The global contours of race and histories of racialisation in the East of Europe

In this book review, Aleksandra Lewicki engages with Anca Parvulescu’s and Manuela Boatcā’s ‘Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania across Empires’ to extract key lessons for global debates about the contours of race and racism from their work. Regions in the east of Europe are often sidelined in scholarly discussions about race-making, or regional histories of racialisation are masked with ascriptions of backwardness, tribalism or ‘ethnic conflict’. Instead, Parvulescu’s and Boatcā’s monograph illustrates how histories of racialisation in Transylvania mirror some of the manifestations of racism that have been documented in other parts of the world but also help to develop our understanding of how racialisation is the product of distinctive structural developments – including inter-imperial and inter-regional dynamics, but also the globalization of capitalist extractivism. Lewicki appeals to scholars in Critical Racial Studies to reflect on the implications of the histories of racism in the east of Europe to our understanding of race-making more generally.