THE FUNAMBULIST

Politics of Space and Bodies

N°48 FIFTY SHADES

July — August 2023

THINKING AGAINST THE

OF WHITE(NESS) U.S.-CENTRIC CONCEPTION

OF RACIALIZATION
 THE FUNAMBULIST BEHIND
THE SCENES
There would be many things to add here, in
particular the ramping up of a plurilingual
infrastructure that will allow us to publish the
magazine in other languages than English in the
Dear subscribers, dear readers, future (starting with French for our 50th issue), but
I’ll leave it at that! Shivangi Mariam and I wish you
I hope that you are all well, as we enter the solsticial a beautiful summer/winter from the office!
part of the year. I’m glad that you opened this issue,
which joins some others in the list of editions we’ve Léopold Lambert
done that have the ambition to be quite precise in Paris, on June 9, 2023
the editorial argument they’re trying to articulate.
Those are always harder to put together, but as
we’re almost reaching the number of 50 issues, I
can tell you that they are also more satisfying for
me as their editor!

One friend has been enriching this issue, every

step of the way, from the choice of some of the
contributors to the careful re-reading of my
introduction and even participating in interviewing
Maile Arvin (pages 72–79). This friend is Anaïs
Duong-Pedica and I am extremely grateful to her
for this, and for our many weekly conversations that
have an impact on the magazine’s contact.

The final two weeks of putting this issue together

occurred right after a quick visit to Venice and a
longer one in Palestine. I had the chance to see
with my own eyes the installation that Venice
Architecture Biennale 2023 chief curator Lesley
Lokko had generously commissioned to us. The
display features a copy of all The Funambulist
publications (the 2013–2015 “Pamphlets” and
“Volumes,” The Funambulist by its Readers book,
and the 47 first issues of the magazine) as well
as hand-written notes (big thanks to Elise Misao
Hunchuck!) providing some “behind-the-scenes” THE ISSUE’S
snippets to visitors. This was also the opportunity
to gather in one place with many of the amazing
COVER EXPLAINED
participants of this exhibition, fourteen of whom are This beautiful piece by Polish-Roma artist
Funambulist contributors (special shoutout to our Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a part of the Out Of
advisory board member Margarida Waco who was Egypt (Wyjście z Egiptu) series (2021). This work
commissioned her own installation). constitutes a reflection on the representation
of Romani people in art, reinterpreting more
As for Palestine, as many of you know, each of particularly 17th century etchings by French

N°48 my visits there is incredibly important to me. This

time around, I went as a support to the staff of the
Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest). We spent a
printmaker Jacques Callot entitled “Les Bohémiens”
(The G*psies) or “La vie des Egyptiens” (Life of
the Egyptians). Four more artworks by Małgorzata

FIFTY SHADES beautifully rich time together and with guests from
Nigeria, Kashmir, Ethiopia, Turtle Island, South
Africa, Egypt..., meeting with incredible Palestinian
aka Gosia are visible in this issue, in dialog with
Margareta Matache’s text (pages 38–45).

OF WHITE(NESS) writers and activists, such as Budour Hassan,

THINKING AGAINST THE U.S.-CENTRIC
CONCEPTION OF RACIALIZATION
Asmaa Azaizeh, Beesan Ramadan, Mahmoud
Jiddah, Ahed Tamimi and her parents, Mohammed
El Kurd, Soheir Assad, Sahar Qawasmeh, Umar al-
Ghubari... in Ramallah, Nabi Saleh, Hebron, Lydd,
Haifa, and Jerusalem-Al Quds.
I first encountered her work thanks to Polish
Parisian curator Joanna Warsza—I’m grateful to
her for putting us in relation—who commissioned
Gosia to create twelve monumental works for
the entirety of Poland’s pavilion at the Venice Art
Biennale 2022.
COVER.
OUT OF EGYPT (WYJŚCIE Z EGIPTU)
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
6.
ibiyanε: PHYSICAL POETRY AND
SPELLS FOR SUSTENANCE
Camille Bacon
10.
GESTURE, MEMORY, TRAUMA,
CENSORSHIP: A PERSONAL
RECKONING WITH
INDONESIA’S HISTORIES
Sabrina Citra
14.
WE THE VANQUISHED:
ON BIAFRA, THE NIGERIAN
POSTCOLONY, AND THE NEED
FOR RADICAL SOLIDARITIES
Amarachi Iheke
32.
WHITE SKIN, WHITE MASKS:
ASHKENAZI JEWS IN
SOUTHERN AFRICA
Mitchel Joffe Hunter
38.
GADJONESS: AN UNCOUNTED
SHADE OF WHITENESS
Margareta Matache
Artworks by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
46.
ON PERIPHERAL WHITENESS
AND BEING CENTRAL
EASTERN EUROPEAN .52
Kasia Narkowicz 6.
52.
MESTIZAJE: WHEN THE SHADES
DISSIMULATE WHITENESS
A conversation with Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

20. 60. .72

FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS): SELF-PORTRAITS
INTRODUCTION Julie Dowling
Léopold Lambert
66. 46.
24. UKRAINE AND THE TRAPS OF
HAVE CAUCASIANS EVER BEEN PROXIMITY TO EUROPEAN AND COVER. .66
WHITE? RUSSIAN COLONIALISM RUSSIAN SLAVIC WHITENESS
AND THE MACHINERY OF Darya Tsymbalyuk 38.
RACIALIZATION
Keto Gorgadze 72.
A FABRICATED “ALMOST
WHITENESS”: THE COLONIAL
RACIALIZATION OF POLYNESIANS
A conversation with Maile Arvin
Questions by Anaïs Duong-Pedica 14.
.10
20.
.24

.32 60.

