territories and establishing colonial more widely. The Russian administration became consisted of seventy-nine buildings for officials,
The main thing is that they are “close” to Russians administrations through fortification, concerned when the diseases affected the army on guards, medical workers, and a marketer where
(white people), which is why they have been trying a large scale, resulting in a significant reduction in people arriving on the territory were quarantined.
to assimilate other Slavic groups into a broad imposing an imperial legal system, its numbers and failures in military operations. This This area was surrounded by a quadrangular
Russian identity. Emphasizing ethnicity is of key
importance when it is necessary to produce a
building schools, and forced further strengthened the already rigid difference
between Russians and Caucasians. Although
rampart with cannons, which were “always
ready to send death into the crowds of audacious
racialized subject, and this is the Caucasian case. christianization. the same diseases and epidemics could occur in mountaineers if they decided to attack,” as stated
Consolidation of a racialized body requires an both central Russia and Europe, in this situation, by one of the Russian officials. Travelers were then
initial perception of it as different and backward— Caucasians were blamed for infecting Russian accompanied by Cossacks (units of the Russian
darker—by the colonizer, which unfolds at the Medicine played a crucial role in this process invaders. The supposed low level of hygiene culture army that usually patrolled border areas and then
moment of invasion. Russians never considered by securing the presence of the Russian army among indigenous peoples, clayey soils, and hot became settlers on Circassian land) “for protection
Caucasian people to be white, regardless of and settlers on the territory, while transforming humid climate were mentioned as the primary against predators.” By “predators,” he referred to
ethnicity, religion, appearance, or status within the its spatiality. Georg Thomas Asch served as a reasons for epidemics. Caucasians.

Racialization was a tool of distinguishing whose life through the naturalization of aggression and,
was valuable and needed protection at all costs, and consequently, danger.
whose life was deemed redundant. Ethnic Russians
were seen as a guarantee of the empire’s existence,
so the preservation of it was intertwined with the The entire space of the Caucasus has
protection of the special status of Russians and their been described as a zone of calamity
lives, even in the reality of oppressions, serfdom,
and exile of political outcasts. The conquest of the and lawlessness.
Caucasus was a pivotal moment in solidifying the
Russian empire and maintaining its integrity. The Ascribing these features to the territory legitimizes
indigenous peoples’ fierce resistance during the the employment of the most aggressive methods
18th–19th centuries fueled Russian frustration. of control. This has been facilitated by the trope of
Although they did not consider the Caucasians the white captive, which is integral to the entire
as their equals, the empire still saw them as a history of cultural reflection on the colonization
significant threat to its own integrity. General of of the Caucasus: from the works of Pushkin and
the Russian army Alexei Ermolov, whose name still Tolstoy to the famous film War by the praised
strikes fear in the memory of the Caucasian people, Russian director Alexei Balabanov, which was
said: “Condescension in the eyes of Asiatics is a released internationally in 2001, at the peak of the
sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am Second War in Chechnya. Despite the differences,
inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds in all three cases, the Russian invader appears to
of Russians from destruction, and thousands of be a victim of vicious Caucasians, marking the
Muslims from treason.” (Walter Richmond, The potential future of Russia, unless applying the most
Circassian Genocide, 2013). Extremely cruel brutal tactics in the conquest. Again, the issue of
murders, beheadings, rape, starvation, deportations, control over the circulation of bodies turns out to
and burning entire villages. These strategies were be essential: Russian culture demonstrated to the
presented as attempts to “cleanse” the Caucasians audience that the one who manages the value of the
of their perceived savagery, and to instill the idea of body, its movement, and position in space wins.
Russian superiority as a steadfast axiom.
The film War begins with footage of Chechens
As is the case with many other colonial contexts, capturing British actors and Russian men who call
the seizure of territories and the extermination of themselves “slaves,” which serves as an obvious hint
indigenous peoples were envisioned as a civilizing that the Russian authorities and the international
mission carried out for the benefit of humanity. community are not tough enough on the Chechen
This is a key concept for understanding strategies rebels. The narrator is a young Russian soldier
of racialization in Russian colonialism. The freed from captivity. Throughout the film, in their
preservation of differences was always accompanied conversations, Chechens constantly express their Fig.4
by a compulsion to russify, as this guaranteed desire to move to Moscow, that they are eager to
Russian domination. Caucasians were expected send their children to study there, that some of
to despise their appearance, culture, language, them have a restaurant business there—all this was
customs, and religion, and continually strive to meant to sow panic among Russian society. If we
become more like Russians, including changing are not cruel to the “Cherniye”—that is how the
their names and surnames. The genocide of the Chechens are called in the film—they will flood Two ways of exercising colonial to commit particularly brutal violence against
Circassians has never been recognized by Russia, regions of Russia. Drawing on this, it is not the people. Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-
and any mention of it causes a storm of indignation. Russians and the British who should be in captivity, control are implemented precisely Balkaria are regions where people are regularly
This is because recognition of these crimes
undermines the construction of modern Russia
in prison or solitary confinement, but the Chechens.
When a Russian soldier and British actor return to
out of the described racialization accused of terrorism, with up to 700 criminal cases
every six months in each republic. Torture is the
as an empire, where white Russians bring peace Chechnya to redeem the latter’s fiancé for several of Caucasians—policies of backbone in the fabrication of these cases. They
and enlightenment to all. This would compromise million pounds, they defiantly shoot the Chechen are used even in the preliminary investigation
the idea of the empire, which further leads to woman and throw her down a mountain into the
incarceration and migration, which stage to force confessions out of people. Caucasians
questioning the integrity of Russia itself. river. As a child, I saw this film many times. It are linked to each other. regularly die in prisons from beatings and other
was regularly shown on TV to affirm the public forms of torture, to which they are subjected
From the conquest in the 18th–19th centuries, perception of the war: Russia was bringing order to more often than other prisoners. In 2017, after the
throughout the Bolsheviks’ restoration of empire at the ever-raging Caucasus and fighting terrorism for People living in the republics of the North Caucasus death of a Chechen prisoner, his former inmate
the beginning of the 20th century to the collapse the placid existence and prosperity of white people. are most often prosecuted under the harshest said, “Since 2003, Chechens, Dagestanis, Ingushs,
of the Soviet Union and the consequential attempts The peace-making narrative has been used as a tool criminal charges—the so-called “terrorist articles,” and other Caucasians were taken from our camp
to rebuild it, the racialization of Caucasians occurs of colonial subjugation. which allow the police and other secret services and other prisons to colony number 16. It is a

Fig.5 Fig.6
tuberculosis zone. [...] They have been infected, of linked with violence, stemming from “savage identify this as an act of political repression and
course, and are leaving this world.” Incarceration mountaineers” who have failed to be civilized. would never extradite them to Russia.
for Caucasians is, to put in words of José Rubio,
a Chicano inmate from Brownsville cited by The connection between racialization and proximity Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of
Alan Eladio Gómez, “death on the installment to death is fully revealed in the policies of European Ukraine in 2022, the imperial sentiments in Russia
plan.” (“Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal states toward Caucasians seeking political asylum have been skyrocketing. It is not a coincidence that
Penitentiary, 1972,” 2006). or refugee status. A large number of people of Alexei Balabanov’s works became widely exploited
North Caucasian ethnicities, particularly from in war-justifying propaganda. By portraying Russia
Thus, entire indigenous communities of the Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, are on as a problematic yet sacred Christian place, he Fig.1 “Manner in which the Tchernomorski guard and sentinels are stationed
Caucasus are criminalized on some of the most preventive police registers as prone to “terrorism” drew a clear racial distinction between “white” and along the banks of the river to reconnaitre the movements of Circassians, their
serious criminal charges, making it completely or on lists of extremists. Russia submits requests to “black.” His most renowned film, Brother (1997), huts being filled with smoke, in the greatest heat of summer to keep out the
impossible for them to organize politically and extradite these people as suspected collaborators features a bus dialog between a Russian man and mosquitoes.” / Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia,
and Africa (London, 1813).
resist colonial violence. Do we hear as much about with “armed formations,” to which European states two Caucasians whom he forces to pay the fare at
Fig.2 A photograph was captured at the camp of Russian troops in Kbaade (now
their detention conditions as we do about what respond positively and deport people to a knowingly gunpoint. This dialog is the answer to the question Krasnaya Polyana) on May 21, 1864. A parade of Russian troops took place here,
Russian white oppositionist Alexei Navalny faces dangerous environment in which they are of whether Caucasians have ever been white or not: symbolizing the end of the Caucasian War./ Unknown photographer.
in prison? In his case, torture is perceived as subjected to torture and extrajudicial executions. Fig.3 The abandonment of the village by the mountaineers as the Russian troops
something extraordinary, and reconstitutions of his In 2020, France not only deported a 19-year-old “Brother, don’t kill. Brother…” approached by Pyotr Nikolayevich Gruzinsky (1872).
Fig.4 “USSR. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia. Main projects of the eighth and ninth
confinement cell are erected in Berlin and Paris. man who later died in Chechnya but also provided “You are not my brother, black-ass louse” ■ five-year plans, 1972” / Source: Pan Caucasus (Twitter).
Racialization, which subjects colonized communities confidential information about the organizations Fig.5 Circassian activists commemorate and demand the recognition of the
to an “endless war”—which in fact means “endless and people who had helped him. At the same Keto Gorgadze is a researcher and writer of Georgian descent. Genocide and Exile of 1864 on May 20, 2012 in Istanbul. / Photo by Fulya Atalay.
death”—enables this state by naturalizing it. The time, a number of white Russians are put on lists Her work is focused on policies of occupation and race-making Fig.6 Data “Papa” Vanishvili woke up one day to find himself behind the barbed
wire installed by Russian troops through his yard at the South Ossetia-Georgia
notion of “life” is not reserved for Caucasians, of extremists due to the tightening of dictatorial in the context of Russian colonialism. She investigates medical
ABL. Data Vanishvili died on March 19, 2021 at the age of 90. / Photo by Jelger
as their region is viewed as being intrinsically policies, but in this case, European states and media infrastructures as facilities for colonial expansions. Groeneveld (May 2016).
Fig.6
WHITE SKIN, WHITE MASKS:
ASHKENAZI JEWS IN
SOUTHERN AFRICA
MITCHEL JOFFE HUNTER
Are there any nuances of whiteness within a settler population? without a passbook, they could vote and run for
This text by Mitchel Joffe Hunter does not answer the question. office (once naturalized). Between 1907 and 1910,
However, it presents the trajectories of Yiddish-speaking there were six openly Jewish mayors of prominent
Ashkenazi Jews in 20th century South Africa, between other South African cities, though they were English and
European settlers’ antisemitism and their own assimilation of German Jews, rather than Yidn.
the processes through which white supremacy operates. From
there, Mitchell asks whether part of the Jewish identity can be
exhumed to humbly contribute to anti-colonial solidarities. Economically and politically,
Ashkenazi Jews have been white in
Arriving in Southern Africa ///
In 1904 my maternal grandmother’s paternal Southern Africa from the moment Fig.1
grandmother, Ella Lurie (nee Gutman) stayed behind

in the port city of Libau, Latvia (now Liepāja) while
they stepped out of the customs
her husband, Elkanan left to seek opportunity. They house. Joining white society /// He had picked up that to be accepted
spoke Yiddish (and perhaps German and Russian), Elkana and Ella arrived, like many other Yidn,
had no formal education or training, and no money. at this moment. Not into a settler state with a into the settler class, Jews could not
The Luries were a part of an already numerous In an oral interview, Geoff Sifrin recounts that homogenous white identity, but with a white
diaspora of Ashkenazi Jews, Yidn, who were his grandfather told a story from when he just alliance that specifically made space for cultural,
just be white, they had to act white
leaving the Russian Empire as refugees. They were
a subjugated population of the Russian Empire, but
disembarked in Southern Africa and walking
along the sidewalk some Black people had quickly
linguistic, and religious difference within its too. So they donned a white mask.
understanding of whiteness. The tacit agreement
when they reached Southern Africa to seek a better stepped aside for him and averted their eyes, he was was that whatever infighting occurs between white
life for themselves, they were inserted close to the astonished. “In Russia, nobody would have stepped groups—and tensions remained between English This was not always simple for newly arrived Yidn,
top of a rapidly reifying racial hierarchy. aside for a Jew!” (The Wandering Jew, 2010). and Afrikaners throughout the 20th century as British settlers brought their antisemitism from
including divided loyalties on who to support home. In the early 1900s, Yidn were often regarded
Elkanan landed in Cape Town, in the British While the Yidn were arriving in South Africa, fleeing during the world wars—they would be united as a as dirty Others, described sometimes in national
Cape Colony, and started trading goods, buying intense overcrowding and poverty, violent and deadly settler class based on what Tunisian anticolonial media, and perhaps more worryingly by state
items on credit and reselling them making small racial discrimination, forced removals and massacres, theorist Albert Memmi describes as a consciousness officials, public health officials, and politicians, as
profits. Two years later, he got a bank loan and they settled in a South Africa in which the British of “profit, privilege, usurpation” (The Colonized and “slovenly,” “unkempt,” “unwashed peregrinators of
a merchant credit to set up a general goods shop were usurping more land through wars against the the Colonizer, 1957). disease,” “parasites,” “depraved,” and “scum,” were
in Kraaifontein. Ella then made the journey with Pedi, Tswana, Zulu, and Xhosa polities, and where scapegoated as responsible for illicit trading, and
their two-year-old son and kept the shop running the Boer (later self-re-identified as Afrikaners) speaking a “disreputable gibberish.”
until the 1940s when my granny would visit, as she Republics were dispossessing the Venda. More economically well off and politically minded
recounted to me. Kraaifontein is now an outlying Jews than my ancestors were aware of this move There were early worries from Ashkenazi
suburb of Cape Town, but back then, it was a small After 250 years of these wars of dispossession, the and sought to become considered as another white communities that Yiddish (as it is written in
town on the train line from Cape Town to Paarl. end of the Anglo-Boer war in 1902 solidified the group. As one pertinent example, in many an Hebrew), would be considered an “Asiatic” language
There were only two white families in town when British Empire’s control over the region and allowed editorial of the leading English language Jewish and, hence, that Yidn would be treated as “Asians”
the Lurie’s settled there, the Jewish shopkeepers them to fashion society in such a way as to ensure newspaper, the South African Jewish Chronicle, for the purposes of immigration, business, and
and a Christian family who ran the hotel. their supremacy, and increase their profits. The Lionel Goldsmid in 1905 explored and encouraged later the vote. This concern was raised again as the
alliance of the “two White races,” British and Boers, fellow Jews to “lead a White man’s life,” stating “Jewish Question” in the 1930s. In the early 1900s,
In this context, Yidn were white: they could own— was based on an extension of “the supremacy of the firmly that Jews, “if they wish to act up to their it prompted the formation of the Jewish Boards
rather than rent—property and businesses, they White man,” and was reflected in political debates name, are pledged to maintain the superiority of of Deputies whose first project was to get Yiddish
were given loans and credit, they could work in and legal plans that resulted in the 1910 Union of the white man in this country.” recognized as a European language. Fully invested
white-reserved positions, they could travel freely South Africa. into showing the colonial state their alliance,

