White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route

"White Enclosures brings the Balkan Route into the global histories of race and coloniality that contribute to the ongoing georacial politics of a world white enclosure. Piro Rexhepi explores how the fear of the extinction of the white body has generatedan entire economy of increasingly more sophisticated forms of surveillance, segregation, incarceration, and encampment of racialized bodies at the borderlands in Europe and the United States. Rexhepi focuses particularly around the borderlands of the Euro-Atlantic community. In these buffer zones that encircle the inner core of the transatlantic alliance, new politics of anti-mixing and race-making have consolidated neo-fascist, white supremacist regimes. For the racialized Roma and Muslim people living along the Balkan borderlands, the reemergence of whitening through purging is understood not as an exception of post-socialist neoliberal reforms, but as protracted colonial/modern constellations of geopolitical white supremacy"--
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. 
Piro Rexhepi explores the overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes in the Balkans that are designed to protect whiteness and exclude Muslim, Roma, and migrant communities.