2 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48

Nº48 NEWS FROM
THE FRONTS

Carving process of elombe 016 (2023)./ Courtesy of ibiyanε

4 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 5
 ibiyanε: PHYSICAL POETRY AND
SPELLS FOR SUSTENANCE
CAMILLE BACON
This text, by Camille Bacon, is a rare feature on a design
practice in the pages of The Funambulist. The creative spirit
through which Martinique-based studio ibiyanε engages with
its work will, however, be familiar to our readers, as it draws
from Black radical imagination and a commitment to the notion
of relationality between the material, the symbolic, the ritual,
the oniric, the corporeal, and the object’s autonomy…
Somatic practitioner Prentis Hemphill notes that “a
measure of liberation will be found in our capacity
for intimacy.” If we consider the design industry’s
infamous exaltation of ostensible “individual”
genius and the Western genealogy from which
such an ideology emerged, we may also consider
the work of ibiyanε—a design studio comprised of
Tania Doumbe Fines and Elodie Dérond—and their
commitment to thinking and making together as
an embodiment of the “capacity for intimacy” that
Hemphill speaks of. In the world of ibiyanε, the
material and spiritual environment serves as a
guide, collective rest is a requisite part of the fecund
soil of a life well lived, sanctuaries for gathering
are plentifully available and dutifully maintained,
and we all possess a place to wander and lift our
burdens up to the sky. Materialized from their
collective sensibilities is an imagined land where
dreamers prevail.
ibiyanε was seeded in Montreal in 2020, when
the two made their first pieces of what they then
understood as “sculptural furniture,” thereby
highlighting the work’s functional and aesthetic
prowess. The resulting forms were shown in two
exhibitions: Black Experience isn’t a Spectacle
(curated by Venessa Appiah of afila.si) and
Wet Metal (organized by Éditions 8888). After
leaving Montreal in the Winter of 2020, the pair
now dwell in Dérond’s rapturous homeland of
Martinique and have since shown in New York,
Miami, and now, Milan.
Across nearly three years of
sustained co-dreaming, Fines and
Dérond have developed a sincere
cadence of creative exchange and
6 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
have recently come to understand
their work as both cartographical
and poetic.
After drawing from Black Quantum Futurism as
well as several other texts that ground their haptic
methodology in the crucible of the Black radical
imagination, ibiyanε think of their artworks as
maps that aid both themselves and their audience
in imagining and actualizing material conditions,
ideological frameworks and spells for sustenance
that extend the viability of the breath that circulates
within and between all life forms.
With this in mind, the nomer “ibiyanε,” which
is derived from the Batanga word “to know one
another,” succinctly articulates one of the pair’s
core concerns: that their work contributes to the
actualization of a lived reality in which all living
beings are adequately resourced and cared for.
To this end, their work has, from the outset, been
deeply influenced by their respective backgrounds
Fig.1 Fig.2
and heritage as people of African descent. As
Dérond exuberantly notes, their racination in afro-
centric ways of being “nourishes” their creative
practice from end to end. For example, their first
project involved the construction of an African the diligent study of texts on African sculpture, With this context in mind, ibiyanε
birthing chair, which have been used across including the eponymous book by Ladislas Segy.
millenia to bring those giving birth greater comfort Such study allows them to place themselves within is, all in all, invested in creating
and which Fines notes were a seminal part of the
Cameroonian domestic visual landscape she grew
a broader continuum of makers and within an
ancestral framework that can be considered a
forms alongside and through which
up in. Their heritage also informs how they source citational practice of sorts, in that they explicitly their audience can partake in
and sculpt their material of choice (wood) and how recognize that their work emerges from a specific
they relate to it as a teacher of sorts, which will be set of histories, just as the wood they coax into new
contemporary rituals of connection
discussed further below. forms emerges from landscapes that once aided and (either with themselves, another, the
abetted liberatory acts of maroonage.
Moreover, ibiyanε’s work is interested in excavating land, or the divine) such as prayer,
and nurturing what the pair described as “new Amidst their time spent studying, Dérond and
imaginaries” in which the development of Doumbe-Fines realized that sculptures are not
conversation, and rest.
relational intelligence (i.e. the individual and merely objects that stand sedentary and silent in
collective practices needed “to know one another” space. Rather, they are objects that can think, act, Rest and reverence, in particular, have been on
in a mode that does not demand the reduction or and feel all on their own. Moreover, if we consider Fines and Dérond’s minds lately. Thus, on the
exploitation of either party) is a tantamount priority. sculpture to be a mode of ritual object, such vessels occasion of “Love Letters,” ibiyanε presents a
On a practical level, they bring this ideological are then also objects through which we may access headrest, elombe 016, a form reminiscent of the
commitment to bear on a formal level through catharsis and guidance from above. sprawling rhizomes that comprise the Martinican
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 7
mangrove. This work serves, in tandem with a
newly commissioned poem, as an homage to those
who have supported ibiyanε’s practice and shaped
their worldview as a duo since they began working
together. More specifically, the headrest honors
those ibiyanε calls “dreamers,” i.e. those who are
invested in “capturing ancestral knowledge and/
or practices, and crafting the world they want
to live through, while also echoing the elements
of our sculptural method of learning, archiving,
remembering, and ultimately releasing.”
The devotional nature of this work comes to bear in
how, exactly, Fines and Dérond went about sourcing
and sculpting the material. After an arduous work
day, they decided to go to the beach to access a
palmful of renewal and chose, specifically, a cove
in Tartane, located on the North-Eastern peninsula.
On their journey back home, they happened upon
branches that had either fallen or been cut from a
canopy of Spanish Lime trees and felt an impulse
to take two large pieces back with them, which
they later intuitively shaped into what is now
elombe 016. Here, they were interested in allowing
the process to unfold organically through a mode
of collaborative improvisation. Together, they let
the wood exert its own agency, listening when it
resisted their push, and allowing the material itself
to tell them how it wanted to look, be and feel. “The
wood just took over,” notes Fines, reflectively, with
a tranquil and all-knowing smile stretched gently
across her face.
Of all their work to date, elombe 016 is perhaps
most resolute in its existence as a collaboration
between ibiyanε’s dual consciousness and that of
the raw material itself. Hence, it also bears noting
that amidst Dérond’s study of pre-colonial sculpture,
they learned not only of the aesthetic dimensions
of headrests, but also the ancient protocols through
which they were made and used.