they put their effort into uplifting poor Jews, ie the ideological and practical allegiance to white
making sure, as Riva Krut describes, they “lived a supremacy. Overtime this created, and continues to
white man’s life,” and assisted in the “deportation maintain, a greater Jewish identification with other
of unwanted Jews”—mostly Jewish sex workers, white South Africans, and deepens the divide, both
and illicit liquor traders—(Building a Home an structurally and psychologically between Jews and
a Community, 1985). They also worked with the African and Asian communities.
state to provide Yiddish speaking customs officials
for immigration checks, worked with the colonial Antisemitism and its lessons ///
police to arrest Jews involved in criminal activity, Despite ongoing efforts to secure their place in
and with Jewish orphanages to ensure that Jewish white society, antisemitism was always around
children weren’t being raised by African women or the corner in its changing guises. Besides, the Fig.2
with African children. early forms of British antisemitism, the 1930s
also brought a rising Afrikaner antisemitism
Similarly, the South African Zionist Federations’ first most virulently expressed through groups such brutally designed to oppress, dispossess, exploit, are always at risk of becoming an underclass again
major local success consisted in being recognized as the Ossewabrandwag (lit ox wagon sentinel) and murder Black people, Jews occupied a position and that the only solution is to virulently uphold
as the “Jewish consulate in South Africa” to help the that attacked Jewish people and businesses and of security and opportunity. This combination their position as white by living “a white man’s life”—
state distinguish between desirable and undesirable protested at docks to prevent further German of a psychology of victimhood combined with a has sunk deeply into everyday Jewish life.
Jews (who did not have a country to represent them). Jewish refugees from entering. During Apartheid, condition of privilege war turned into a lesson in
Their 1905 national congress ran a naturalization the antisemitism from various sectors of white self-preservation. The tendency to explain away complicity with
campaign, encouraging Jews in South Africa to act society changed form but remained present. In a violent past as a form of protection from
as model citizens to prove to the British that they the 1960s, my mom attended an Afrikaans school This ethic of self preservation produced heart antisemitism can be explained by Steve Biko, South
were ready for governance—consciously drawing in a small town whose principal, in the morning wrenching contradictions. In the early 1900s, African freedom fighter and founder of the Black
links between being colonizers in South Africa and a assemblies, would go on an anti-Jewish tirade Jewish groups of different political persuasions Consciousness movement. He dismissed ideas of
desire to colonize Palestine. and encourage a boycott against the local Jewish were involved in raising money and political internal difference within white society from the
businesses, mentioning them by name. My uncle support for Jews that were victims of forced perspective of Black liberation: “Basically, the
This relationship between official Jewish jokes that he learned to run from having to escape removals in Eastern Europe, and at the same time South African white community is a homogenous
organizations, most South African Jews, and from the older boys who would beat him up for bought land in the cities and rural areas of South community. It is a community of people who sit to
antisemitism from the rest of the white settler being Jewish. Africa was only available due to recent forced enjoy a privileged position that they do not deserve,
society continued through to the end of Apartheid, removals (let alone speaking of the colonial land are aware of this, and therefore spend their time
with the official organization very weary to dispossession). Jews later bought land in parts of trying to justify why they are doing so” (“Black
“provoke” existing antisemitic allegations and Yidn in South Africa all carry both the urban areas made available to white citizens Souls in White Skins?”, 1970).
doubling down on the Jewish population to “whiten intergenerational and personal through the forced removals of the Group Areas
up” and to “live a white man’s life.” They understood Act. They advocated for and celebrated access to
what Frantz Fanon had later noticed: that for Jews trauma: intergenerational trauma citizenship rights just as a white only franchise was However, other options have always
in European/white society “his actions, his behavior
from either the pogroms or holocaust, instituted and further entrenched between 1910 and been available. Many Yidn have taken
are the final determinant” (Black Skin, White the 1940s. They never wished to “plead on behalf
Masks, 1952). or from early experiences in South of undesirables” (Morris Alexander in Cape Times, the more difficult path and become
1903) with regards to immigration restrictions, only
The official Jewish community organizations’ Africa, and personal experience with that Jews were not undesirable.
accomplices in the struggle against
use of patronage and policing was deployed both
antisemitism. white supremacy.
for disciplining individual lives and the Jewish In my lifetime, elderly Jews would still use racist
collective writ large and functioned to transform slurs in Yiddish to refer to Black people, despite
Jews to colonialists, not only inhabiting the And yet, Yidn have never not been white in South strong advocacy against antisemitic slurs. The Yeshua Israelstam is an early example. A
structural position of a settler population but also Africa. In the settler colonial context, in a system contradictions are numerous. This lesson—that Jews Lithuanian born socialist, he founded the Yiddish

speaking branch of the International Socialist landsmanshaftn (hometown societies) are forgotten,
League in South Africa, and raised money for bundist organizing for a socialist and antifascist
victims of pogroms in Eastern Europe. He was also a struggle against antisemitism has disappeared. This
frequent accomplice to antiracist actions and strikes, is an immense and painful cultural loss that can be
and guest to the founding of the South African placed at the feet of global antisemitism and Zionism
Native National Congress in 1912 (the forerunner to and, in South Africa, at the feet of whiteness as the
the African National Congress, ANC). He argued tribute it demanded for its barbed rewards. Our
in the Jewish and national press against racist ancestors would not recognize us.
thinking.
We cannot turn back the clocks though, nor would
Another example is Ray Alexander Simmons. She we want to. Reclaiming our cultural heritage back
worked for the communist party and the militant from assimilation does not constitute resistance to
Food and Canning Workers Union until she was whiteness. It is important work for ourselves but
banned in the 1950s. She then joined Lilian Ngoyi, inconsequential to the structures of oppression and
Florence Mkhize, and others to found the multiracial exploitation.
South African Federation of Women in 1954, which
launched a major pass strike and the women’s Black people are resisting whiteness throughout
charter. Exiled from the country, she moved to the country, and the world. From everyday acts of
Lusaka to work with the ANC headquarters in exile. resistance, to adhoc collaborations, and decade-long
Simons rejected parochialism, an approach taken movement building such as Abahlali baseMjondolo
by many in these later generations: “I didn’t think (shack dwellers), in every sector of society there are
of myself as being Jewish, because I just felt that I pockets of revolutionary, generative practices.. Fig.5
belong to the world. I am an internationalist” (Milton
Shain and Richard Mendelshohn, The Jews in As 21st century Jews, we can perhaps be recognized
Southern Africa, 2008). by our ancestors through the embrace of the lessons
learned by Israeltam, Simmons, and others: that
There are many such biographies of radical Jews antisemitism and other forms of racism come from
who threw their lot in with the African majority the same white supremacist politics, that systems
in fighting against oppression. It is true and often of oppression should be fought whether you are the
stated that proportionally more Jews were involved intended target or not, that resistance is possible,
in the struggle against Apartheid than any other and that in South Africa, we should throw our lot in
group. For example, Jews made up over 8% of those with emancipatory politics and be accomplices to the
accused of Treason at the 1956 Treason Trial despite struggle. It’s time to take off our white masks. ■
never constituting even close to 1% of the population.
This is an important recognition that many Jews Mitchel Joffe Hunter works in a public library. Previously he
refused the lessons explored above. However many lectured in Sociology at the University of the Western Cape
Jews were involved though, they were still only a where he completed his MA in Sociology, which theorized
tiny minority of the Jewish community and were the historical transformation of Jews in South Africa from
often socially and even officially excluded from colonizers to colonialists through their mobilization of race
the organized Jewish life. From calls to exclude and racism in the early 20th century. Mitchel has been involved
Israelstam in 1904, to banning anti-zionist Jews in student and labor activism, as well as Palestinian solidarity
from Jewish conferences in 2018, there are common organizing through South African Jews for a Free Palestine.
practices to squeeze out the radical recognitions that He tries to intervene in Jewish community discourse, but isn’t
our history of victimization should lead not to self- always welcome.
preservation, but to work in solidarity with all those
who resist oppression and fight for freedom.
A 21st century Yid? /// Fig.1 Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain’s 2008 illustrated history of The
Jews in South Africa held in front of the Garden’s Community Centre, which hosts
It has been almost 120 years since Elkanan and
the Jewish Museum, the Holocaust and Genocide Centre, a Jewish Library,
Ella Lurie arrived in South Africa. I am a fifth synagogue, and many offices of Jewish organizations behind an entrance with
generation Jew in South Africa, but am I a Yid? airportesque security features including bag and body scanners, and ID verification
Acculturating to whiteness has forced, required, and and home address verification.
rewarded Ashkenazi Jews to lose or adapt many Fig.2 Ray Alexander Simons (center) with officials from the Food and Canning
Workers Union. / Mendelsohn and Shain, The Jews in South Africa, 2008.
parts of our culture into the strangle settler blend. Fig.3 The 156 people accused in the 1956 Treason Trial with ten of the thirteen
My Yiddish is a set of idioms and exclamations Jews highlighted./ Photo by Eli Weinberg (available at
rather than a language, Klemzer is gone, the https://www.ethnicradicals.co.za/treason-trialists). Fig.3

GADJONESS: AN UNCOUNTED
SHADE OF WHITENESS
MARGARETA MATACHE
ARTWORKS BY MAŁGORZATA MIRGA-TAS
The Roma question is central to this issue. On the one hand, narrative from the periphery towards dialog
Romani people are often deceivingly perceived as white in and solidarity with other racialized communities
the U.S.-centric epistemology, on the other hand, “gadjoness” across the globe.
tends to transform the many shades of whiteness described in
this issue into a single one, complicit with the implacable pan- The seeds of gadjoness ///
European processes of anti-Roma structural racism. In this Soon after the arrival of our ancestors in European
text, Margareta Matache provides a brief history of gadjoness, territories, European gadje began to cast Romani
with an attempt to situate it in the broader framework of race, families and groups in and as an absolute periphery.
racialization, and slavery. The peaceful arrival of the Romani people was not
met with a warm welcome. Notably, the settlement
Across eras, political regimes, and civil and political or movement of the Romani people in the territories
society, Roma people have endured the challenges of Europe did not mirror or mimic Europeans’
of overlapping peripheries: an absolute periphery horrific means to institute white settler colonies,
of a people labeled forever inferior and criminal occupation, and exploitation outside Europe. Yet,
outcasts in all societies; an auxiliary periphery early on, European sovereigns employed two
of a dispersed people that cuts across and gets predominant models of supremacist projects:
amplified within hierarchies established between ownership over Roma people and exclusive gadjo
superpowers, semiperipheral, and peripheral control and living in their lands.
states; and a shunned periphery as an uncharted
racialized people in global spaces of periphery and The Romanian principalities of Moldova and
solidarity against whiteness. Wallachia were the pioneering European
establishments to implement customs, laws, and
However, the enduring power dynamics and practices of (proto)racial slavery. They seized and
processes that have pushed Roma people into zones exploited Roma people within their territories
of inferiority, non-humanness, and criminality have and crafted a division of labor, power, and social
simultaneously upheld white Europeans in zones hierarchy; all while placing gadje at the top. The
of normativity, humanness, and civilization. This enslavers—the Crown, the Orthodox Church, and the Fig.1
has resulted in the formation of two relational, nobility—instituted the Roma as the natural slave in
hierarchical, and antagonistic identities. the 14th and 15th centuries by setting our ancestors
apart as property and nonhumans and weaponizing For instance, archival documents I found in my also became an issue of interest and a marker
characteristics such as nomadism, skin color, ethnic county, Ilfov, included detailed descriptions of of identity in travelogs and the local academia.
distinctiveness, language, and other group traits. fugitive enslaved Roma from estates. Enslavers For instance, Mihail Kogalniceanu, well-known
In this text, I discuss the construction often sought institutional support to recapture and celebrated abolitionist, described Vătrașii
of gadjoness, an early shade of enslaved individuals, and in their descriptions Roma girls as beautiful, with skin like tar, uniting
would often mention features such as black eyes, “the features of the Greek and the fire of their
whiteness, crafted as a specific During and after the era of slavery, black hair and the color of their skin. An example ancestors.”
hierarchy between European gadje skin color became one of the is a statement that reads, “Two nights ago, a g*psy
washerwoman escaped from the estate; her true In fact, this system of inherited bondage,
and Roma. apparent markers used to identify name is Safta. She is 30 years old, short and thin, characterized by exploitation, extraction,
with black skin, two spots on the cheek and one on violence, and racialization, gradually created
and ascribe some groups of the nose, and several items of good clothing. She is the foundation of a particular form of ethnic and
My objective is to contribute to co-centering of the enslaved Roma, a major element accompanied by Negoiță, a g*psy of chef Petrache social stratification, establishing a distinct and
Roma experience in European and global history, Perățean(u), same age, medium height, black skin.” lasting consciousness of gadjoness among gadjo
specifically in the context of racialization and in the long-lasting bond between Despite the diversity within the Roma community, Romanians.
whiteness. By doing so, I aim to shift the Roma
gadjoness and whiteness physical appearance, particularly phenotype,

