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- Convenors:
-
Stephanie Rudwick
(University Of Hradec Kralove)
Bolaji Balogun (University of Sheffield, UK)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S85
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel is conceptualised as a multidisciplinary platform which addresses questions of racial and linguistic belonging among African people and Afropeans in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The objective is to tease out a nuanced understanding of race, whiteness, language, and migration.
Long Abstract:
Language and race are intertwined in Western thought and racialized language is not only historically and ideologically constructed but it is also deeply embedded in political structures. This panel focuses on constructions of 'blackness' vis-a-vis 'whiteness' and their intersecting nature with language in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Whilst scholarly attention on Black Europe tends to focus predominantly on Western Europe, this panel expands on the growing decolonial scholarship on the experiences of citizenship, belonging and racialisation of African people and Black Europeans in understudied locations. In doing so, the panel provides a distinctive focus on Black Eastern Europeans, as part of the collective Afropean experience. It addresses forms of the production of difference through race and language and aims to interrogate how they are co-constituted in various national identity politics. It provides a multidisciplinary platform and aims to offer intersectional perspectives between social, historical, anthropological, and linguistic studies.
Our objective is to tease out a nuanced understanding of race, whiteness, language, and migration in CEE. The panel will convey critical engagement with multiple social factors and offer a comprehensive, balanced, and global view, whilst focussing on a diverse range of socio-cultural issues across CEE. With the above context in mind, we welcome contributions that provide insights into the complex processes of racial and linguistic forms of 'othering' from an empirical perspective. Of a particular interest will be a race-language conscious social analysis, the broader interdisciplinary debates on Black Europe and the very particular case of Black people in CEE
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Bolaji Balogun (University of Sheffield, UK)
Paper short abstract:
This talk sets out the foundational ideas about race and colonialism in Poland and relates them to the global manifestations that influenced them.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on race and colonialism, the talk indicates a shift in global racial discourse – an understanding of the specificity of Polish racism that can transform and add to our understanding of race in the West. In doing so, the talk offers a brief theoretical and historical context of race-making in the so-called ‘peripheral sphere’, whilst outlining the ways in which race and colonialism have been explicitly framed in early modern Poland and its empire in the Atlantic world. To do this effectively, I draw on archival resources - manuscripts, documents, and records - from Poland and other parts of Europe to theorize what I identify as the three key manifestations of race and colonialism in Poland, namely Colonial global economy; Colonization; and Eugenics. These key manifestations allow me to recall discussions on race and colonialism from the margin to the centre in order to redirect them beyond the prevailing accounts of race and colonialism in the West. The talk excavates the veiled racialized and colonial structures within the Polish histories to remap the politics of race-making in Europe.
Martin Schmiedl (Mendel University in Brno) Nsama Jonathan Simuziya (University of Hradec Kralove)
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents data based on interviews with Africans living in Czechia and evaluates their feeling of safety, unsettledness, unsafety in relation to education, work opportunities or racism in Czechia. Findings show a position of ambiguity in a country which is hegemonically white.
Paper long abstract:
Africans have been living in Czechia for decades and although there is a substantial history of relations between African countries and Czechoslovakia/Czechia, the community of Africans in Czechia is still rather small. The significance of this community in Czechia was recently highlighted by the global movement dubbed, Black Lives Matter, but unfortunately there were rather minor responses from Czech politicians and Czech society more generally.
As part of a broader project that investigates African identities in Czechia, we present data collected through semi-structured interviews with Africans living in the country. The paper aims to evaluate the extent to which the Africans in Czechia feel (un)safe or (un)settle in the country, particularly in terms of race relations, education, and work opportunities.
The findings suggest that Africans find themselves in a dilemma: in their home countries, insecurity, in broader terms, has made them to Czechia, yet this supposedly safe alternative has not particularly welcomed them. Africans find themselves being met with racist undertones as aliens and immigrants who can never be Czech on account of their race or language. Consequently, Africans are in a quandary whereby on the one hand, they feel that it is hard to stay (due to racist attitudes), and on the other hand, they feel that it is hard to leave to their home countries.
Jochen Lingelbach (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
Today’s unequal treatment of Black and white refugees in Europe is mirrored by the privileged treatment of European war refugees in the British colonies in Africa. This paper focuses on the forgotten history of privileged refugees and the influence of race on the unequal treatment of refugees.
Paper long abstract:
Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine forced millions to flee, Poland has become a generous host to some 1.4 million of them. At the same time, the right-wing government is building a massive border wall to keep out non-Ukrainian refugees. Black students fleeing from Ukraine and being denied entry at the border while white Ukrainians were welcomed exposed this unequal treatment of refugees. It makes plain obvious that race, and not only the “well-founded fear of being persecuted” (UNHCR 1951), does play a role in the actual treatment of refugees – in Central and Eastern Europe as elsewhere in the Global North. “Refugeeness” is not only unsettling the order of nation-states (Malkki 1995), but it is also internally hierarchized along lines of race, class, gender, nationality and religion.
In this paper, I argue that this inequality has a long history and functions vice versa too. When thousands of Europeans fled to Africa during the Second World War (mainly from Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia) the hosting British colonial states treated them preferably. Based on extensive research in European, African and UN archives it becomes apparent that constructions of race were relational and context-specific. Due to the refugees’ whiteness and their status as co-belligerents, they lived in well-supplied refugee camps scattered throughout the British Empire and beyond (Lingelbach 2020; 2022). And while British settlers and administrators regarded the Eastern Europeans’ whiteness with suspicion they still included them in white society, especially in opposition to the Black majority population. Acknowledging this long-standing inequality should serve as a starting point for a future vision where refugees are treated equally no matter where they come from.
Nicola Raúl (University Palacky, Olomouc)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the changes in the dynamics of social and political representation of a group of Angolan students who came to Czechoslovakia during the normalization period.The focus is on language as a factor in the construction of otherness,(in)acceptance and narratively constructed identity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, based on the analysis of biographical interviews, focuses on the changes in the dynamics of social and political representation of a group of Angolan students who came to Czechoslovakia during the normalization period for exchange study programs within the framework of international agreements on scientific and technical cooperation.The focus is primarily on language and from Czech society as a factor in the construction of otherness, (in)acceptance, but also narratively constructed individual and collective identity of the Angolans in a different socio-cultural environment.The integration barriers that the Angolan students encountered and had to overcome are also highlighted.Upon arrival in the Czechoslovakia, the Angolans were not proficient in Czech language, could not know their way in the new environment and were dependent on scholarship financial support. They were also carriers of different linguistic, religious and cultural forms of knowledge, very few of which were appreciated by the majority in the new society.The pressure from Czech society created by the contact of Angolans with the majority society is a central motif that led to a rethinking of previous customs, meanings and ways of life became one of the central forces influencing the (re)formation of identity throughout their lives.The Czech language became an important element in the (re)construction of cultural identity and influenced a variety of discursive and social practices through which they continue to form, maintain and reproduce their identity,which they have used and continue to use in social interactions narratively in a form of communicative memory.