8 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
Alas, for elombe 016, ibiyanε wished to not only pay
homage through form, but also through process.
Normally, they coat the sculptures in chemicals to
Fig.3
maintain their structural integrity. Now, however,
they have employed the natural protective
properties of shea butter to coat the headrest just as
their ancestors would have. Additionally, they are
learning to make their own dye.
elombe 016, taken in tandem with ibiyanε’s work to
date, demonstrates a continued interest in world-
building through a mode of experimentally poetic
storytelling and communion with both the mundane
and the miraculous dimensions of life itself. To
think, feel, and convene in the midst of ibiyanε’s
work is to behold a collection of prayers that take
on material form: an invitation to raise one’s hands
up to the heavens in praise of our earthly condition
and to call our fingers forward as we chart forth
realities that love us back. ■
ibiyanε extends gratitude to the dreamers Karl Obakeng
Fig.4
Ndebele, Pascale Chroné, Karine Numa, Venessa Appiah,
Adama Keïta, Albert Balon, Camille Bacon, Nene Myriam
Konate, Glowzi, Sandrine Doumbe , René and Chantal Dérond,
etc. Thank you also to esteemed collaborators Jean Michel
Gadoua and Anna Carnick.
Camille Bacon is a Chicago-based writer who is building a
“sweet black writing life” as inspired by the words of poet
Nikky Finney and the infinite wisdom of the Black feminist
tradition more broadly. Through a methodology that straddles
rigorous research and divinely derived oration, she aims to
excavate how aesthetics can catalyze a collective reorientation
towards relation, connection and intimacy and away from
apathy and amnesia. Ultimately, her work serves as the
external embodiment of her commitment to amplifying the
wayward ingenuity of the Black creative spirit. She currently
manages McArthur Binion’s studio in Chicago, IL and formerly All photos are courtesy of ibiyanε
held positions at GRAY Gallery, Chicago, IL, and The Studio Fig.1 elombe 015 (2023).
Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Fig.2 elombe 016 (2023).
Fig.5 Fig.3-5 Carving process of elombe 016 (2023).
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 9
 GESTURE, MEMORY, TRAUMA,
CENSORSHIP: A PERSONAL
RECKONING WITH
INDONESIA’S HISTORIES
SABRINA CITRA
In this personal text, Sabrina Citra navigates between colonial
memory, postcolonial state narratives, and a reckoning with
the fabricated, if not fictitious, dimension of nationhood after
the fight against colonialism has ended. Through a mindful look
at gestures and rituals, she articulates how this mythology is
inscribed within the memories of their bodies.
Being of a diaspora had afforded me the distance
to think about my Indonesian-ness, while being
raised in Jakarta has granted a closeness to the
community and land that automated a sense
of belonging to the nation. I had believed that
“nationhood” would articulate my relation with
the motherland (encapsulated in the national
language as Ibu Pertiwi), rather than an “identity”
that must be explicitly defined. However, the first
years of living abroad had enforced an assertion
to recognize my national identity by the demands
of state administration, as my Indonesian-ness had
been reduced to the passport that I had carried
and my precarious status as an “immigrant.”
The following instances had awakened me to
the volatility of “nationhood” as a concept that
affirmed my being. Upon my return to Jakarta, my
identity became a subject of criticism among my
community for I had been deemed “less Indonesian”
for challenging national epistemologies, in
particular national history and language. These
collective experiences have clarified (or rather,
complicated) my ideas of “belonging”’ in the context
of nationhood. In this text, I sought to explore it
through the encounters and experiences that I had
with the histories of Indonesia.
At the age of nine, my mother often narrated stories
of decolonisation against the Portuguese, the Dutch,
and the Japanese. She described their battles in
folklore, claiming their victories to be God-given:
“They came in with their firearms and all we had
was our bambu runcing. Under the name of God,
our people raised their spears and went into battle.
Imagine this, these spears of bamboo had brought
10
us freedom! Logically we don’t even stand a chance
against their ‘military’ power. All that firearm
pales in comparison to the spirit of our people.
That is what I know to be a miracle, Sabrina. That
is God’s miracle for Indonesia.” These stories had
been likened to the narratives of creation within
mythology, propelling the violences that had been
endured by the nation’s forebearers as necessary
sacrifices to birth a postcolonial Indonesia. My
mother’s ritual of storytelling had inherited a belief
in the “sacred” genealogy of nationhood.
The trajectory of her stories aligned
with the narratives of national
history that signified colonization
as the phenomenon that had unified
the different ethnic groups across
the archipelago to reclaim their
Fig.1
Indonesia.
memorize legislative documents and its regulations, salute the flag while singing the national anthem.
The urgency for independence had established the the Constitution of Indonesia and Pancasila The following gestures have been tradition within
nation-building project to (re)build a postcolonial (“philosophy” of Indonesia), as well as a range of the flag ceremony, which has been unchanged for
Indonesia that removed colonial influences within patriotic songs and its accompanying histories. The decades since the nation’s independence in 1945.
their proclamation of an Indonesian identity. This range of these materials explicated the multiple These rituals of remembrance had been imposed
involved the destruction of any public symbols that contexts of statehood that demands its citizens to to accustom Indonesians to realize their moral
valorized colonial rule (across Jakarta), as well adhere to their specific duties, adjusted to each responsibility (towards their forefathers, as well as
as the creation of a national history, language, setting. To this day, I cannot recall any moment that for one another) to remain in unity.
monuments, and museums. Decoloniality had required me to recite or remember the Constitution,
materialized in Indonesia’s newfound culture, Pancasila, or any legislative policies beyond Upon reflection, the national histories had proven
forming a “rooted” expression of a national (read: examinations, but the memory of songs had proved the existence of an Indonesian historiography
Indonesian) identity. useful for flag ceremonies. My teachers had taught that blends oral, textual, and visual narratives
us the lyrics for the national anthem and patriotic with embodied experiences which broadened
Identifying as an Indonesian did not come without songs about the national flag—such as “Berkibarlah the temporality of historical knowledge to exist
the terms and conditions that demanded an Benderaku” (“Fly Free, My Flag”) by Ibu Sud in beyond its recollection of “past events” towards
adherence to its civic duties. The years of schooling 1947—which were eventually sung during its its enlivenment in present-day time. Granted, I do
had molded me to become a “good,” law-abiding procession. When the flag was raised, participants not want to ignore the political context within the
citizen through civic studies, when I was taught to were required to maintain an upright posture and following narratives that instrumentalized history
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 11