Fig.2

Other European establishments took a divergent influence of climate on the physical changes of races.
approach, one of rejection, employing various In 1853, Gobineau claimed that “[t]he Bohemians,
tactics, such as expulsions, prohibitions on Romani or Z*ngaris [...] show the same early development
families and groups from entering their territories, as the Hindus, who are akin to them; and under the
or G*psy hunts and killings. These methods became most inclement skies, in Russia and in Moldavia,
paradigmatic expressions of the sovereign power they still keep the expression and shape of the face
to kill and, later, the state’s “murderous function”— and the physical proportions, as well as the ideas and
understood also as indirect murder, which Michel customs, of the pariahs.”
Foucault defines as “exposing someone to death,
increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite Prior to the 19th century, other scientists, travelers,
simply, political death, expulsion, rejection…” (Society and philosophers were also intentional in linking
Must Be Defended, 1976). Mass expulsions, entry bans, characteristics related to our ancestry, phenotype,
and killings aimed to achieve absolute separation and and identity to an idea of race (or protorace),
spatial purity, leading to the racial cleansing of some introducing narratives of what I call paired
neighborhoods, public spaces, cities, or provinces, racialization—a process that ties together two
effectively purging them of Romani people, thus racialized groups to transfer the prejudice tied to
establishing gadjikano zones. Although the language one against the other—to boost whiteness further. In
of laws, the historical and political contexts, and the 1775, Immanuel Kant claimed that “[t]he olive-yellow
levels of intentionality varied, the end goal of creating color of the skin of the Indian, the true g*psy color
gadjikano zones persisted. which lies at the base of the more or less dark brown
of other eastern peoples, is also just as characteristic
Similarly to the system of slavery, some oppressors, and persistent in regeneration as the black color
witnesses, observers, or travelers also framed, of the N*gro, and together with the remaining
narrated, and justified the ‘must die’ policies and formation and the distinct natural disposition
practices targeting the Romani people, and in those appears to be just as much the effect of a dry heat, as
processes, also normalized and solidified gadjoness. the latter appears to be that of a humid heat.”
In the 1500s, a French lawyer claimed that “[i]t was
very necessary to remove these terrible persons Thus, Gobineau and Kant, along with other
from the simple common people on whom they had scholars, employed phenotype, along with
played a thousand tricks and subtle swindles.” In other traits and tropes, as a joint element of
Germany, representatives of some provinces labeled reciprocal race-making of different communities
Romani people as “bands of harmful vermin.” The to further strengthen whiteness. However, the
essentialized depictions involved dehumanization, racialization processes of various Romani groups
criminalization, and association of Romani people, were not exclusively based on phenotype. In Fig.3
primarily nomadic families, with an inferior “way some geographical locations and contexts, other
of life.” Notably, many of these accounts did not common characteristics or identity markers such as
explicitly mention gadjo Europeans. The oppositional language, crafts, family history in the community,
narratives of the ‘G*psies” were constructed against clothes, or itinerancy were also weaponized to cultural norms, and all spheres of society, keeping Phenotype has remained a marker used in
an unnamed and invisible white gadjo portrayed identify or target Romani families or groups. But Roma people in the absolute periphery of the identifying and targeting some Roma groups,
as “superior and civilized,” gradually establishing a the underlying purpose of establishing whiteness corpus of protected legal subjects and social families, and individuals including in practices of
widely accepted standard and norm. not only as “looking white” but more so as a structures—reinforcing gadje’s “legal legitimation police racial profiling, everyday racism, hate crimes,
performance of culture and an enactment of power of expectations of power and control” that Cheryl hate speech, and more.
Epistemic violence accompanied violent policies (cf. Steve Garner, The Politics of Whiteness, 2007) Harris refers to in Steve Garner’s Politics of
and practices in solidifying this shade of whiteness remained in place. Whiteness (2007).
in stone, as well as other forms of whiteness. Generally, the systems of knowledge and power
White supremacy became arguably the most overt, intersected and fortified each other in normalizing On both the micro and macro levels, gadjo powers However it is important to note that,
explicitly stated, and openly defended of the 19th- gadjoness and all other shades of whiteness. Thus, have maintained and remodeled the old legacies phenotype has not represented a
century theories of race across Europe. when we discuss the history of whiteness and and traditions of rejecting or offensive against
racism, I suggest we also explore the history of Roma people’s proximity, blending, and bonding fundamental element of identification
Although the major race theories did not target Romani people as a point of reference. within geographic, national, religious, or cultural
Romani people, our ancestors did not escape boundaries. They have also preserved, updated,
or racialization of all Romani groups
their epistemic violence. For instance, Arthur de The continuum of gadjoness /// and reshaped the fictionalized sovereign race-made and individuals; on the contrary, in
Gobineau, a highly influential author of racial The birth of nation-states, the rule of law, human G*psy as an identity, religion, security, contagion, or
ideology, categorized Romani people as pariahs rights, and democracy did not bury gadjoness and biological threat—not an adversary against Us (gadje) the U.K. or the U.S., some institutions
and essentialized Romani physical and cultural
characteristics to oppose theories regarding the
racism in the past. Instead, they have continuously
been instated in the framework of state affairs,
but as the face of the absolute unwanted, savage, and
antithetical racial Other rejected by Us (gadje).
categorize Romani people as

white, as do members of some as well as other migrants, refugees, and other
people who were not considered worthy of the
Romani groups in Nordic or Western white European category.
European countries and beyond. Other States and stakeholders persist in
implementing both overt and veiled manifestations
Nevertheless, appearing white or passing as of anti-Roma racism. While some have abandoned
white has not granted power to Romani groups explicit language of white superiority, the
or individuals, although in certain circumstances, deeply ingrained and long-held myth of gadje’s
it may have yielded limited white privileges. But superiority over Roma continues to manifest in
indeed, manifold elements of the racialization of actions, practices, laws, policies, racially-coded
the Romani people, whether based on phenotype, vocabulary, and more. Gadjoness remains implicit
itinerancy, or other characteristics, often and normalized as the prototypical standards—the
intersectional, have given rise to this distinct form blueprint—the norm within societies, cultures,
of whiteness. Yet, gadjoness quietly or violently policies, laws, and scholarships, furthering
has persisted in norms, laws, policies, institutions, marginalizing and relegating Roma people to the
values, beliefs, actions, attitudes, research, and absolute periphery. ■
in all aspects of our lives designed by and for
hegemony. Margareta (Magda) Matache is a Lecturer on Social and
Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Today, states aim to have “a positive influence” Health, and the co-founder and Director of the Roma Program
on their citizens’ lives, but full citizenship is often at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard
granted only to particular categories of white University. She is also a member of the Lancet Commission
individuals. In some cases, states employ similar on Reparations and Redistributive Justice and the O’Neill-
tactics and methods to target both Roma and other Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination
racialized groups using. Although in the age of and Global Health. She is the co-editor (with Jacqueline
human rights, the methods and justifications of Bhabha and Andrzej Mirga) of Realizing Roma Rights (2017), an
racism have become more sophisticated, states have investigation of anti-Roma racism in Europe, in collaboration
refined the methods of “killing” and their legal and with, as well as (with Jacqueline Bhabha and Caroline Elkins)
moral rationales. Yet, while the era of slavery may Time for Reparations (2021), a volume exploring the issue of
be in the past, present-day anti-Roma expulsions reparations across a broad range of historical and geographic
and entry bans echo similar historical tactics, contexts and academic disciplines.
technologies, and narratives of sovereign power.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a Polish-Romani visual artist, sculptor,
In general, contemporary state’s offensive toward painter, educator and activist. Born in 1978, she lives and
Roma people has not been fictionalized as a defense works in Czarna Góra, a Romani village at the foot of the Tatra
of the state or the society against a conquering Mountains, where she also works as an educator and activist.
or life-threatening G*psy enemy, as in the case of She combines various techniques to talk about the convoluted
other racialized communities. However, among the Roma and Roma-Polish identity and show the daily life of her
tools legitimizing “the acceptability of putting to community. Her work explores themes around history of the
death,” the State has at times placed Roma people Romani people and transcultural and transnational experience
in a state of exception, security, or emergency. of being a Roma.
For instance, in Italy, the government’s Council of
Ministers issued a decree in 2008 titled “Declaration
of the State of Emergency with Regard to Nomad
Fig.4 Community Settlements in the Territories of
Campania, Lazio, and Lombardia regions.” In effect,
the decree, and the accompanying decrees designed
for other regions, paralleled the presence of Roma
people in Italian cities with a natural disaster or
catastrophe, giving contentious powers to prefects
and other local authorities to solve the “emergency.”
Thus, Italian leaders, as well as leaders of other
EU States, did not shy away from using the claim
All artworks by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.
of security and emergence to break the EU laws, Fig.1 & 2 Out Of Egypt (Wyjście z Egiptu), 2021.
democracy, and human rights principles in order to Fig.3 My Mom, 2020. / Photo by Marcin Tas.
shield their borders from EU-mobile Roma people, Fig.4 Sisters, 2019. / Photo by Marcin Tas.

ON PERIPHERAL WHITENESS
AND BEING CENTRAL
EASTERN EUROPEAN
KASIA NARKOWICZ
Through three specific space-time cases considering ‘white’ at the edges of Sweden’s capital, Stockholm. Part
Poles as racialized subjects, Kasia Narkowicz demonstrates of Miljonprogrammet, the Swedish public housing
how shades of whiteness are formed contextually. The urban program introduced by the Social Democrats during
outskirts of Stockholm in the 1990s, the space of the 2017 the 1960s, was meant to encourage affordable
EU referendum in Britain, or the recent borderland separating collective living with common laundry rooms,
Poland from Belarus and Ukraine are three distinct sets common waste facilities, common playgrounds,
of conditions through which Polish proximity to Western and relatively low rents for all. In the early 1990s,
European whiteness evolves from aspirational to effective. the residents in these suburbs were a unique
amalgamation of disastrous global politics; Iraqis,
Whiteness and Europeanness so starkly marks Afghans, Chileans, Somalis, and Bosniaks fleeing
out Central Eastern European identity because at dictatorships and wars, and then us Poles, escaping Fig.1
different times throughout our history the promise the aftermath of the post-communist transition to
of being fully embraced as Europeans, with all capitalism.
that it grants, has been dangling in front of us in The Eastern Margins of Empire racialized tropes that we were trying to scrub off
as a carrot. And no matter how eagerly we have We lived together in conditions not always mirroring our migrant bodies and that have been used to
responded, implementing imposed shock therapies, the promises of Swedish welfare, sometimes with (2007), still held the promise of describe our region for centuries.
voting almost unanimously to enter the European
Union, or integrating as model migrants in Western
cockroaches in our kitchens that many of us would
see for the first time. We were uprooted, having
assimilation to Swedish whiteness. When some of Eastern Europe first joined the
Europe, it was never quite enough. But still, it often left behind family and friends. We had names European Union in 2004, the divisions within our
harbored a promise of the possibility of being white that the Swedish struggled to pronounce and we When skipping school or not handing in school region took on a whole new set of meanings. Poles,
enough that tipped us over in our solidarities, and lived in a bubble far away from white Swedish assignments on time, I was met with teacher’s Hungarians, and Czechs were among those groups
we became the keen handmaidens of European people, mainly communicating either in English or disapproval and disciplined for it. Cutting alongside chosen to enter the EU first, followed only some
white supremacy. sign language with one another until, one by one, the frustration of not being allowed to skip school years later and with less generous immigration
we would be placed in an integration class in one as much as the other immigrant children from benefits with Bulgarians and Romanians. Arriving
Being Eastern European in Sweden: 1992/// of the local neighborhood schools. In our minds, we outside Europe, was another, more profound and en masse to seek work opportunities, often over-
As Stuart Hall argued, race is a “floating were the same. We were all undesirable and our desperately desired feeling; one of belonging. qualified for the jobs they agreed to undertake,
signifier” (1997), which means that it is a marker small kids’ bodies already knew that and, in that, Of being potentially good enough to warrant a the Poles quickly became a model minority. Not too
of difference that is shifting and not stable. there was solidarity and true friendships. punishment, good enough to be seen by the Swedish different but still occupying a lower position in the
Within the racial divisions that still cloud our teachers. One can only disappoint if there is an racial hierarchy, they did not disturb the workings
contemporary life, those from Eastern Europe But not long after starting school something that expectation to do better, and this was not granted of racial capitalism; they were to be grateful to be
have historically occupied a much more fragile would disrupt our innocent togetherness started to my other diasporic friends. Our difference? I was doing below living-wage labor and enjoy benefits
position in relation to whiteness than our Western happening; as a Central Eastern European I was from Poland, Central Eastern Europe and the others that migrants from outside Europe were often
European white counterparts. But we have still being singled out and given different, better, were from either further east; Bosnia, Serbia, barred from accessing. But then Brexit happened,
been embraced, if conditionally, by whiteness. The opportunities than my ‘darker’ friends from the Turkey, or altogether far off from what could be followed by Covid and the bubble burst for Central
complexity of Central Eastern European whiteness concrete blocks. While it didn’t register critically in comfortably embraced by European whiteness. Eastern Europeans.
has haunted me my entire life, starting as subtle my tween mind back then, it nevertheless taught Despite that our histories were entangled and
realizations when I first migrated illegally from me my first lesson about racial hierarchies and solidarities were present in these shared histories Being Eastern European in Britain: 2017 ///
Poland to Sweden in 1992 as a child migrant whiteness. (as mapped in James Mark’s 1989: A Global Britain’s EU referendum was a way of barricading
following my mum who, some years earlier, left History of Eastern Europe, 2019) Central Eastern and blaming immigrants for a decline in living
Poland in search of work. Europeans differentiated “us” from “them” in order standards accompanied by an increasingly
As an immigrant from Poland, my to demarcate and protect an imagined belonging. aggressive political climate. And for the first time,
In Sweden, we were all poor, mostly first- and whiteness, however shifting and what Those coming from the former Yugoslavia and it was Eastern Europeans, until now protected by
some second-generation immigrant and refugee Turkey would be spoken about as less civilized, their status as EU migrants, that felt the impact
children, housed in concrete gray apartment blocks Manuela Boatcă calls “less than” less clean, and more criminal: exactly these same of British hostile environment policies first

