Book Discussion: Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife, by Chelsi West Ohueri, and Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe, by Elana Resnick

Session Submission Type: Book Discussion Roundtable

Brief Description

Through a discussion of two new books, this roundtable looks at race and racial logics—their ongoing formation, implementation, and negotiation—in Albania and Bulgaria as a way to better understand global systems of racialization and social hierarchy.
In Encountering Race, Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often limited to Western processes of modernity that exclude Eastern Europe, racialization processes are global, and the ethnography of everyday Albanian socialities makes visible how race operates. Historical and political science frameworks prevail in the study of post-Cold War East European societies, yet as West Ohueri shows, anthropological and ethnographic knowledge can equip scholars to ask questions that they might otherwise not consider, illustrating how racialization is ongoing and enduring in a period that she terms the communist afterlife.
Elana Resnick’s book, Refusing Sustainability, presents a new take on environmental “sustainability” logics, Europeanization, and waste itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental reforms and processes of racialization. In Bulgaria, Romani women comprise the bulk of the country's waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially disposable. Without their labor, however, the country cannot meet the sustainability targets required by the European Union. Elana Resnick analyzes the power hierarchies at play in both waste management and “liberal” European expansion projects. Simultaneously, she examines how communities racialized as discardable push back against a system that both relies on and excludes them.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Azra Hromadžić, Syracuse U

Roundtable Speakers

• Manuela Boatca, U of Freiburg (Germany)

• Ioanida Costache, Stanford U

• Chelsi West Ohueri, U of Texas at Austin

• Elana Resnick, UC Santa Barbara

• Sunnie Trine'e Rucker-Chang, Ohio State U