to materialize a nationalist mode of belonging, but I
want to recognize the physicality that is demanded
from historicizing.
Our bodies have become sites of
praxis or what I loosely refer to as a
“living archive” that utilizes memory
as a vessel to contain the entangled
relation of knowledges that merges
its distant past with its present-day
reactions and receptivity.
I had sought to implement the following mode of
historicizing to understand my family’s experiences
in colonized Indonesia. My Oma (“grandmother”
in Dutch) refused to speak on the matter because
it had triggered unwanted memories of her family,
but my Opa (“grandfather” in Dutch), who grew
up during the Japanese Occupation, was willing to
share the stories that he remembered. He recalled
his history in fragments: blending his ‘mundane’
experiences with Japanese soldiers alongside their
cruelties that he bore witness to. He was always
happy to recall the memories of the former: “At
school, we would have Senam Pagi (morning
12
Fig.2
aerobics) everyday before class would start. Did
you know a Japanese soldier would lead our
routine? And he would go “Ichi, ni, san!” (“One,
two, three!”), he said as he gave me a demonstration
of his exercise routine from seventy years ago.
He credited the Japanese for inciting his hobby of
exercising, which he believed was one of the habits
worth inheriting. My questions regarding the latter
issue had always made him uncomfortable, but he
was insistent on sharing the memory that he could
recall. He had always been grateful for his young
age, as it had saved him from Rōmusha (Japanese
colonial system of forced labor) and he briefly spoke
of his friends who he barely saw since they had
been enlisted to partake in forced labor: “I only saw
them when I had gone home from school. They
would typically go home in big groups but one day,
I saw one of my friends return home by himself and
he wore nothing but a rice sack.”
I had learned from my conversations with my Opa
that there exists a difficulty within the retelling
of traumatic histories in Indonesia due to the
two reasons: firstly, there is a disability to recall
past experiences among those who had endured
and lived through these histories and, secondly,
censorship remains rampant in the publication and
writing of histories that discerned the violences
of the nation. Beyond the context of colonial
occupation, there had been stories that were either
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
lost or removed in articulating the periods of mass
violence in Indonesia, ranging from the Papuan
referendum, the 1965 murders of hundreds of
thousands of Communist party members and their
affiliates, as well as ethnic violences that were
endured by Chinese-Indonesians.
It is a privilege to have encountered academics and
artists such as Brigitta Isabella, FX Harsono and
Betty Adii of Udeido Collective whose works have
offered clarity towards the insularity of national
history. Their research challenges the image of an
equal, just, and united Indonesia produced in its
narratives (that we have naturalized) , excluding
any experience, events, and memories that were
deemed unsuitable to the trajectory of nationhood,
including the violence that is faced by marginalized
communities. This began with Mba Brigitta who
produced a paper entitled “Hantu Topeng Kelono,
Hantu Burung Kasuari, dan Hantu Ngung
Ngung Ngung Cakcakcak: Tiga Hantu Tari
Yang Bergentayangan Dalam Narasi Identitas
Kebudayaan Nasional” (“The Ghost of Kelono,
The Ghost of the Kasuari Bird and The Ghost of
Ngung Ngung Ngung Cakcakcak: Three Ghosts of
Dance that Haunt the National Cultural Identity”),
where she positions herself as a ghost to produce
critical re-reading of dance performances that were
deemed a threat against the “wholeness” imbued in
the aesthetics of a national identity.
Following this, Pak Harsono searched across Java
to find the mass burial sites of Chinese-Indonesians
who were victims of ethnic cleansing, which had
eventually led him to encounter their families who
retold the stories of their fathers and mothers’
deaths. The oral histories had acted as inspiration
for his numerous works called Berziarah ke
Sejarah (Pilgrimage to History) and Memelihara
Hidup, Menghentikan Hidup (Preserving Life,
Terminating Life), where he produced his own
reflections with the lost memories that he had(n’t)
inherited as a Chinese-Indonesian.
On the other hand, Betty took it upon herself to
utilize her installation called Dystopian Reality:
The Agony of Existence to raise awareness of what
she calls the “power dynamic” of the militia that
had endangered the lives of Papuan women. In a
letter that she had written to me, she articulated
her intention to materialize the “realities from
memory and collective trauma” that had never
been inscribed in the narratives of nationhood. I
had presumed the importance of recognizing the
categorization of their work in the fields of art and
cultural studies, as I believe that these fields have
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
granted them the freedom to safely explore these
topics and they would risk censorship, if it were
produced in a different context.
To publicly detail histories that challenge the
very idea of “nationhood” has become a difficult
exercise for Indonesians, especially those who
are disconnected from their own memories I have
embodied its belief as I have been bound by my
birthright to Ibu Pertiwi, carrying her histories
as my own. Even as I write this, I feel a guilt for
failing to provide you, reader, the “truth” of the
(violent) histories contained from the public sphere.
My positionality as an Indonesian writer does not
grant me the liberty to place myself as a “voice of
clarity” to write on their behalf, as I only stand as
a witness of their memories. I can only hope that
there will be a time for them to choose their way of
remembrance. ■
Sabrina Citra is a researcher whose interests intersects
between the subjects of aesthetics, cultural studies and
postcolonial history. Her work has been published in
Photoworks UK, Jogja Biennale, and Gal-dem. Since her
Masters, she has previously coordinated research for
Decolonize the Art World and King’s College London. She is
currently based in Jakarta and working as a strategist, whilst
pursuing research on the “exotic gaze” that has been attached
to the making of a Southeast Asian aesthetic. Her next work
interlopes across theory, poetry, photography and dance.
Fig.1 Three young Indonesians on a street. Two of them are Republican volunteers
from Sulawesi, members of the armed youth organization KRIS, on leave in
Yogyakarta, December 1947. / Photo by Hugo Wilmar (Dutch National Archives/
Spaarnestad Collection).
Fig.2 A vision of nationhood in Markas Laskar Rakyat (The People’s Basecamp) by
Sudjojono (1964).
13
 WE THE VANQUISHED:
ON BIAFRA, THE NIGERIAN
POSTCOLONY, AND THE NEED
FOR RADICAL SOLIDARITIES
AMARACHI IHEKE
In this personally-charged text, Amarachi Iheke analyzes the
politics of the postcolonial state in Nigeria, in particular the
eastern part of the country, where the myth of reconciliation
after the 1967–1970 Biafran war fails to conceal the inertia of
state violence. Envisioning emancipatory futures, she also
questions what radical solidarities look like in this context.
As I write to you from Marseille, in the home of
my wonderful Bambara host, I am swaddled in
reminders of a romantic childhood in Umuahia,
Eastern Nigeria. Having not returned home for
several years now after my Father’s passing, I feel
called upon by the Eastern Nigerian countryside,
woven into Fatou’s decorative cane mats, etched
on mud and wax prints, echoing through Salif
Keita’s Tomorrow. I feel my late Father’s presence
urging me to do some necessary grief work,
not only for him, but in many ways for my
community of tradespeople, cultivators, educators,
and spiritualists. A community that was once a
symbol of anti-imperial and anti-state resistance
in the Biafran nationalist project, now reflects the
sobering violent dispossessions of the Nigerian
postcolony. Stories too harrowing that they often
read as folklore, of pogrom, state-orchestrated
famine, and a punishing “victor’s justice” as post-
conflict reconciliation, fundamentally shaped and
indeed radicalized me as a child. Certainly, losing
my Father as custodian of this history had kept
me from engaging with the familiar inherited
traumas of Biafra for some time now. In many
ways, revisiting Biafra here in this text for me
feels like a return. A return to a political landscape
that holds and continues to reverberate all the
messy contradictions of (post)colonial victimhood.
A return to a call for radical empathy which
allows us to acknowledge shared violations at the
hands of the Nigerian post-colony, from Biafra to
ENDSARS. A return to an advocacy for radical
solidarity, where in acknowledging collective but
differing struggles, we can still make space for
each other, to feel and be with our vanquished
condition(s).
14
This text is not concerned with legitimizing Biafran
nationalisms at large or providing a historiography
of the struggle for Biafran statehood. Literary
accounts of the Nigeria–Biafra war, including
Chinua Achebe’s There was a country (2012), Wole
Soyinka’s The Man Died (1972), Buchi Emecheta’s
Destination Biafra (1982), and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s
Sozaboy (1985) to name a few, illustrate how Cold
War and African decolonial nation building politics
at play instrumentalized both Biafran nationalism
and the development of a “legitimate” Nigerian
nation state. These regional and global political
contexts shed light on the various motivations
of an emergent Nigerian political class and
Biafran nationalists alike. Accommodating these
complexities is essential not only to understand the
story of Biafra, but also to normalize contradiction
and inconsistency in narrating colonial afterlives.
Fig.1
In the Biafran story, there are no Seeing the war necessarily as imperial production, Ojukwu’s declaration of a Biafran nation, stretching
neat binary identities of perpetrator I take as point of departure the existing ethnically across the Bight of Biafra, what transpired in the
antagonistic lines carving out the Nigerian “colony state’s ruthless three year counter-insurgent war,
and victim, but the nature of state proper,” as North and South Protectorates and signaled the formation of a Nigerian postcolony.
the strategic assignment of warrant chiefs, the Arguably, the turning point of the conflict and
violence deployed by a fledgling likes of my paternal grandfather. Similarly, there death knell for the Biafran nationalist project,
Nigerian postcolony remains a key were fraudulent truth commissions that silenced was the use of famine as a genocidal instrument
the women of the 1929 Aba Revolt and made de of war by the Nigerian state, propped up by
defining character of the conflict. facto insurgents of us all as colonial subjects, British and Soviet sponsors. For the first time,