Daily microaggressions where Eastern Europeans be an active participant in the ongoing European
are disciplined or ridiculed for their language, border imperialism.
accents or their “unpronounceable” names are
common. Having one’s name butchered countless Being non-European in
times during the day and being told that one Central Eastern Europe: 2022 ///
“doesn’t look like an Eastern European” in the way Cutting through beautiful national parks is the
of a compliment, grinds one’s sense of dignity and border between Central and Eastern Europe,
belonging. What until now was continuous, but also the Eastern border of the EU. In the words
bearable, became more and more virulent in the of Nicholas de Genova, it is the site of a “border
lead up to the EU exit vote, resulting in increased spectacle” (“Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’,” 2013):
attacks on the Polish community in Britain. the practice of exclusion, but also of inclusion
through exclusion. The Polish border has become a
If Brexit was a first realization for many Central contested space, depending on where one’s point of
Eastern Europeans that their whiteness was entry is. If crossing at the various open checkpoints
more precarious than initially hoped for, the in the southeastern part of Poland from Ukraine,
global Covid-19 pandemic cemented that. Many the border customs website helpfully maps out over
Eastern Europeans are employed in so-called “key twenty-five border crossing points, specifying the
professions” doing jobs that are essential yet often waiting time at each. A few kilometers to the North
offering little security but high levels of potential is the Białowieża National Park, a dense forest
exploitation. These jobs include nurses, bus drivers, and home to thousands of bisons. In it, is another
food and parcel deliveries, teachers, and cleaners. border, between Poland and Belarus. Each border,
When Covid hit, these workers were unable to Ukraine–Poland and Belarus–Poland, is around
shield themselves at home because their essential 500 kilometers long. Who gets to cross Polish
jobs required them to go out to work each day. Even borders into the EU depends on two things that are
home, often with shared occupancy, was not a safe intimately welded; where on that stretch of the 1,000
space and government guidance overlooked the kilometers one finds itself, more North or more
very specific circumstances and needs of migrant South, and how one gets racialized.
essential laborers. When most citizens were shielded
in their homes, labor migrants from Eastern Europe At the end of 2021, when news of Polish border
were flown into countries like Germany and Britain guards responding with violent push backs to the
on charter flights to pick fruits and work on farms. growing crowds at the Belarus border started
For many Polish and other Eastern Europeans circulating, there was no lack of international
working in factories, their already fragile everyday condemnation for the barbaric handling of the
life became that much harder when accused by migrants. It was indeed horrific when volunteers
locals of not following Covid guidelines. When at the Polish–Belarus border started finding bodies
going back and forth between work in the factory of people in the dense forest. Migrants had died
Fig.2
where no distancing measures were kept and their in the forest in subzero temperatures and among
overcrowded accommodation where bedrooms were them were children and young people. Every day
introduced in 2012 by the Conservative government. analyzes as “dirty white” (“‘Eurowhite’ Conceit, shared with people working for different factories there are new updates about people being found
Since Poland joined the European Union in ‘Dirty White’ Resentment,” 2021). The British tabloid across town, physical distance was not possible. from Grupa Granica (Border Group), an informal
2004, overwhelmingly voting for inclusion or press frequently reported on dangerous Polish lorry group of volunteers providing medical, legal, and
“return back” to what then President Aleksander drivers, criminal gangs and Eastern Europeans For the Polish community in Britain working in humanitarian assistance on the Eastern border. But
Kwaśniewski referred to as “the European family,” eating swans (a historical trope at various points frontline roles, the convergence of Brexit and the violence at Europe’s Eastern borderlands is part
a steady flow of Poles arrived in Britain with one- attached to different racialized groups). Poles Covid had serious impacts on financial security, of a larger, deeper, violence that is what Harsha
way tickets in hand. They undertook hard work, in Britain are hesitant to speak of being treated health and mental wellbeing, social isolation, and Walia calls “border imperialism” (Undoing Border
often low-paid and precarious, soon becoming the differently, partly because they aspire to whiteness plans for the future. Some of its members suffered Imperialism, 2013), making European borders the
country’s largest foreign-born population, peaking and Europeanness that continue to be conditional. deep depression, others made firm plans to return most deadly, both those in Western and Eastern
at one million just before the Brexit referendum. Eastern Europe, historically and still today, is to Poland, hoping to counter the lack of family, Europe. Still, whatever happens in the East of the
narrated as in a permanent state of ‘catching-up’ friends and support that Covid laid bare in Britain. EU is always going to be read as less civilized.
Although there is no doubt that we enjoyed with Western modernity. While returning “home” can be undoubtedly a hard Which is why the claim to Europeanness, and by
privileges not available to migrants from outside choice to make, it nevertheless is a possibility for extension, to whiteness, is crucial for Poland and
the EU, our Eastern Europeanness was a marker of a border crossing not afforded to other migrants thus also for Poles and the larger Central Eastern
difference that traversed racial divides in complex Here, again, is that promise of from outside Europe. In this, the relative whiteness European region. Having eagerly joined the EU
ways: white enough and European enough to be belonging that is never quite achieved of Central Eastern Europeans does not only allow in 2004, Poland has since become one of its most
allowed entry into Britain, but not white enough them to cross borders, it also gives them the staunch defenders. Because, not dissimilar to how I
to escape being racialized as what József Böröcz but therefore so sought after. mandate to engage in border fortification and thus was lifted out of the crowd of undesirable diasporic

Fig.3 Fig.4
migrant children back in the 1990s, it lifts these chosen to align with or aspire towards Western distancing themselves as the white, indigenous, Europe; those stuck at the border between Belarus
countries out of an undesirable crowd and allows European nations as is teased out in the work and thus more deserving Muslim community. Little and Poland that has been termed both a “graveyard”
them access into Europeanness. But this is not of scholars Marta Grzechnik (“Aspirations of an hints at this tension more than a jarring sign that and a “migrant hunting ground.” ■
unconditional, for it comes with the expectation Imperial Space,” 2018) and Bolaji Balogun (“Polish hangs just meters away from the mosque where
that Poland and Poles will be the guardians of that Lebensraum,” 2018). Consequently, the push backs the burials are held, it reads: “Thank you for your Kasia Narkowicz is a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University
enclosed community. of Black and brown people at the Belarus border is service and the protection of our border.” London. Her research interests are migration, borders, and
only the most recent example of when Poles got the Eastern Europe. Kasia’s recent work explores the complex
chance to racially distinguish themselves from those To Europe yes, but only with our dead /// positionality of Eastern European migrants in the UK, who
In that, Poles and Poland are not placed below them and jumped at the opportunity to As late Polish scholar Maria Janion described in experience racism and are also invested in racial exclusions.
innocent or passive receivers of advance in the racial hierarchy. her work Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna (Uncanny She is currently working on an edited book entitled
Slavdom, 2006), the invention of the concept of Migration and Race in Central and Eastern Europe: Decolonial
European benevolence, just like Many of the migrants are Muslims or migrants Central Eastern Europe was intended for the Perspectives (forthcoming, Routledge).
assumed to be Muslims who, despite small numbers, purpose of marking out countries like Poland and
we never have been innocent of have in the last decade become the national folk stress their cultural closeness to the West. Janion
engaging in racism despite being devil in Poland, supposedly threatening European also wrote another book in the context of Poland
Christian civilization as the Polish right-wing joining the European Union, or as the narrative Fig.1 Residential neighborhood of Fittja in the outskirts of Stockholm, built as part
racialized ourselves within Europe. populist government would argue in their bid to went “rejoining” to where it always belonged. The of the Miljonprogrammet and where a majority of the residents are immigrants. /
“save Europe.” Those migrants who lose their lives book is called Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi Photo by Holger Ellgaard (2007).
Fig.2 Silent march in honor of Arek Jozwik, a 40 year old Polish migrant worker
There is a long history of Central Eastern Europe, on the Poland–Belarus border are often buried umarłymi, which translates to To Europe yes, but
murdered by English teenagers in Harlow town center on August 27, 2016. / Photo
placing itself at the heart of Europe, capitalizing on in an old Muslim cemetery in Bohoniki, a Tatar only with our dead. When she was writing, “our by Alan Denney on September 3, 2016.
its in-betweenness to make its claim to whiteness village in Eastern Poland. The Polish Tatars, while dead” was mainly designating Jewish people. Now, Fig.3 The Polish army guarding the militarized border between Belarus and the
through racial exclusions. From engaging as the stepping up to conduct burials for Europe’s most our dead, those who die and continue to die because European Union, while thousands of exiled people attempt to enter Poland. / Photo
by the Wojska Obrony Terytorialnej (so-called “Polish Territorial Defence Forces”)
perpetrators in murders of its Jewish and Roma unwanted according to the Islamic requirements, of both our precarity and our complicity with
on November 15, 2021.
populations, to its grand (if unsuccessful) ambitions also occupy a complex racial position in Poland and whiteness, must include the most recent victims Fig.4 Small church, set up in a welcoming center for Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
to colonize parts of Africa, Poland has often have themselves Othered Muslim migrants when of European border violence in Central Eastern / Photo by ProPics Canada Media Ltd (March 2022).

MESTIZAJE: WHEN THE SHADES
DISSIMULATE WHITENESS
A CONVERSATION WITH MÓNICA G. MORENO FIGUEROA
Insisting on the many “shades of whiteness” always bears U.S. imperialism is not just a political thing, it also
the risk of making whiteness as a racial project disappear. has to do with media flows, cultural flows, etc.
As such, this conversation with Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa
about mestizaje (the ideology of racial mixture in so-called The way I like to think about it to separate them,
“Latin America”) became urgent. Our discussion focuses on to clarify our influences, but also to see the
how mestizaje came about historically, how it dissimulates the particularities, is to think that every region, area,
settler colonial conditions of Abya Yala, and how it constitutes a country... has a particular racial project, and that
faulty national assimilationist project in Mexico and other states. there are different racial projects around the world.
This is the way in which racism gets organized
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: In this issue, we’re trying to differently in each place. And we can broadly
articulate the many shades of white(ness), which say these racial projects are defined in terms of
mostly means showing that whiteness is more assimilation and segregation as a first distinctive
complex than what it’s usually painted to be. But way of understanding them. The United States of
this also means that we should reveal whiteness America, together with other places like South
in systems of racialization that have deliberately Africa, and maybe some similarities with Europe
hidden it. This is the context for this conversation have to do with logics of segregation, where people
about mestizaje with you Mónica. are more physically separated. This, of course, is
If we begin to consider whiteness in the way it’s not the only thing going on in these places as there
conceptualized at a global scale, we are forced to are also some strong assimilation logics, but that
recognize that we are strongly influenced with the the defining idea is that people should not mix:
knowledge production emanating from the settler they should be separated. Mixture is a big problem
colony we call “the United States of America” (not for places where segregation is a tendency that
be confused with “the United States of Mexico,” occupies most of the racist imagination.
which we’ll talk about in just a moment!). This
has a strong consequence on the way racialization
operates in Mesoamerica since the geographies On the other hand, in places like Latin
Fig.1
situated south of the U.S. border and the people America, mixture is at the center of
who come from them, indistinctly, are flattened
into a single racial identity (whether it’s been how the racial project is organized,
colonially called “hispanidad” or “latinidad”). Could makes us as great or as worse as we are…” is a MGMF: Well, it is obviously a very long history
you tell us whether this has an impact on the way
and assimilation therefore, becomes strong distinction of Latin America from Europe or with many different complicated things. What
Mesoamerican societies think about their systems of a really important process by which the U.S.. This thinking creates different systems of I would say is a very summarized account and,
racialization? racialization, if we put it in the terms that you were surely, I’m leaving many details aside, but the way
societies are building themselves, mentioning, and gives us a different entrance to a I like to explain mestizaje is that it is a multiple
MÓNICA G. MORENO FIGUEROA: I think that it is
interesting that we start there, because it is the
creating nations and creating discussion of how racism is experienced in different
parts of the world.
definition idea: it has a multiplicity of versions or of
definitions, and none of them necessarily contradict
first myth we need to dispel in a way. It is the first different communities. each other, but they are built on top of each other.
idea that we need to make clear that discussions LL: One thing mestizaje conveniently dissimulates And sometimes you see one of these versions
about race, as you rightly say, do not have to always as a white ideology, is the settler colonial conditions coming up and sometimes others.
have a reference to the United States and the way This is important to understand, because it is quite that structure all nation states in Abya Yala (the
it’s discussed there. However, it would be false to different to think about whiteness in a context Americas). We are invited to believe that if there The first understanding that many people have, is
say that there’s no influence and correlations and where mixture is valued, and where mixture is are no Indigenous people nor settlers, then settler that Mestizaje refers to the process of colonization,
flows of information and impact of different ways in at the core of the national project, at the core of colonialism is no longer a relevant framework to and of the building of the new colonial situation
which racism works in different parts of the world. people’s imagination, at the core of who they are. politically analyze these states. Could you take us where you have Spanish and Portuguese people
So in that sense, it is correct to say that there is some To say, “We come from a mixed background, we through the way this concept of racialization (or arriving and mixing biologically and culturally with
impact, some correlations, and flows. And of course, are mixed, this is what defines us, and this is what rather the denial thereof) was formed? the Indigenous people who were already there in

