For all its history of intersecting empires, the Balkans has been rarely framed as a global site of race and coloniality. This, as Piro Rexhepi argues in White Enclosures is not surprising, given the perception of the Balkans as colorblind and raceless, a project that spans post-Ottoman racial formations, transverses Socialist modernity and is negotiated anew in the process of postsocialist Euro-Atlantic integration. Connecting severed colonial histories from the vantage point of body politic, Rexhepi turns to the borderland zones of the Balkans to trace past and present geopolitical attempts of walling whiteness. From efforts to straighten the sexualities of post-Ottoman Muslim subjects, to Yugoslav nonaligned solidarities between Muslims of the second and third world, to Roma displacement and contemporary emergence of refugee carceral technologies along the Balkan Route, Rexhepi points not only to the epistemic erasures that maintain the fantasy of whiteness but also to the disruption emanating from the solidarities between queer- and transpeople that fold the Balkans back into global efforts to resist the politics of racial capitalism.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Nonaligned Muslims in the Margins of Socialism: The Islamic Revolution in Yugoslavia 43
2. Historicizing Enclosure: Refashioned Colonial Continuities as European Cultural Legacy 70
3. Enclosure Sovereignties: Saving Missions and Supervised Self-Determination 90
4. (Dis)Embodying Enclosure: Of Straightened Muslim Men and Secular Masculinities 107
5. Enclosure Demographics: Reproductive Racism, Displacement, and Resistance 128
Afterword 151
Notes 157
References 161
Index 181