our assaulted ecosystems, captive deities that lie war was brought home in the global broadcast
The present day volatility of the Biafran identity estranged in the British museum… The precursory of chronically malnourished infants, masses of
itself within the multi-ethnic eastern and traces of Biafra are indeed too many to recount. gaunt bodies huddled in Irish Catholic refugee and
southeastern region, is testament to historical Unquestionably, it is from the indirect bureaucracy relief camps, civilian casualties strewn across the
negotiations around victimhood, as such, Biafran of British coloniality, its fragmentations and what rainforest. These stories of an emergent mercenary
nationalist agitations and the conflict itself must Soyinka regards as Nigeria’s negotiated—rather state as postcolony, alongside parables of the wily
be situated within a context of coloniality. A than collectively struggled for—independence in chameleon, the leopard and the hare co-existed in
reflection of the intentional historical opacity and 1960 that Biafra emerges. The ethno-religious my childhood imaginary.
revisionism that surrounds Biafra discourse, I tensions inherited from empire’s fracturings
am frustrated to no end by the erasure of British ultimately sounded the war gong in 1966 as anti- Equally, I am particularly amazed by how strongly
coloniality in understanding the genesis of the Igbo pogroms perpetrated by both civilians and the these images and narratives resonated globally and
1967–1970 war between the Nigerian state and state military in Northern Sabon Gari (foreigners’ across time. My travels around Europe have found me
Biafran nationalists and the nature of violence quarters), triggered a mass Igbo exodus back talking about the Biafran genocide with strangers,
that embedded it in international consciousness. to their eastern homelands. Soon after Colonel friends and colleagues alike in Valencia, Marseille,
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 15
Paris, Nuremberg, and of course at home in London.
I suppose my surprise reflects a disheartening
rejection of history that is commonplace in Nigeria
today. Rather than an intentional widespread civilian
ignorance, on the contrary, such a rejection speaks
to the postcolony’s inability to take responsibility for
its violations and indeed practice what it preaches
in the pithy post-war statement of “No Victor, No
Vanquished.” On that note, I vividly remember
my beloved late Godfather who supported the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
wartime relief programs, taking my brother and
I around the only standing national monument in
memory of the war. Based in rural Umuahia and
maintained by local historians, it is important to note
the location (and remoteness) of this singular site of
(national) memorialization, and the fact that the state
has relieved itself of responsibility for its upkeep, as
quite telling. In other words, this is your history, not
ours. This is Biafran and specifically Igbo history, not
a collective national history. My Father’s generation
as Elders of the community certainly felt and still
do feel that sentiment ring true as symbolic of their
vanquishment. It is a commonly held view across the
East and South-East, particularly among the Igbo,
that the state wanted Biafrans to pay for attempting to
undermine its newly won legitimacy in independence.
A fragility towards history and its relegation to
the victims of history itself, is certainly not new to
the Nigerian postcolony. Rather, it is necessarily
symptomatic of structural violence. In the context of
postcolonial victimhoods in the Nigeria–Biafra war,
there is little to no capacity to speak of Biafra as
shared history, talk less of a willingness to accept and
empathize with historic state harm suffered by Igbo
and minoritized Ibibio, Efik, Ijaw, and Ogoni to name
a few. This is why I address the Nigerian nation space
explicitly as postcolony, molded and continuously
molding itself in the image of empire. In the Nigeria-
Biafra war, it efficiently demonstrated its tendencies
to subjugate using all violent genocidal infrastructure
at its disposal.
As mentioned earlier, the story of Biafra within
a postcolonial and anticolonial framing is full of
its contradictions and contestations, especially
where claims to a singular or prioritized
victimhood are concerned. Being Igbo myself, I
feel a responsibility to emphasize the dominance
16
of Igbo ethnonationalism in structuring a Biafran
national identity. Securing Biafra as a refugee
nation by a predominant Igbo political elite intent
on capitalizing off a Biafran nation state, often
carried deadly implications for minoritized groups
in the region through forced conscriptions and
various other intimidation tactics. However, the
fact that the last Biafran head of state, Major
General Philip Effiong, was Ibibio reminds us that
collaboration between Igbo and non-Igbo groups
in the region was indeed present and is still
active. Understanding Biafra as colonial afterlife
therefore requires that space is made for these
fractures in victimhood, where the context of
an operative post-colony reproduces and exploits
those very same colonial frictions between groups.
These antagonisms show up contemporarily as
the postcolony routinely silences demands for
truth-seeking around the war, which would reveal
ethnoplural victimhoods. Additionally, it works
to maintain half-truths of a Biafran project led
by a stubborn Igbo community in isolation, who
refused to get onboard with the project of a great
independent Nigeria.
Such official narratives along with a collective
aversion to this painful history, has fueled
the current day agitations across eastern and
southeastern Nigeria to revive Biafra. Among
groups such as the Indigenous People of Biafra
(IPOB), Eastern Security Network (ESN), and
Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign
State of Biafra (MASSOB), young people have been
engaged in various acts to subvert and undermine
the Nigerian postcolony. Rallies, pamphleting and
even local collective action to establish health
facilities, schools, and various other infrastructures
have been met with the swiftest and deadliest
martial force, as part of the state’s default no-
engagement policy. My former primary school
was even a site of such state-civilian clashes,
resulting in many lives lost senselessly. The current
imprisonment of Nnamdi Kanu, infamous IPOB
leader who is labeled as an insurrectionist by the
state, certainly points to an insecurity around
Nigerian nationhood and the threat Biafra still
poses to the postcolony. Without exploring their
respective complex claims, the intergenerational
hurt that these groups speak to in the inherited
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
narratives recounted earlier, are quite easy to
understand, acknowledge, and empathize with.
These intergenerational victimhoods in relation to
the postcolony’s violence are not only valid but also
contemporarily relevant, as along with denying
genocide claims, the state never stopped punishing
the East and the South-East. Socio-economic
underdevelopment and an absence of necessary
post-conflict repairs in the region even until today
remain bitter post-war conversations back home
in Umuahia. Violent anti-Igbo rhetoric and attacks
during the recent national elections served as a
reminder of how deeply embedded official post-war
narratives are in “national consciousness.”
Beyond neo-Biafran separatism, the ghosts of Biafra
were evidently present in the ENDSARS protests of
2020. Despite a global health crisis, Nigerian youth
came together to address the ugly face of the carceral
state that, through the militia Special Anti-Robbery
Squad (SARS), terrorizes, maims, and kills regular folk
across the country. I am still reeling at our capacity
to stand up, be counted and boldly assert a right to
life. To say over and over again to the postcolony,
“Stop Killing Us!” The protests brought to a global
audience the extent to which the Nigerian postcolony
securitizes civilians as a threat, but most importantly
it said something to Nigerians about claiming a
nonnegotiable humanity. Just as anticipated and in
a repeat of history, the state drew its only hand, by
squashing protestors like roaches under the literal
cloak of darkness at the Lekki Toll Gate.
While the online and physical agitations of the
ENDSARS movement signaled the revolutionary
chickens coming home to roost, there remains
plenty of work to be done to seize the moment and
develop necessary ethnoplural radical solidarities.
This is no easy feat of cours e. As previous issues
of this magazine have touched upon, solidarity
building in the context of colonial afterlives,
involves active listening and acceptance of
shared but not competing experiences of harm. A
necessary first step would be to develop empathy
for those historically dehumanized by drawing
throughlines between an experience of genocidal
violence, the absence of post-conflict repairs, and
contemporary extended struggles to challenge the
Nigerian postcolony.
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
Biafra as colonial afterlife is poignant
not only in holding up a mirror to
Empire and the Nigerian postcolony,
but more importantly to ask ourselves
how do we not abandon each other?
How can we extend ourselves to one another within
a suffocating state which routinely disposes of the
governed? These questions are also continentally
relevant and we need only look at the experience
of our neighbors over in South Cameroon who find
themselves similarly grappling with the tensions
of building solidarity despite the pervasiveness of
French and British colonial legacies.
In light of assertions of postcolonial harm,
identifying ourselves as pawns in Nigeria’s (neo)
imperialisms helps us develop capacities for
necessary ethnoplural solidarities and indeed
revolutionary empathy. It is difficult not to feel rage
for my late Father, Godfather, and their generation
who never received such empathy or justice for
the pain they endured, but I feel renewed hope
for evolving possibilities in solidarity building.
Therefore, short of a call to arms and in defense of a
shared colonial and postcolonial victimhood, I claim
a collective We the vanquished. We the structurally
violated. We the undercommons. To claim a collective
“We” is to assert a shared dispossession by empire
and its extensions in the contemporary Nigerian
postcolony. This I believe would be a collaborative
building block for radical inclusive solidarities and
indeed continued resistance. ■
Amarachi Iheke is a doctoral student at King’s College London
and the coordinator of the Africa Research Group. She is
currently investigating radical indigenous reconciliatory
imaginaries in the Azanian context through sonic and poetic arts.
Fig.1 Nigeria’s National War Museum in Umuahia in the southeastern region of the
country. / Photo by Sam Iheke (April 2018).
17
THE FUNAMBULIST N°48