the Americas. This is how they created these new belonging and citizenship. It creates
peoples: the mestizos. So it has to do with peoples
and cultures. Mestizaje is a historical moment in the racialized cultural imaginaries,
history of mixture: cultural mixture and biological
mixture. However, these have a lot of variants. For
cultural products, as well as racialized
some, it’s simply a mixture of peoples. Basically, if material culture and geographies.
a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman have a
child, this child is a mestizo/a, i.e. a mixed person. So all these different understandings of mestizaje,
a mix of individuals, specifically Indigenous
During the colonial period, there was what we call Spanish, where mixture operates towards a
a caste system: people of all kinds of mixtures, and particular official goal, the logics of the caste
of course, the forced arrival of African enslaved system, the official national ideologies developed
peoples, and also the arrival of people from Asia, throughout the Americas and the everyday logics
and of course European peoples. The creation of of racialisation, we can understand making
these castes is done through all these different mestizaje kind of quite complicated.
variations of possibilities of people who were
recorded and registered. LL: You use the instance of a Spanish man and
an Indigenous woman, which probably could not
There’s another process added to that, which be less of an innocent example. The gendered
has to do with the confirmation of nation states dimension of mestizaje is very important, isn’t it?
during the 19th century and early 20th century,
which became a process of establishing this idea of MGMF: Yes, and we can bring the gender component,
mixture as the official ideology that would create the class component, and you can see that all these
the new states, the official kinds of people. How variations imply dominance, a lot of violence...
we got to that from having that initial mixture 300 If we go to the colonial experience of mestizaje, Fig.2
years ago is a long historical process. It has to do this is not a story where the Indigenous women
with almost a rejection of scientific racism coming were “hanging out” and wanted “to go out” with
from Europe, or eugenic policies in the Americas, European men who came and flirted, and then got
where Mestizaje then becomes this proposal of a engaged. Mestizaje started as an alliance: some
project that wants to unite the population, but with of the Indigenous peoples were offering their
a very clear task of whitening, through mixture. women to the colonizers as a way of establishing of caste systems, which is essential to the notion What it wants is to say: “yes, we want to mix
It proposes that we mix the population, but in a relationships of power for the new colonial state— of mestizaje, claims that if an Indigenous woman because we can accept that your blood can be
particular direction. This already tells you that it’s I’m not a historian so I won’t be able to tell you the and a European man have a child, they become cleaned, that it has some defects, but European
not just any mixture or that any mixture works. details with precision; there are people that can a mestizo/a. If a mestiza woman has a child with blood is going to make it better.” Women’s bodies
talk about that process (see for example the work a European man, they become a castizo/a. And are a site of control for this process. This ideology
Additionally, there is a further understanding of Fe Navarrete for Mexico). Generally what we if a castiza woman has a child with a Spanish is completely embedded in the ways of thinking in
of mestizaje as an everyday logic of racist and see is that the colonizing process was a violent man, they become Spanish themselves. So in three Latin America, in everyday practices nowadays: this
racialized differentiation that organizes people’s process, not unique to Mexico or Latin America generations with the appropriate mixing and with is not just happening in the colonial paintings of the
everyday life. and the Caribbean, but to that moment of European a continuous gender dominance, you can “improve 18th century.
expansion throughout the world. the race.” This is not the case for Black people:
Black women who mixed with white Europeans LL: In the case of “the United States of Mexico”—I
Mestizaje logics are intersectional Once you start seeing the development of the caste would produce a lineage that could never be fully purposely insist on the official name of the state
in nature, as most social relations, system, you see that the aim was this building redeemed. to show its similarity with its settler colonial
towards whiteness, and the creation of a discourse northern neighbor—mestizaje seems to even be
and it gives pointers to how people that Indigenous blood could be redeemed. This a national project to flatten the differentiation
means that you can dilute the Indigenous line This notion of “improving the race” is (except perhaps cultural differentiation) of the
establish their social relations, their through continuous violence over Indigenous essential to understanding mestizaje various political communities that live under
cultural tastes, their understanding of women or Indigenous women descendants, Mexican sovereignty. Could you tell us what is
mixing with European men. One of the examples as a whitening ideology. to be gained by the state through this national

Fig.3 Fig.4
project? Is it the end of Indigeneity and its “one drop” notions of purity and whiteness. So when we can all be together.” However, this came resources, without the promise of development,
sovereignty claims? that project, which had strong ties with the 1910 to an explosion in 1994, showing that it didn’t without anything.” Of course, I’m simplifying here,
Mexican Revolution, or rather the aftermath of work, that the promise of inclusion, of welcoming and there’s so much more to say about development
MGMF: Mestizaje was a project of nation building the Revolution, with the establishment of the first was built on top of a lot of historically developed in Latin American countries, and how it triggers
that very much tried to impose these logics of governments that really wanted to deal with the colonial legacies and the 19th century development poverty and violence.
mixture when facing the impossibility of killing Indigenous problem and that denied the presence of capitalism in terms of who owns what, from the
and disappearing all the Indigenous population. It of African descendants, Black people, and other development of big haciendas to the development What we can say is that Indigenous people got
was obvious by the 17th century that Indigenous people. Everybody got deleted to become Mexican. of industries... We started seeing a society divided, together, got organized, and started demanding
people were still there, that there were mixtures, built on a Indigenous/mestiza/white pyramidal change. It was so strong that we can say that the
and that this notion of purity was just not holding. This was built around a lot of ambivalence, because system. What happened in 1994, is the Zapatistas Zapatista movement has impacted and imprinted
So it was an ideological solution for building a it gives the impression of inclusion, something rebelling and declaring: “Your idea of us as being many other Indigenous mobilizations throughout
nation that could compete with European nations like: “Everybody can join in! You just need to stop one didn’t work, it hasn’t worked, because we’re the Americas and maybe in other places of the
and the United States that had a much more strict being who you are. And then you can be this and still in the worst situation we are, without the world. They envisioned an anti-capitalist and anti-

to start and to organize it. If you think about facial “whitest” body. I think that characteristic makes
features, if you think about the physical body, in the the experience of whiteness in Mexico a tricky one,
embodiment, what the body does, what the body very movable and shifty. There are new studies
can do, then the thing gets a bit more complicated, about white people, people that self identify as
but definitely what we can find is that the lighter white, and there is this new term, “whitexican”:
someone is, the better the outcome. This has been people who consider themselves to be white
now proven by many different surveys and studies Mexicans. This is bringing interesting debates, and
and we can see that there’s no way out of the we need to be more able to understand the flows of
discussion where skin color is not relevant. different racial projects, and to see how they impact
each other and we cannot think that nation borders
actually stopped racial projects... But we just need
However, the issue here is that one to know how to contextualize them historically, and
of the main differences that I found in with the wider situation. It’s not just an input from
the U.S. or from Europe to Mexico. So, yes, there is a
my own work is that skin color in the lot to think about. ■
Latin American context is relative and Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Black-mestiza, Mexican-
contextual. British, Associate Professor in Sociology at the University
of Cambridge. She is also a Fellow in Social Sciences at
Downing College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on the
What I mean is that one person could be light- intersectional lived experience of ‘race’ and racism in Mexico
skinned—light brown for instance—in one context, and Latin America; antiracism and academic-based impact;
and then be considered as dark-skinned in another feminist theory, intersectionality and racism. The book
context, and that’s going to completely shift their Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America
experience. People are constantly shifting the way (Pittsburgh University Press, 2022), edited by Peter Wade, is
Fig.5 they are perceived, the way they’re treated, and based on their project on anti-racist practices and discourses
the way they are going through life. This makes in Latin America, comparing experiences in Brazil, Colombia,
us all aware of how our embodiment impacts the Ecuador, and Mexico.
place we are in, and the spaces that we interact
racist world—well, anti-racism might not have the “You are all blue!” while the racialized reality of with. So we have to think with the context. It also
been at the very center of their explicit discourse it makes it clear that there’ll always be “dark blues” has to do with that particular understanding of
but it is very much part of it. This was definitely a and “light blues.” Is what we came to call “colorism” what are the characteristics of Indigenous people,
statement on how mestizaje did not work, even in an apt reading grid to understand it? Or is that of Black people... People are very good at reading
its multicultural aspect—a contradiction in the terms accepting to debate Mestizaje on its own terms and bodies, at reading their body, the body of others
if you ask me. This multiculturalism constructs a taking the risk to dilute a bit further identifiable and constantly locating themselves in relation
situation where we have a certain allowance for political groups and their specific histories: to those spaces. And that is what you’re trying
Blackness, for Indigeneity, for even Asianness to Indigenous people, Afro Mexicans whose ancestors to do in racialized societies, where your body is
appear, while these principles of improving the were subjected to the transatlantic slave trade, your capital. So there might be many similarities,
race, of whitening the population still continue. refugees, and settlers? but I just want to point out that in places where
So you can say it is not the end. And on the assimilation is at the center, and where mixture
contrary, you have now generations of Indigenous MGMF: In a way, it takes us to the first question. I is prioritized, the question of how somebody looks
intellectuals and professionals who are claiming mean, colorism is a very U.S. specific term that like is very important and will determine your
their nations and saying that it didn’t work and it’s has to do with Black people having different skin fate. You find that even within families. If I were to
not working... It’s a new moment. color shades. And the idea that the lightest you are, show you a picture of my own family: I have from
the better. So I cannot say that it has nothing to do the very blondest cousin, to me, the darkest cousin,
LL: In the 1980s, French comedian Coluche was with it, but I would say that there’s other logics at but in another context, I might be the lightest dark
telling this joke—I have to warn you, it’s very play when you think about mestizaje. Skin color is skinned person. Fig.1 Monumento al Mestizaje (1982) by Julián Martínez and M. Maldonado in the
French, quite bad taste, but telling too I think. It’s very definitely important for the understanding of Jardín Xicoténcat in Mexico City. / Photo by Javier Delgado Rosas (April 2009).
Fig.2 Lexicon of mestizaje in the Americas. “The vocabulary is taken mainly from the
about a group of Black and white pupils fighting how racism is experienced in Mexico and in Latin I guess we didn’t quite talk about whiteness in
Diccionario de la Lengua Española (Real Academia Española) and the inscriptions
for seats on the school bus. The exasperated driver America. But when we think of skin color, we’re Mexico or in Latin America, per se, but we talked upon the drawings of people called “retratos de castas,” from painters like Miguel
(who we can definitely assume to be white although not just saying literally just skin color, you know, about mestizaje as a whitening project. Perhaps, Cabrera, or the c. 18th anonymous kept at the Museo Nacional del Virreinato.” /
of course it is not said) yells: “That’s enough! In my we are saying skin color with facial features with I could just finish by saying that we can also Photo by Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas (2018).
bus, there is no Black, there is no white, you are the whole embodiment of how gender and class are understand that mestizaje is a form of whiteness Fig.3-4 La cena del capitalismo (The Dinner of Capitalism) and La orgía (The Orgy)
depicting whiteness and mestizaje together. / Murals by Diego Rivera (1928) at the
all blue!” And then: “Okay so now dark blues you’re also imprinted in bodies. It’s a complex phenomena, that is ambivalent, that is porous, that is always Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City.
going to the back and light blues you’re coming to and maybe it’s reductive when we just want to put centering the whitest body: what I mean is not Fig.5 Allegory of the Mestizo in Chetumal, Mexico. / Photo by Rafael Saldaña
the front.” It feels that Mestizaje is the ideology of it in terms of justice in color, but it is a good way necessarily the “white body,” but the “whiter” or (December 2018).

