The Call Is Coming from Inside the House: Researching Race After Yugoslavia in ‘Post-post-Racial’ Times

This chapter sets efforts to research race in the (post-)Yugoslav region in the context of what Kimberlé Crenshaw has termed today’s ‘post-post-racial’ times, in which progressives who might have believed that global society was on an inevitable course towards overcoming racism have now had to confront its open resurgence. From the perspectives of Crenshaw and other critical race scholars whose work has opened up new possibilities to understand south-east Europe within the global politics of race, however, the persistence of structural racism as a historical legacy of colonialism and the enslavement of Africans means that the ‘post-racial’ moment was already an illusion. Movements to ‘decolonise the university’ and its knowledge production, which have significantly influenced my own working environment as a white anglophone scholar of south-east Europe in the UK, share this structural perspective. The chapter explains the significance of these movements, and struggles in related disciplines to confront sympathies with white supremacism, for researching race after Yugoslavia in a moment where Islamophobic narratives justifying violence against Muslims in the region have become points of identification for the far right worldwide.