Roma activists protesting in front of the Russian embassy

in Bucharest on May 16, 2022. / Photo by LCV.
FIFTY SHADES
OF WHITE(NESS)
THINKING AGAINST THE
U.S.-CENTRIC CONCEPTION
OF RACIALIZATION
 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS):
INTRODUCTION
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT
Welcome to the 48th issue of The Funambulist.
Following the paths traced by some recent issues,
it attempts to articulate a rather precise editorial
argument, offering what is hopefully a productive
dialog between different contributions. The general
argument behind this issue is that if we are to
consider whiteness at the global scale, we require
a more complex understanding of it than the one
constructed in opposition to white supremacy in
the United States. To a certain extent, this U.S.-
based concept makes sense as an interpretative
framework within their settler colonial context—in
the way it flattens whiteness into a single “shade”
when various European migrant groups colonized
stolen Indigenous lands. Yet, nuances produced by
the distinct political trajectories of each group prior
to becoming settlers exist, and should be dignified
with deeper analysis (cf. Mitchell Joffe Hunter’s
contribution about Askhenazi Jews settling in
South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century).
Furthermore, for other contexts, it is crucial to
strongly nuance the way processes of racialization
operate and read them through a highly
contextualized (both geographically and temporally)
framework, rather than through a U.S.-centric lens.
This is certainly not to say that whiteness is
necessarily more complex than what it seems to
be, especially within geographies where the very
structures of colonial racialization were invented
(i.e., Western Europe). This is also not to say that
there aren’t processes of racialization that would not
fundamentally overcede the “fifty shades of white”
described in this issue’s title: antiblackness and the
structural racism against Roma people (as described
by Margareta Matache in this issue) certainly
constitute the most ubiquitous of these processes in
Europe—although, tellingly Roma people are usually
perceived as white in U.K. and U.S. contexts.
The distinctions this issue intends
to make is that we understand
whiteness is fundamentally produced
by two affirmations: first, we cannot
20
approach race solely through a
regime of visibility (i.e. what’s ‘visible’
to us) and second, race is a space-
time (i.e. racializing processes always
have to be understood contextually).
From here, it is easy to understand that the “shades
of whiteness” discussed in these pages are not literal
shades that would follow the logics of colorism,
but rather, degrees of proximity to whiteness,
proportional to the exercise of political power.
Nothing speaks more to the necessity for context
than the word “Caucasian,” as used by the U.S.
bureaucracy to designate European settlers on
the land it occupies. How did West Asian people
(Abkhazians, Armenians, Chechens, Ossetians, and
many more…), who have been racialized by the
Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and still today by
the Russian Federation and other European states,
end up in the category of whiteness in the U.S.
settler colony, created by the British, French, and
Spanish empires? Unsurprisingly, the answer to this
question involves 19th century theories of colonial
science and the collaboration of European empires,
as described by Keto Gorgadze in the following
pages. The complexity of racialization appears
even more clearly when considering Armenians
specifically: while the Turkish ethnocratic state and
its Azeri proxy perpetuate the Ottoman murderous
violence against them, their strong presence in
western diasporas, their relationship to Christianity,
and their apparent proximity to Europeanness often
place them in the delicate situation of witnessing
the symbolic and opportunist seizing of their
struggle by white supremacist agendas. In parallel,
some of their Maronite neighbors (in particular
in the diaspora in France) seem to accommodate
themselves quite well within the analog whitening
myth of their descendance from Phoenicians (a term
forged by the Greeks, externally from the peoples it
Fig.1
designated), claiming to be unaffected by fourteen
centuries of Arab presence.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 21
The contextuality of race is made evident when
considering “white” Eastern Europeans. As Kasia
Narkowicz shows in her contribution, “white” Poles
can simultaneously incarnate one of the main
targets of British racist speeches surrounding the
campaign for “Brexit,” be racialized as Other yet
still be perceived in proximity with whiteness in
contrast to Black and other non-white immigrants
within a western European context such as Sweden,
all while calibrating the standard of whiteness in
Poland’s structural racism and brutal contribution to
Fortress Europe. It also shows us how whiteness is
not solely anchored into a regime of visibility: it also
infiltrates the perception of people’s names, accents,
the use of a “foreign” language, etc. Furthermore,
race does not solely operate within a geographical
context: its temporal component is also crucial to
consider.
If we stay in Poland for a second: let’s consider
how busses of Ukrainian refugees, fleeing the 2022
Russian invasion of their country, were given a safe
passage deep into the European Union. Contrast this
with how West Asian exiles had to risk their lives
and health through the forests bordering Belarus
and Poland, despite fleeing similar circumstances
in different contexts, due to being attributed a
further proximity (or none) with whiteness. Much
has been written (often in 280 characters) about
this contrast, caused by an assumed definitive
Ukrainian whiteness, as Darya Tsymbalyuk
discusses in her contribution. Observing that a
significant number of Ukrainians are, in fact, not
white, although important, is beyond the point here.
What seems crucial to understanding however,
is that this whiteness granted to Ukrainians by
western European and North American narratives
is temporal and conditional. Insisting on the
precarious and opportunist (for western states)
nature of this ‘positive’ racialization (on which
Ukrainians have very little control) seems to me
more productive than the characterization of
the Russian colonial invasion and the Ukrainian
resistance to it as a fight between two embodiment
of whiteness, a claim made to suggest that the
global anti-racist movement should not engage. For
many Ukrainian refugees living within western
European societies built on structural racism, a
durable existence remains precarious.
22
A contribution missing from this issue—although
it was planned—has to do with the national
refusal to assimilate to European whiteness. Such
a refusal could be found in the sustained Irish
anti-colonial struggle, although it would require
much critique. More convincingly is the key role
played by Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement
during the 1960s and 1970s. Initiated by Kwame
Nkrumah, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser,
Sukarno, and Josip Broz Tito, its first summit took
place in Belgrade in September 1961. The “treason
to whiteness” advocated by Noel Ignatiev (1992)
is elevated at a national level here, in a strong
commitment to solidarity with nations refusing to
align with neither the western capitalist bloc nor
the Soviet Union and its allies. But such a “treason”
is also contingent on time, with the racist mass
murders of Bosniaks and Albanian Kosovars by
Serbian militaries and paramilitaries in the 1990s,
or more recently, the construction of a border
wall at the Schengen limits between Slovenia and
Croatia, while the latter marks the limits of the
European Union, excluding the rest of what used to
be Yugoslavia.
Questions pertaining to the relations between
Indigeneity and whiteness are also central to the
issue. By this, I do not mean the claims made
by white supremacists groups in Europe that
delusionally claim the term “Indigenous” for
themselves. Rather, these relationships ought to
be studied for the way European colonizers deem
some Indigenous peoples to be in closer proximity to
whiteness, in contrast with “darker,” “more savage”
peoples. This is the case of Polynesians in contrast
with Melanesians, as described by Maile Arvin in
a conversation with Anaïs Duong-Pedica (who has
helped me in many ways to put this issue together),
but also of Amazighs in contrast with Maghrebi
Arabs. In the colonial enterprise of the “civilizing
mission,” based strongly within scientific racism,
Europeans thus created racial hierarchies that
indicated who was more likely to assimilate and
move one shade closer to European whiteness—but
never giving the colonized the full extent of political
power afforded to whiteness. Some reminiscences
of such an ideology (on a less dramatic level) can
be found in the current fetishization of Sámi people
within various spheres of cultural production.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
Far from being in solidarity with their struggle for
land and against resource extractivism, we have
lost count of cultural projects that seem to only
see Sámi Indigeneity as a peculiar paradox of an
Indigenous people “looking white.”
In parallel, a colonial process imagined by
Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in Abya Yala
(the Americas) was to drown Indigeneity into
whiteness by forming national racial projects
aiming at the intermixing of Indigenous peoples
and European settlers. As we discuss with Mónica
G. Moreno Figueroa, this is called “mestizaje”
in Spanish, and it has become a paradigm to
approach racial identities (or rather, the supposedly