SELF-PORTRAITS
JULIE DOWLING
Each self-portrait in my career has been painted to three years and, due to my disabilities, Carol is my
be a signature to a solo exhibition I have completed. carer—she often jokes that she is my unpaid artist’s
They are part of a documentary process of the assistant. Carol is an award winning radio producer
theme of those shows. In 2004, I painted a series and long term university academic in Aboriginal
of self-portraits and I have not done this since. In Studies. Collaborating with each other’s careers, we
essence, these self-portraits are comments about the are each other’s intellectual support. Carol is also an
lasting impact of eugenics theories upon me and anthropologist/sociologist who has often discussed
my family. I have lived my life as a litmus test for issues of sovereignty, self-determination and
race relations in Australia. I have walked between decolonization with me over many years. Whereas
two worlds but always lived as a strong Badimaya I manifest these discussions into my works, Carol
woman with a deep connection to my traditional has equally written and lectured about them too.
country in the Central-West of Western Australia. This process has worked for over thirty years in our
respective careers. We both hold doctoral degrees.
I have witnessed the devastating impact of racial
code-switching on fair-skinned First Nations When looking into a mirror as part of my painting
people in my family and community. It causes process for these self-portraits, I reflect on who
psychological damage so profound that sustained I am as an individual twin. This mirror image is
mental health can be impossible, and suicide can my twin. You are often unconscious about your
seem like the only option. I am fortunate to see individualism when you are an identical twin
my self-portraits as biographical to speak about because everyone reminds you of your similarity to
the situations I have experienced at a specific time someone else. You are conscious that your twin is
and they are about the world around me. I fully different from you fundamentally, but the outside
understand my placement within my family stories world wishes you or even pressures you to explain
and especially how these stories are placed within yourself. Such inquiries fill me with sadness and
the white colonial male patriarchy. Deeply impacted fear because they will never know this deep love
by the stolen generations, I am a product of the and connection with another human being. Being a
“breeding out program” imposed upon my maternal twin makes you a better friend, and family member
family going back only three generations. The and it definitely makes you a better commentator on
“stolen generations” describe a long period from human interactions and life. Intuition and empathy
1900s to 1970s whereby thousands of Aboriginal are important for twins. It is also important to
and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly stop racism because such violence comes from
removed from their families by federal and state ignorance and a lack of compassion. When
government policies to culturally and biologically you become connected to other human beings,
assimilate them within white society. Many of especially since the womb, your connectedness
these children never to saw their families again to the non-self becomes more evident. My works
resulting in intergenerational trauma experienced are about connection and wanting the viewer to
by their descendents. The majority were raised in become compassionate about what my people have
government and church institutions facing often experienced. The gaze upon me, my family and
extreme physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. community within my paintings calls for connection
These successive government policies were fueled and for a commitment to justice.■
by international notions of eugenics whereby my
people were deemed lowest on the evolutionary Julie Dowling is a Badimia First Nations artist and activist.
chain and soon to die out. We did not die out. I She was born in Subiaco, Western Australia, and grew up in
know that my Badimaya culture cannot be erased both semi-rural and urban areas in a large Badimia extended
so easily despite everything that has happened. family. Her work is both personal and political. Drawing on
Aboriginality is not a mathematical equation. a diverse range of artistic traditions, including Flemish and
Renaissance portraiture, Orthodox Roman Catholic and
I was born as an identical twin. My twin sister Russian icons, Badimia First Nation iconography and mural
Carol Dowling and I have always been very close. painting, Dowling’s poignant portraits bear witness to the
We have lived together now for the last twenty- past, both her family’s and more broadly.
60 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) Fig.1

61
UKRAINE AND THE TRAPS OF
PROXIMITY TO EUROPEAN AND
RUSSIAN SLAVIC WHITENESS
DARYA TSYMBALYUK
While the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, Darya cross from the Belarusian side. The unprecedented
Tsymbalyuk attempts to reckon with the complex layering of fast and efficient EU response in helping fleeing
racialization Ukrainians are subjected to. In being presented Ukrainians by activating the Temporary Protection
unequivocally as “white” when they receive support from Drive has also clearly demonstrated that such
western nations, we ought to question the peremptory actions are possible when the EU deems certain
dimension of this characterization and reflect instead on the lives “worth saving.” Finally, the racist public
conditionality of this temporary access to European whiteness. discourse that surrounded the situation and which
privileged and pitied Ukrainians against other
In the beginning of the Russian invasion of people that have been fleeing violence globally,
Ukraine that started on March 4, 2022, Syrian revealed the hypocrisy of the values of human
writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh published an essay rights and the deadly structuring of life according
entitled “Why Ukraine is a Syrian cause.” In it, to the proximity to European whiteness. Rightfully,
he offered a generous gesture of solidarity from these racist dynamics provoked a wave of outrage
a place of pain and embodied knowledge of and condemnation.
Russian imperial violence. Several weeks later,
Saleh published another piece, this time reflecting At the same time, and in response to western
on the failure to condemn Russian imperialism hypocrisy, there has been a tendency among many
in Syria in comparison to Ukraine and exposing people involved in the global anti-racist movement
profound racism within western institutions of to wrongfully conflate a rightful rage at racial
power, including towards people fleeing the war capitalism with Ukraine’s ability to continue
as refugees, where he frames this dynamic as resisting colonial aggressor, where this ability is
“selective solidarity.” Saleh’s work deeply speaks to conditioned by the support of the western allies.
me because he is able to address both violences of This tendency is often articulated by explaining
racial capitalism and of Russian military invasions, Russia’s war on Ukraine through the frame of
exposing their complexities and entanglements. It “white European war.” According to this logic, if
is this multiplicity of regimes of violence which is Ukraine is only supported because it is seen as
unfortunately often missing in some perspectives on white and European, it means that by supporting
Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the war’s international Ukraine one perpetuates the ordering of life
impact, and which I try to understand in this text. according to white supremacy. Such kinds of (mis)
interpretations of the war result in direct or indirect
The escalation of Russia’s eight-years long war suggestions of reducing and denying support for
on Ukraine to a full-scale invasion resulted in Ukraine’s anti-colonial struggle.
millions of people instantaneously crossing into
the European Union, where the EU’s response In “Fighting for Whiteness in Ukraine” (2023),
exposed deep structural racism and organization U.S.-based law academic Marissa Jackson Sow
of life according to white supremacy and discusses “Ukraine’s leveraging of the Russian
perceived proximities to European whiteness. invasion to negotiate enhanced status within the
People perceived as not-belonging to Ukrainian global white body politic.” As Jackson Sow points
whiteness or racialized citizens of non-European out, the narrative of Europeanness and associated
countries residing in Ukraine have been obstructed, whiteness is indeed instrumentalized by some
mistreated, and in some cases detained while trying Ukrainians, yet the argument that Ukraine is
to flee the Russian invasion. Moreover, the same “leveraging” the war diminishes the existential
eastern borders of the EU that opened to welcome nature of Ukraine’s anti-colonial resistance and
Ukrainian refugees have for long been a place of misrepresents geopolitical complexity of Russia’s
systematic violence against other refugees trying to imperial invasion and its impact.
Fig.1

white supremacy risk overlapping and feeding as well as to combat structural racism against Roma Perceived and constructed proximity to colonial
into deadly Russian propaganda that mobilizes and people and other racialized groups in Ukraine. This metropoles and European whiteness is also a
legitimizes the daily murder of people in Ukraine. exclusion based on racialization is also part of the defining feature of Ukraine’s colonial relationship
colonial trap of proximity to hegemonic (European or with Europe, though operating in a very different
At the same time, Ukraine (like any other country) Russian Slavic) whiteness in Ukraine and of larger fashion. In relation to Europe, Ukraine is always
is not a place free of racism, and of course, the colonial dynamics. catching up and striving to be recognized as fully
experience of Russia’s war on Ukraine is also European, but yet always remaining the “Other,”
multilayered, where those belonging to racially exploited, sexualized, romanticized, corrupt,
marginalized groups, sexualities, and genders Racialized categories and whiteness and sacrificed. Ukraine has its own history of
outside the constructed norm, and impoverished are always contextually articulated, European colonialism, where parts of Ukraine
classes are often in much more vulnerable positions. were colonized by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
For example, in the first days of Russia’s full-scale and construction of whiteness in Ukraine is also one of the places butchered the
invasion, there were numerous instances of racism most in Nazi colonial expansion in World War II,
on Ukrainian borders, where non-Ukrainian and/
Ukraine and in relation to Ukraine is where more than 1.5 million of Ukraine’s Jewish
Fig.2 or non-white people were often deliberately slowed inextricably linked to the country’s and Romani people were assassinated in the
or obstructed in their exit, or even detained. Scholar Holocaust—for example, Babyn Yar in Kyiv is the
of race in Ukraine and the Soviet Union Kimberly legacies of being positioned at the site of the largest single Holocaust massacre)—
Constructed as belonging to St. Julian Varnon has commented on these cases
intersection of multiple colonial while many other Ukrainians were killed, injured,
at length in her crucial work. Ukraine has also or exploited as forced labor, Ukrainian lands
European whiteness, Ukrainians are been complicit in policing EU borders through the regimes. were occupied. If direct colonial subjugation
both seen as pawns in western racist operation of three detention centers, open with EU
funding and as a condition for liberalizing a visa-free
by European powers is in the past for Ukraine,
following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the
geopolitical games and as complicit in regime for Ukraine. The centers have continued, to For a long time, Ukraine has been imagined as a country became inscribed in global capitalism as a
operate after Russia’s full-scale invasion. borderland between East and West. This borderland site of cheap labor force, including sex trafficking.
perpetuating white supremacy. imaginary is strongly linked to Ukraine’s perceived This can be observed in the trope of a sexualized
proximity to different colonial metropoles whether and impoverished Ukrainian woman, often the
Ukraine is not a homogeneously white country, in Russia or in Europe, where these metropoles only representation of Ukrainian women on a
When it comes to Ukraine, however, the violence though people who, within the Ukrainian context remain at one point seemingly close and yet forever western screen—see for example The Unknown
of racial capitalism does not cancel the violence of would be considered as white do constitute an unattainable. Woman (Italy, 2006), Import/Export (Austria,
a colonial invasion. In relation to Russia’s war on overwhelming majority. Still Ukraine is ethnically 2007), and Olla (France, 2019). Numerous other
Ukraine, these violent phenomena co-exist producing diverse, consisting not only of white Ukrainians, At the same time these proximities to colonial instances can be found in Andriy Pryymachenko’s
a set of global and intersecting complexities and but also of Jews, Gagauz, Roma, as well as people centers and to the hegemonic (European or Russian video collage entitled “56 Years, 89 Titles, and
articulations. What strikes me in interpreting indigenous (korinni narody) to Crimea (Crimean Slavic) whiteness operated differently from each a Single Story about Ukraine,” assembling
Ukraine’s anti-colonial resistance only as a “white Tatars, Krymchaks, and Crimean Karaites…). side of Ukrainian borders. In the Russian empire, the moments Ukraine has been mentioned in
European war” is that by homogeneously framing People from all ethnicities inhabiting Ukraine have Ukraine was called Malorossiya, “little Russia,” a Hollywood films. The video provides an interesting
Ukrainian people as white, and therefore privileged, joined and united in the anti-colonial struggle name that originated before Russia’s imperial rise glimpse into the tropes through which Ukraine
one is erasing or diminishing other very real and against the Russian aggression. At the same time, and had different meanings, but which came to has been perceived in the West; in addition to
material aspects of millions of Ukrainians which construction of whiteness and racialization within signify Ukraine as a lesser and integral part of sexualized women, there are also narratives of
are not necessarily structured by whiteness only. Ukraine operates through the systematic exclusion of “greater Russia.” The term Malorossiya is invoked by nuclear apocalypse and around Chornobyl, toxic
Indeed, many Ukrainians are living under murderous Romani Ukrainians and other racialized Ukrainians. Vladimir Putin in his imperial rhetoric, including his masculinity, and condescending humor around the
Russian occupation, others live in the threat of being Initiatives addressing these processes of racialization 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and seemingly absurdity of Ukrainians insisting on not
killed daily, and/or do not have access to basic goods in the country have been growing, especially in Ukrainians.” Russian colonial politics in relation to being confused with Russians.
because of the Russian invasion. Moreover, Russia response to anti-Roma pogroms in 2018. At the same Ukraine is based on the denial of the very existence
has been justifying its colonial invasion of Ukraine by time, the work of anti-racist activists has also been of Ukrainian culture, language, state, as Putin also
claiming that it is de-nazifying the country. For years, affected by the invasion. One of the most prominent proclaimed in his invasion speech on February 21, Perceived proximity to imperial
on both domestic and international levels, Russia defenders of the rights of refugees, migrants, 2022. Russian colonial erasure of Ukraine is therefore metropoles set several colonial
has engaged in complex propaganda campaign that stateless and displaced persons in Ukraine, and based on constructing Ukrainianness as a deviation
misleadingly constructed Ukraine as a far-right an anti-racist activist Maksym Butkevych joined from Russianness, where Ukrainians have been traps for Ukraine, including a forever
and neo-Nazi state —it’s worth noting that far-right the Ukrainian army in 2022. Several months later, either represented as caricatured and burlesque, or
parties failed to pass the electoral minimum at the he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Russian as morally corrupt by the West and brainwashed
catching up game, and gaslighting,
last parliamentary elections in Ukraine in 2019—and military and sentenced on fabricated charges by an by neo-Nazi ideologies. In the history of Russian where colonial violence can be easily
where Ukrainian democratic revolution of 2013-2014 occupation court to thirteen years in a high-security colonialism of Ukraine, Russia attempted to eliminate
against state violence and the rise of authoritarianism prison. While anti-racist activists have been laboring this “deviation” and return “the lost Slavic sibling” to obscured or underestimated by the
has been wrongly portrayed as a far-right coup. It is
therefore important to be aware where the narratives
tirelessly, larger Ukrainian society still needs to do
a lot of work to address complicity in (domestically
the “family” through politics of russification or the
murder of the hopelessly “deviated” ones, and we
perceived proximity to the colonial
of linking the support for Ukraine with perpetuating and internationally) upholding racialized categories, clearly observe both dynamics today. centers of power.

