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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes a critical ethnographic study into the reconfiguration of whiteness and racism following the emergent South and Southeast Asian immigration to Romania and Eastern Europe, a country and respectively a region long imagined as ‘raceless’ or even 'anti-colonial'.

Paper long abstract

This paper proposes a critical ethnographic study into the reconfiguration of whiteness and racism following the emergent South/east Asian immigration to Romania and Eastern Europe (EE), a country and respectively a region long imagined as ‘raceless’, even anti-colonial by virtue of its socialist ties with decolonizing countries. I interrogate how privilege, belonging, and racial categories are reordered as a result of racialized immigration in a statistically ‘white’ country that has a significant diaspora who is seen as 'white-but-not-quite' (Kalmar 2022) for often providing cheap and flexible labor to the wealthier countries of the European Union. There are significant overlaps but also racial frictions and gaps between the experiences of violence of Europeanization and labour migration of EE migrants in Western Europe and SE Asian migrants in EE. I am raising the provocative question of what does the arrival of bodies that seem ‘out of place’ (Puwar 2004) do to the ‘peripheral’ whiteness of EE, by investigating how Asian migration in Romania is reshaping racial hierarchies, identities and ideas. The affective encounters between migrants, Romanian diasporic visitors, and Romanian residents of different ethnicities deserve special attention. The research project focuses on hospitality and tourism during the summer months when Romanian diaspora visit ‘home’, creating intensified racialized dynamics in the service sector. What struggles around racialization become articulated in these encounters? What discourses about race, hierarchies, belonging, or social status become consolidated? The paper situates ‘non-racial’ EE as a key location for theorizing the ways ‘race’ hierarchizes people in contemporary Europe.