lack thereof) in Latin America. But mestizaje is
merely an ideology of whiteness that skilfully
dissimulates the still-operating conditions of settler
colonialism and structural racism against both
Indigenous and Black peoples. Such dissimulation
is further deployed by the prominence of the
U.S. epistemology of whiteness that flattens all
communities south of its colonial border into one
racial identity, blurring the political line between
southern European settlers and Indigenous peoples.
These questions raise another more complex and
delicate one, which goes back to the critique of
reading race solely through a regime of visibility:
the question of what came to be called “passing.” I
have to admit that I certainly have no confidence
in making this question any less complex. In
challenging race’s regime of visibility/recognition,
while also paying respect to the fact that this
visibility is precisely what makes darker-skinned
people more targeted by racist violence, reflections
that go further than individualistic and sometimes
self-indulgent accounts are rare.
The notion of being more targeted
is important because, although it
does determine crucially significant
aspects of one’s life, it also speaks to
how we often approach race through
an economy of suffering.
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
The concept of “white privilege” is particularly
illustrative of this. At best, it is a tautology that
fails to recognize that whiteness is precisely
the system that constructs a position of political
domination through racialization. At worst, it
defines “white” solely based on visual recognition
and on the individualist level, designating a
political condition for those who are likely to be
spared from recognition-based violence (such as
police brutality for instance). In doing so, it crowns
a value system constructed upon the degree to
which one is subjected to this type of violence.
Although the concept of white privilege is certainly
aimed at supporting people who are the most
directly and intensely affected by racialization, it
does not constitute a sufficient foundation for an
anti-racist project in itself.
I hope that these imperfect considerations might
influence your reading of this issue before
drawing any conclusions, in the spirit of trust that
characterizes our relationship between readers,
contributors, and editor(s). Such a spirit allows
for hesitation, vulnerability, and at times failure,
which are necessary to walk the path we’re
walking together. With this in mind, I wish you an
excellent read. ■
Léopold Lambert is the founding editor of The Funambulist.
He is a trained architect and the author of four books analyzing
the political violence of the built environment, in particular
in Palestine, Algeria, Kanaky, and France’s banlieues. Those
include Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of
Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), and États d’urgence: Une
histoire spatiale du continuum colonial français (PMN, 2021).
Fig.1 Armenian fedayi who volunteered in self-defense militias against the Ottoman
mass murders of Armenians at the turn of the 20th century. The person on the right
is Eghisapet Sultanian (circa 1895).
23
 HAVE CAUCASIANS EVER BEEN
WHITE? RUSSIAN COLONIALISM
AND THE MACHINERY OF
RACIALIZATION
KETO GORGADZE
In an issue dedicated to decentering the U.S. epistemology
of whiteness, a contribution delineating the rather surprising
conflation of the terms “white” and “Caucasian” felt
necessary. Keto Gorgadze describes how such a conflation
came to be, as well as the processes of racialization actual
Caucasians have been subjected to and continue to be
subjected to by Russian imperialism.
In 1879, a soldier participating to the Russian
conquest of the North Caucasus portrayed
Caucasians as such: “A mountaineer (gorets), a slave
to tradition, is prideful, insidious, cunning, and
systematically ignoble; he is not devoid of natural
mental abilities, but these abilities have been given
a false direction in the environment in which they
developed.” Coopted and decontextualized in the
U.S. racial paradigm, the word “Caucasian” has
been designating an identity of white settlers.
This tradition is rooted in Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach’s racial theory, which is based on skull
measurements and classification. The skull of a
Georgian girl, gifted to Blumenbach by Russian
physician Georg Thomas Asch, became a model for
whiteness in this epistemology.
While Russia started its colonial
expansion in the North and
South Caucasus, enabled by the
racialization of the indigenous
communities, Blumenbach placed
Caucasian “beauty and bodily
symmetry” at the apex of the racial
hierarchy in his racist theory.
This would not have happened without Russia’s
access to the territory and the collaboration between
Europeans and Russians in their scientific and
24
medical colonial endeavors. How has racialization of
Caucasians facilitated the conquest in the 18th–19th
centuries and ensured control over territories?
The term “Caucasian,” having been referred to
Fig.1
simultaneously white and non-white people in two
colonial contexts, reveals a complexity of race-
making strategies and allows for a decentering of
the U.S. epidermal paradigm of race.
In 2022, a podcast called “No to Racism!” was
released in Russian. In it, anti-racist activists and
people who had experienced racialized violence
shared their perspectives and strategies for
resisting racism in Russia. This led to a heated
debate among the activist community about which
groups can be identified as racialized and non-
white. One of the arguments put forward was
that Caucasians cannot be considered a racialized
group because the term “Caucasian” in the U.S.
means “white.” Even in Russia, where people are
aware of the racist killings of Caucasians, their
criminalization, difficulties in renting apartments,
and finding jobs because of their origins, names,
and appearance, U.S. epistemology has a significant
influence on the conceptualization of race.
Predominantly the light skin of
Caucasians hinders shaping their
experience as racialized, even
though in Russia they are often
called “Cherniy,” which translates to
“black” and is the same word used to
designate Afrodescendant people.
On the other hand, the proliferation of literature on
racism and translocal anti-racist movements has
led to widespread acceptance and consolidation of
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
the idea of race as a social construct. This was a
significant shift that helped to dismantle the notion
of race as a biological category that naturalizes the
hierarchy between people based on physical features.
However, the discourse of the social construction of
race, by portraying it as something that does not
exist in reality, reduces it to a set of stereotypes,
representations, and prejudices. Understood as
such, race functions as an epistemic concept that
influences the lived experiences of racialized
communities. Therefore, eliminating the construct
should lead to the disappearance of injustice.
Various colonial situations produce different social
constructs, as illustrated by the ambivalent use of
the term “Caucasian” in U.S. and Russian contexts.
This ambiguity and the obvious artificiality should
lead to the eradication of racial violence against
actual Caucasians. Yet, it is not happening neither in
Russia, nor in Western countries.
This highlights the necessity of employing
an alternative conceptualization of race that
emphasizes its materiality and exposes the
mechanisms of production of racialized subjects,
which enables colonial control. Daniel Nemser,
a researcher of colonial infrastructures in Latin
America, suggested that “race itself may operate
as a sort of infrastructure, a sociotechnical relation
that enables the ongoing functioning of specific
machineries of extraction and accumulation.”
(Infrastructures of Race, 2017). In this regard,
the transfer of a Georgian woman’s skull from St.
Petersburg to Göttingen reveals the nature of the
race-making process through the machinery of
death management.
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Fig.2
The Caucasus territory is divided into two parts—
North and South Caucasus—by the mountain
range. The North Caucasus is included within
Russian borders, comprising federal subjects that
are referred to as “republics,” a term rooted in the
Soviet history of positioning the parts of former
USSR as seemingly autonomous. In reality, Russia
is highly centralized and these so-called federal
subjects do not possess any actual autonomy. The
South Caucasus is formed by Armenia, Azerbaijan,
and Georgia, which became independent states
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Despite
being independent, Georgia faces Russian colonial
occupation of 20% of its territory (Abkhazia and
South Ossetia). Armenia grapples with both the
violence of Azerbaijan and Turkey’s collaboration
and Russia’s political manipulations regarding
military aid. The borders between these different
territories in the North and South Caucasus are
traceable. However, various communities reside not
only within the borders of their regions, but across
the entire Caucasus.
Indigenous communities of North and South
Caucasus are ethnically diverse. Among them are
Abkhazian, Adyghe, Armenian, Azeri, Balkar,
Chechen, Circassian, Dagestani, Ingush, Kabardian,
Karachay, Kartvelian, Ossetian, Talysh peoples.
Some of them form their own ethnic families like
Armenians, Vainakhs or Kartvelians, while others
belong to broader Turkic and Persian groups.
The question of ethnicity may be perplexing as it
is commonly acknowledged as a cultural concept
rather than a racial one. In the U.S. context, ethnicity
discourse sprung from the liberal reflections on
25