Whiteness of most Ukrainians is part of the on Ukraine and its global implications exclusively
privilege of perceived proximity to the imperial through the lens of “white European war”—as some
metropoles, whether it is the Slavic whiteness at of the members of the global anti-racist movement
different points of Russian and Soviet imperial falsely suggest—and without a thorough engagement
histories constructed in opposition to the non-Slavic with the impact of Russian imperial violence, which
Other, or it is European whiteness constructed structures life and death not only in Ukraine,
in the opposition to non-white Other in western but also in Saqartvelo (Georgia), Syria, Moldova,
colonial rhetoric. This trap is, for example, visible Chechnya, and many other places.
in the unprecedented western support to the
Ukrainian state and army, as well as Ukrainian Furthermore, Russia’s imperial violence also operates
refugees. Yet, where in the eyes of many, Ukraine as racial violence, which is clearly visible in the
seems to be showered with western aid, from the unproportionate recruitment of non-white Russian
perspective of many Ukrainians, western deliberate citizens and indigenous people into the Russian
slowness, in providing military support for example, military, as well as in the Russian colonial occupation
also indirectly contributes to the growing number of of Ukraine, where, in the settler colonial regime
people killed by Russia in Ukraine. installed in Crimea (occupied since 2014), indigenous
Crimean Tatars have been targeted through
At the same time, construction of whiteness in persecution. Therefore, when it comes to Ukraine, it
Ukraine is also conditioned by the colonial trap of is important to understand complex layers in which
proximity to the imperial metropoles, where white racial violence overlaps with the multiplicity of
Ukrainians have been always constructed as not colonial legacies through which Ukraine has been
white enough in comparison to the hegemonic shaped and the ongoing Russian colonial invasion
Russian Slavic whiteness or the hegemonic and occupation and its role in structuring conditions
European whiteness. Racial capitalism orders the of life and death for all people living in Ukraine
value of life according to whiteness. In the context today. Only then can we also start untangling
of Ukraine, the hierarchy of white supremacy and confronting the dynamic of colonial traps of
conditions the ones who are perceived as almost proximity to imperial metropoles and to hegemonic
white to strive for whiteness, where being white (European or Russian Slavic) whiteness, and the
is constructed as the only possibility to survive. Ukrainian role in upholding racial structures
This, in turn, often results in Ukrainians being of oppression inside the country and globally. Fig.3
complicit in the construction of white supremacy. Understanding the dynamics of these overlapping
This dynamic has been much critiqued with phenomena is the first step in addressing and for the Syrian Revolution—and we should add: for Darya Tsymbalyuk writes, researches, and draws. She comes
regards to Ukraine’s relation to and construction dismantling these entangled regimes of violence, other places struggling for survival, freedom, and from the south of Ukraine and in her work engages with
of Europeanness, and it can also be observed in and like with everything else, such work is only dignified life. contexts and stories of Ukraine. She was a Max Hayward
the history of Ukrainian Canadian communities on possible in solidarity and in labor with others. Many communities that have been standing in Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford
Indigenous land, for example. This dynamic and its solidarity with Ukraine have helped materially, (2022–2023), and received her PhD from the University of St
logic need to be urgently examined and dismantled, but have also shared their own knowledge of Andrews, Scotland.
if one is willing to envision inclusive imaginaries The generous support of Ukraine resistance, of surviving wars, of the difficulties of
for the post-war Ukraine which are grounded in by other people who lived through post-war reconstruction, and tactics of responding to
freedom and liberation for all people everywhere. “westsplainers.” The labor of solidarity is not easy,
violence (Taiwan, Syria, Qazaqstan, especially when someone is fighting for survival,
There is a lot of anti-racism work that has to be and when, after nine years of war, communities
done in Ukraine, and this work cannot be done
Saqartvelo, Bosnia…) opened up new of Ukraine (inside the country and abroad) are
without understanding Ukraine as a site of multiple lines of exchange and possibilities of emotionally and physically depleted, as are so many
colonialities and ways in which these different of the communities who live through violence and
colonialities have operated and continue to operate building anti-colonial non-Western oppression daily in other parts of the world.
through racialization. Moreover, the anti-racist
struggle in Ukraine and in relation to Ukraine
solidarity networks. To conclude, Ukraine’s freedom cannot come at the
cannot be separated from the existential anti-colonial expense of the lives of others, and Ukrainian people
resistance against the Russian invasion, as the illegal It also created the possibility of collective work cannot be sacrificed for the logic of opposing western Fig.1 Symbolic beheading of the Russian figure on Ukraine-Russia Friendship
imprisonment of Maksym Butkevych poignantly towards dismantling different and overlapping hypocrisy in the global anti-racist struggle. We must Monument in Kyiv on April 26, 2022. The eight meters tall statue had been erected in
reminds us. Racial capitalism is not the only structures of oppression: Russian imperialism, find a way to fight against several violent regimes, 1982 for the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union. / Photo by Studio Melange.
structure of power that organizes life in Ukraine racial capitalism, Eurocentricity. Saleh warns such as racial capitalism and Russian imperialism Fig.2 Crimea Tatar and Ukrainian flags in a street of Kyiv on April 29, 2021. The Ukrainian
flag bears the name of Bakhchisaray, a town in Crimea. / Photo by Andrii Koval.
today and that decides who is privileged and white against “Syrianizing” Ukraine and instead calls for at once and tackle their articulations with attention Fig.3 Darya Tsymbalyuk and Ahmed Abozaid at a vigil in St Andrews, Scotland on
enough to be worthy of being saved or to live. Hence “Ukrainizing Syria,” meaning that the same support and knowledge of sociocultural and sociohistorical February 28, 2022, a few days after the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of
it would be inaccurate to interpret Russia’s war mobilized for Ukraine should be also mobilized contexts. There is no justice and if not for all. ■ Ukraine. Ahmed’s sign reads “No to War No to Occupation.” / Photo by Fayaz Kacho.

A FABRICATED “ALMOST-
WHITENESS”: THE COLONIAL
RACIALIZATION OF POLYNESIANS
A CONVERSATION WITH MAILE ARVIN
QUESTIONS BY ANAÏS DUONG-PEDICA
In this contribution, Funambulist friend Anaïs Duong-Pedica

asks questions to Maile Arvin about the research she
placed on Polynesian whiteness, but
conducted for her book Possessing Polynesians: The Science constantly showing that Europeans
of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania. In it, she
shows how Polynesians have been racialized by European understood Polynesians as white in
and U.S. colonizers as being in proximity with whiteness, in some manner.
contrast with Melanesians and Micronesians in Oceania. She
argues that far from affording them political power, this racist
myth legitimized the settler colonial appropriation of land and This is from the earliest travelog writings by Cook
people. and others. But my book looks a little bit more at the
social scientists who came after, and who continued
Fig.1
ANAÏS DUONG-PEDICA: One of one of my first some of those ideas.
encounters with your work was with the text you
entitled “Polynesia is a project not a place” (2018), Another way to frame it would be to say that context. Perhaps, building on that, something that The way that settler colonialism
drawing on Martinican poet and theorist Édouard Polynesians were understood as the “noble savage.” would be useful at this stage for listeners is an
Glissant, who wrote “the West is not in the West, My book tries to understand and go into the history explanation of how indigeneity and race are not works to break Indigenous ties to land
it is a project not a place.” In it, you write about
the ways in which Polynesia was born out of the
of how that idea of Polynesians as being the “noble
savage” is tied with Polynesia being understood as
the same thing, but they, however, work together in
settler colonial contexts. So could you explain what
and within Indigenous communities is
imaginations of European imperialists. Could you “almost white” when other parts of the Pacific were you understand by indigeneity in your work, and actually by imposing ideas about race
talk about this and about the racial logic behind racialized in a mutually constitutive thing where how it is mobilized? And in the context of Hawai‘i
the division of Oceania into three areas, which are Melanesia was understood to be black. And so my more specifically, and Oceania more broadly?
onto Indigenous peoples.
Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia? work tries to understand the legacy of these ideas,
particularly in Polynesia, because I’m Hawaiian, MA: When I explain indigeneity to the students in A really prime example in the Hawaiian context
MAILE ARVIN: I think that a lot of the representations but I don’t think you can really understand the my classes, I try to get them to understand it as a is that ideas of blood quantum were introduced.
of the Pacific that white people in North America ways that Polynesians are represented as “almost social category that is like race or gender, and often Blood quantum is a Western notion of race that
or Europe are familiar with are representations white” or as “noble savages” without also seeing intersects with those other social categories, but says that Indigenous blood is diluted through racial
of Polynesia, and they have to do with a tropical that Melanesians are understood as the opposite of it’s also distinct. Indigeneity refers to the unique mixture with other races, other kinds of peoples.
island paradise, a natural, lovely vacation place. that: as the “savage savages.” And then Micronesia social category that Indigenous people inhabit. In settler colonial logic, through this measuring
My work really looks at how the history of these can go either way in the historical writings on race And, you know, indigeneity can look different of people through blood quantum, the idea is that
representations is really deep and inextricably in the Pacific. Sometimes they’re more lumped with to different Indigenous groups. But maybe just Indigenous people are destined to die out and just
tied to colonialism and imperialism in the Pacific. Polynesia and sometimes more with Melanesia, speaking for Native Hawaiians, but I think this eventually become part, in a lower position, but part
When I was doing the research for my first book, depending on the colonizer or whoever is writing, is applicable more broadly as well, indigeneity of the white race. These ideas are really harmful
I was looking at the history of scientific writing and what arguments they’re trying to make. But I is to us just how we understand our relationship to Indigenous peoples, because for Hawaiians,
about race: Western folks coming to the Pacific and think what this history shows us is that ideas about to our land. We are descendants from the land: traditionally, genealogy was a really broad
assigning Western ideas about race to Indigenous race, antiblackness, and white supremacy are all the land is literally our ancestor. Because of expansive thing. So as different kinds of people
peoples from the Pacific. really, really important and a primary logic that that, genealogy is really important to us. And started coming to Hawai‘i, having an ancestor who
goes along with settler colonialism in the Pacific because the land is our ancestor, we have certain was Chinese or white or of another race, that didn’t
context. responsibilities to take care of it, as that land takes make you any less Hawaiian at all, right? It even
As I was doing that, I kept coming care of us. So indigeneity is not the same as race, broadened Hawaiian ties to the rest of the world.
across these references to ADP: Yes, and actually, what I particularly from an Indigenous perspective, in the sense that And so it wasn’t necessarily seen as a betrayal of
appreciated in your book is how you connect white it’s really about genealogy in a broad sense, and your race or your nation, but just an expansion.
Polynesians as white, or almost white, supremacy, settler colonialism, and antiblackness in the responsibilities that you have because of your That’s really different from the ideology brought by
Oceania, and how they’re articulated in that specific genealogy. white Americans and British and other Europeans
or various conditional phrases being

Fig.2 Fig.3
to Hawai‘i, which said that if you had different and reflections on geographical regions and this happened with Polynesians and people were cataloging the size of their noses, the kinds of ear
ancestors from different races, then you were names to what you call like a scientific fascination consistently saying that Polynesian languages were lobes they have, the frizziness of their hair, and,
becoming less Hawaiian. That was and continues to for Polynesian origins, which you explain was close enough to Sanskrit that it could be argued again, taking all of these things and comparing
be a really damaging idea for Hawaiians. It’s a way nicknamed by scientists the “Polynesian problem.” that Polynesians were a distant ancestor, or the it to “Caucasian people” (the term physical
to diminish Hawaiian epistemologies, relationships Could you tell us about this literature and its Aryans were a distant ancestor of Polynesians. anthropologists were using at the time), and based
and kinships. It particularly places a certain burden legacies today? And therefore, because Europeans also shared that on how close those characteristics are, arguing that
on Native Hawaiian women. Over the years, some ancient Aryan ancestor, that there is this kinship certain races are more or less white or Caucasian.
of these ideas have been internalized by Hawaiian MA: As I mentioned earlier, when I was doing between Europeans and Polynesians, that would So this is where Polynesians are being compared to
people and, sometimes, Hawaiian women face a my research for the book, I was looking at these then get deployed by imperialists and colonizers Europeans and, again, arguments are being made
certain amount of pressure to only have children histories of science, which start in the late 1800s, to say that, “we’re family and our are coming to about how the true ancient “Polynesian type” was a
with Hawaiian men who have a certain amount of with particularly folks who are linguists or Polynesia and taking over the governments and “Caucasian type,” or “almost Caucasian.” Of course,
Hawaiian blood so that their children will have a philologists, so the people who trace genealogies installing plantations, on your lands, it’s not it’s not if you look at the actual research that these people
certain amount of Hawaiian blood so that they can of language. So the first chapter of my book looks colonialism, it’s just a family reunion,” right? were doing, the actual people that they’re looking
be recognized by the state for certain programs. All at these folks who are looking at comparing at would not be understood as white, right? But
that’s to say that places a lot of unfair pressure and Polynesian languages to Sanskrit, and trying to So it’s very convoluted, in some ways. But there, there are all these kinds of different discourses and
sometimes even sexual violence on Native Hawaiian make certain kinds of arguments about how close there are people like Edward Tregear in the New convoluted logics that these scientists are using to
women, in particular. So these ideas about race or far Polynesians are to Sanskrit. This was all Zealand context who wrote a book called The Aryan make this argument that Polynesians are somehow
that go along with settler colonialism are also very being couched in terms of Aryanism. The original Maori (1885), and that was literally his argument: conditionally white. And again, that logic has been
heteropatriarchal which, again, was not necessarily discourses about Aryanism were fairly literal in that the British and the Māori people are distant used not to extend the privileges of whiteness to
how Hawaiians thought about these things before the sense that these white linguists and philologists long lost relatives, and that it’s just destiny for the Polynesians, but to justify white settler colonialism
colonialism. were seeing that the Aryans were this ancient race British to come to Aotearoa/New Zealand and take in Polynesia.
from northern India. In their view, Europeans were it over and lift up their little Māori brothers. As
ADP: In your book there’s a lot of this idea of this distantly descended from these Aryans, who were you can hear, it’s a very paternalistic discourse. Then, in my third chapter, I look more at sociology
tragic loss of authenticity and purity, through different from modern Indian people somehow. Then following from that into more around the and sociological studies that were being conducted
this concept of blood quantum. You analyze the These philologists would compare different turn of the century, there comes the era of physical in Hawai‘i, more in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
science behind this logic of the Polynesian race languages back to Sanskrit and, based on their anthropology and eugenics. At that period, there These studies were a lot about racial mixture—
as “almost white” and you explore how in the 19th proximity to Sanskrit, would say that certain races were a lot of physical anthropologists traveling this so-called discourse of racial mixture. There
century, there was a shift in Western writing about were more or less white or Caucasian or Aryan. from the U.S. and Europe to the Pacific and doing were all these ideas that Hawai‘i in particular, was
the Pacific from “first contact” travel narratives This happened with a lot of different races but a lot of detailed measurements of people’s heads, this magical, racial melting pot that the Chicago

school of sociology really represented as the U.S. troops who were stationed in Hawai‘i during Polynesians’ supposed proximity to whiteness. Could roots of that racism, but I think one of them is this
solution to a lot of the race problems that were World War Two and after. What I’m arguing about you talk more about these distinct positions and history of this idea imposed on the Pacific that
really evident in the continental U.S.. And so these that figure is that by seeing that these Hawaiian what was at stake in these discourses based on the Polynesians are whiter and better than Melanesians
white sociologists who came to Hawai‘i would do women are mixed-race, it makes them preserve background of the scientists taking part in them? and Micronesians. And I think if we’re better able to
interviews with mixed-race people, and based on some of the exotic “noble savage” ideas about see where these ideas come from, and how and why
their interpretation of the surveys would say “oh, Hawaiians, but also makes them more familiar and MA: I look at two main Polynesian people who were they’ve been internalized, then hopefully, we can
there’s no racial prejudice here in Hawai‘i.” But more available to white settlers and men. also engaging with some of these discourses at the understand these ideas as a really central part of
when I read the surveys, I argued that there’s time. One is King Kalākaua who had this scientific decolonization more broadly.
actually a lot of evidence of racism in the surveys, Throughout the book, I talk about this logic of society called the Hale Nauā. With that society, he
including internalized racism, because a lot of the possession through whiteness, which is just another was engaging, keeping up on some of these studies ADP: Perhaps we can come back to this idea of
interviews that the sociologists were doing were way of saying that, again, there are ways through about the Polynesian race, and sometimes trying to Melanesian and Micronesian people being family
with mixed-race Chinese and Hawaiian people. which white settlers extend this very conditional see how they would fit with Hawaiian genealogies with Polynesians, and that’s the way a lot of people
The majority of the interviews are really saying whiteness to Polynesian people. and Hawaiian ideas about race, and sometimes in the Pacific see this as well. In the second part of
“oh, Hawaiians are bad,” “Hawaiians are stupid trying to use them for the benefit of the Hawaiian your book, you show how the logic of possession
or backwards,” “they’re criminals.” These are nation in ways that would maybe bolster ideas that through whiteness continues to inform the way
Hawaiian people saying this about the Hawaiian This is never a logic that actually the Hawaiian Kingdom was civilized and modern, white Americans see and value Native Hawaiians
people. But by contrast, they see their Chinese includes or extends the privileges of and maybe white to some extent. Another figure and other Indigenous Pacific Islanders today.
heritage as more positive and more industrious, that I look at is Te Rangihīroa, who was a Māori But most importantly, you also demonstrate how
more fitting into the ideas of the “American whiteness to Polynesian people, but anthropologist, among many other amazing things. Indigenous Pacific Islanders resist these settler
dream.” So with the racial melting pot idea, the And he also wrote a couple of books that were colonial discourses and use strategies against
idea is that Hawaiians will blend into whiteness,
it underwrites this logic that white really engaging with this literature on the so-called the logic of possession through whiteness in
and again, this is justifying and naturalizing U.S. people have a natural claim to land “Polynesian problem” or the origins of Polynesians. various fields. And you do so by coining the term
control of Hawai‘i, and imposing white supremacy He ultimately actually agrees with a lot of the white “regenerative refusals.” Could you give us some
on Hawai‘i, even if white people have never been and other resources, and even people social scientists and argues that Polynesians did contemporary examples of this and tell us more
the majority in Hawai‘i, and still are not. Yet,
white people still control a lot more wealth and
and in this case, especially mixed- come from somewhere in Asia, but that they didn’t
so-call mix with Melanesian people or Micronesian
about what you mean by “regenerative refusals,”
and how they help foreground radically decolonial
power in Hawai‘i than Native Hawaiian people. So race Hawaiian women. people, and therefore, Polynesians are a really oceanic futures?
what I’m saying is that these ideas about the racial distinct race that is ultimately whiter and implicitly
melting pot were one way that white supremacy or explicitly better than Melanesian people and MA: In that second part of the book, I try to show
flourished in Hawai‘i, even as white people have They all become natural possessions of whiteness. Micronesian people. different examples of the legacies of these ideas as
never actually outnumbered Hawaiian people. Because through this convoluted social scientific well as how Native Hawaiians and other Polynesian
logic about the origins of Polynesia somehow in I raise these things not to say “Oh, Te Rangihīroa people are grappling with these legacies today. I
ADP: Continuing on this idea of the melting pot ideal Northern India, having this ancient relationship to was so colonized or so wrong,” although, I do think look at it in a couple of different areas, including
or this really positive perception of racial hybridity Europeans, then there’s this idea that “Oh, white it’s important to critique the legacies of those ideas legal forms of recognition and legal debates over
in Hawai‘i, could you tell us a little bit more about people are indigenous to Polynesia, too, right?” And and the ways that they’ve been internalized. This blood quantum, also looking at contemporary
the sexual and racial politics that are at play? so by colonizing Polynesia, they’re just reclaiming is to point out that these ideas are actually not our genomic studies, where we see again largely white
Earlier you talked about this pressure that it puts on what was always their birthright. This applies to ideas. Hawaiians and other Polynesians have really or non-Polynesian scientists trying to determine
Native Hawaiian women, this idea of this tragic loss land and water in Polynesia, which gets taken up different ideas about our genealogies and our the exact origins of the Polynesian race, but now
of authenticity, but also at some point in your book to build these large scale sugar plantations and, relationships, which often emphasize that we are through using more genomic technologies. I then
you write about the figure of the hybrid Hawaiian later, pineapple plantations. But I also think that the family with Melanesian people and Micronesian also look at our contemporary Indigenous artists
girl. And so can you talk to us about this figure in same logic is really evident in the blood quantum people. But I think if you can see the writings who engage with a lot of these ideas.
relation to this “ethnic rainbow,” and how the hybrid discourses, or these discourses about racial mixture, of Kalākaua and Te Rangihīroa in this larger
Hawaiian girl is also enabled by what you call this where Hawaiian bodies, especially female-identified context of this discourse about Polynesians being
settler logic of possession through whiteness? bodies, are also seen as natural possessions of white, it makes sense that they were trying to get That idea of “regenerative refusal,”
whiteness. a handle on this discourse and see how it might in my usage, came out of seeing
MA: Absolutely. In the chapter in which I talked be used to bolster confidence and empowerment
about those sociological interviews that I was just ADP: Something else I wanted to talk about is the fact for Polynesian people. Again, it’s not to critique how often Indigenous people’s
mentioning, I also just talk about this figure that that it’s very clear that you look at different groups Kalākaua and Te Rangihīroa, but to show how they
emerges around this time, which I argue is partly of scientists. On the one hand, there are the white were honestly trying to bolster their communities
engagement with things is often
enabled by these sociological discourses about the settler scientists who you’ve talked about in this and their nations in this colonial time. I think it’s dismissed as hopelessly futile.
melting pot, which is the half Hawaiian, or in some interview already, and on the other, there are also important that we, today, are able to see how much
way, mixed-race Hawaiian woman, which becomes Polynesian scientists with different positionalities we’ve internalized some of those ideas ourselves
very emblematic in many arenas, including tourism. than those settler scientists, and also different still, and are able to do it differently. So in Hawai‘i, For example, in 2014, the Department of Interior
But especially in the 1940s, there’s a lot of photos political agendas and purposes than their white it’s really evident that there is a lot of racism of the U.S. Federal Government came to Hawai‘i to
published in the newspapers of so-called half or colleagues, but who were nonetheless involved in against Micronesian people, including sometimes hold hearings about so-called federal recognition
mixed-race Hawaiian women performing for the the discourses of Polynesian exceptionalism, and from Hawaiian people. And there might be many of Native Hawaiians, which has a very long

and convoluted history. But to put it briefly, the thought our relationships were to each other and
Department of Interior wanted to make Native what nation we wanted, or how we wanted to be
Hawaiians into a status that would be equal to recognized, or how we could recognize each other.
a federally recognized Native American tribe. So the regenerative refusal idea is really just trying
Native Hawaiians have never had that because to point out just how productive sometimes saying
the history of colonialism in Hawai‘i is related, but “no” is. Even though I think, in a lot of mainstream
also distinct to colonialism that has impacted and discourse, there’s a lot of dismissal of refusal as
continues to impact Native Americans. So in 2014, being difficult to work with. So I talk about those
the Department of Interior came to Hawai‘i, and hearings and that example in the book; also in
held these hearings about “What are Hawaiian terms of genomic science. There’s also a refusal
communities thoughts about being federally at certain points by Hawaiians to participate in
recognized?” Meeting after meeting on all of the genomic studies or to agree to genetically modify
islands, in different locations, and consistently, kalo or taro, which is our staple plant and staple
probably at least like 90% of all of the people who food. And, again, trying to point out how a lot of
spoke at these meetings said: “We don’t want to be how that has been represented by the mainstream
recognized by the federal government as Native has been like “Oh, Hawaiians just don’t know what’s
people under the Department of Interior, please send best for them, or they’re so difficult,” but I’m trying
Fig.5
the Department of State to come talk to us about to show, in the context of these longer histories
restoring our independence as an independent of colonialism, just how powerful and important
country.” And also really interestingly, in the those refusals can be, even if it does not appear
hearings, there was a lot of pushback against necessarily, to outsiders, that something productive
ideas about blood quantum as well. The way that is happening, because they’re shutting down the
these hearings and Hawaiian responses were settler project. But the idea of regenerative refusals Fig.4
portrayed in the local media at the time, with a lot is to really see those moments as actually really
about “Oh, Hawaiians are just so rude or being so producing something different decolonial that is
mean to these Department of Interior people. The really essential for our communities. ■
Department of Interior people are just trying to
help, but Hawaiians are so backwards and hopeless. Maile Arvin is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) feminist
They’re rejecting this help…” scholar, and an associate professor of History and Gender
Studies at the University of Utah. She is also the director of
So the idea I was trying to capture with Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Utah, as well as
regenerative refusals is just that all of those people the co-host and co-producer (with Angela Robinson) of a
who spoke at those hearings, who said “no” to this podcast called Relations of Salt and Stars. Her first book,
offer from the Department of Interior, a lot of those Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Following figures from Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler
refusals were being dismissed by mainstream Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, was published with Duke Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, Duke University Press (2019).
Fig.1 Plaster casts of Harriet Beamer, James Apo, Moses Kamakawiwoole, made
media, but I think what they were doing was University Press in 2019.
by George Usborne under the direction of Louis R. Sullivan in 1920–21. Three of
something really radical and regenerative. Even fifty-four plaster casts prepared for the Second International Congress of Eugenics
as eventually the Department of Interior did pass Anaïs Duong-Pedica is a white-Vietnamese PhD researcher in October 1921. / Bishop Museum Ethnology Collections, in Honolulu.
the rule that recognized Hawaiians in some way. from Kanaky-New Caledonia (KNC) temporarily based in Fig.2 “New Race Growing Up in the Pacific,” published in the Oakland Tribune
But what I think came out of those hearings was Finland. Her thesis is on the politics of mixed-race identity and newspaper in 1930.
Fig.3 “A century of change in Hawaii’s population,” in the Cold Spring Harbor
something bigger and more exciting and not related settler colonialism in KNC. She currently teaches on whiteness, American Eugenics Movement archive (circa 1922).
to the Department of Interior at all. As people spoke, womanhood and feminism and participates in anti-racist and Fig.4 Anaïs Duong-Pedica’s copy of Maile Arvin’s book, accompanied with a few
it was a chance for Hawaiians to say what we anti-colonial interventions in/from Finland. other books and items from Oceania (2023).

THE FUNAMBULIST
ISSUE N°48 JULY – AUGUST 2023 NEXT ISSUE N°49 SEP – OCT 2023
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) SCHOOLS OF THE REVOLUTION
CO-EDITED WITH SÓNIA VAZ BORGES
FUNAMBULIST Contributors: Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Camille Bacon, Sabrina Citra,

fu·nam·bu·list (fyo͝ o-năm′byə-lĭst) Amarachi Iheke, Keto Gorgadze, Mitchel Joffe Hunter, Margareta
noun. One who performs on a tightrope or a slack rope. Matache, Kasia Narkowicz, Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa, Darya
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THE FUNAMBULIST

Politics of Space and Bodies

N°48 FIFTY SHADES

THINKING AGAINST THE

OF WHITE(NESS) U.S.-CENTRIC CONCEPTION

One friend has been enriching this issue, every

The final two weeks of putting this issue together

N°48 my visits there is incredibly important to me. This

OF WHITE(NESS) writers and activists, such as Budour Hassan,

20. 60. .72

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Carving process of elombe 016 (2023)./ Courtesy of ibiyanε

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Roma activists protesting in front of the Russian embassy

designated), claiming to be unaffected by fourteen

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grandmother, Ella Lurie (nee Gutman) stayed behind

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60 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) Fig.1

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In this contribution, Funambulist friend Anaïs Duong-Pedica

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FUNAMBULIST Contributors: Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Camille Bacon, Sabrina Citra,

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