European immigration and the status of these not
white enough, but still white people, and then
absorbed the racial discourse for some time by
equating white migrant experiences to racialized
ones, which actually constituted disregard of white
supremacy as a racial domination. Subsequently, the
ethnic paradigm of race was rightfully criticized and
the concept of ethnicity was clearly distinguished
from the one of race.
Ethnicity has a different nature in the context
of various projects of Russian colonialism: it is
intended not to distinguish “shades of whiteness,”
but to create non-whiteness. People with proximity
to whiteness do not have ethnicity in the eyes of
Russians, or more precisely, it is not so important.
The main thing is that they are “close” to Russians
(white people), which is why they have been trying
to assimilate other Slavic groups into a broad
Russian identity. Emphasizing ethnicity is of key
importance when it is necessary to produce a
racialized subject, and this is the Caucasian case.
Consolidation of a racialized body requires an
initial perception of it as different and backward—
darker—by the colonizer, which unfolds at the
moment of invasion. Russians never considered
Caucasian people to be white, regardless of
ethnicity, religion, appearance, or status within the
26
Fig.3
colonial system. Dmitriy Romanovskiy, a general of
the Russian army and essayist, classified Caucasian
ethnicities and called them “races”—Indo-European,
Turkic, and Ural-Altai—while highlighting that
Russians do not belong to any of them. Over
time, the difference gradually turned into a solid
hierarchy achieved by the objectification and
controlled mobility of bodies.
Active conquest of Caucasus
by Russians started from the
1760s onwards by annexation of
territories and establishing colonial
administrations through fortification,
imposing an imperial legal system,
building schools, and forced
christianization.
Medicine played a crucial role in this process
by securing the presence of the Russian army
and settlers on the territory, while transforming
its spatiality. Georg Thomas Asch served as a
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
physician in the General Staff of the army that
invaded the Caucasus, and was therefore part of
the colonial system. The skull he transmitted to
Blumenbach belonged to a young Georgian woman
who had been taken captive by Russian troops
and subsequently died in Moscow, most likely due
to a venereal disease. Nell Irvin Painter contends
that “the woman whose skull gave white people
a name had been a sex slave.” (The History of
White People, 2010). The fact that this girl was in a
vulnerable position, with the risk of becoming a sex
slave, enabled the invaders to use her skull as an
object of circulation, and thus of an anthropological
collection in Göttingen. Focusing on this aspect
instead of the orientalist and mythologized notion
of “Caucasian female beauty” that oversimplifies the
cultural and physical differences among indigenous
communities, provides a better understanding
of their racialization. Race, functioning as
infrastructure itself, made it possible for this body to
be replaced and trafficked.
As military actions during the conquest dragged
on, infections, mass diseases, and epidemics spread
more widely. The Russian administration became
concerned when the diseases affected the army on
a large scale, resulting in a significant reduction in
its numbers and failures in military operations. This
further strengthened the already rigid difference
between Russians and Caucasians. Although
the same diseases and epidemics could occur in
both central Russia and Europe, in this situation,
Caucasians were blamed for infecting Russian
invaders. The supposed low level of hygiene culture
among indigenous peoples, clayey soils, and hot
humid climate were mentioned as the primary
reasons for epidemics.
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Consequently, the inherent
inclination towards epidemics
became associated with a specific
geographical area, naturalizing the
perception of the “filthy” Caucasian,
who was ordered to be isolated and
examined before any contact could
be made.
To “combat” epidemics, an intensified control over
the indigenous population was introduced: the
borderline, also known as the “quarantine guard,”
was aimed at protecting Russia from “Caucasian”
diseases, while facilitating the conquest. It marked
a new level of death management, as it turned
into an economic blockade caused by limitations
on the mobility of indigenous peoples and further
starvation. Hence, as a boundary for Caucasians,
it rendered boundlessness for Russians. The line
consisted of seventy-nine buildings for officials,
guards, medical workers, and a marketer where
people arriving on the territory were quarantined.
This area was surrounded by a quadrangular
rampart with cannons, which were “always
ready to send death into the crowds of audacious
mountaineers if they decided to attack,” as stated
by one of the Russian officials. Travelers were then
accompanied by Cossacks (units of the Russian
army that usually patrolled border areas and then
became settlers on Circassian land) “for protection
against predators.” By “predators,” he referred to
Caucasians.
27
Racialization was a tool of distinguishing whose life
was valuable and needed protection at all costs, and
whose life was deemed redundant. Ethnic Russians
were seen as a guarantee of the empire’s existence,
so the preservation of it was intertwined with the
protection of the special status of Russians and their
lives, even in the reality of oppressions, serfdom,
and exile of political outcasts. The conquest of the
Caucasus was a pivotal moment in solidifying the
Russian empire and maintaining its integrity. The
indigenous peoples’ fierce resistance during the
18th–19th centuries fueled Russian frustration.
Although they did not consider the Caucasians
as their equals, the empire still saw them as a
significant threat to its own integrity. General of
the Russian army Alexei Ermolov, whose name still
strikes fear in the memory of the Caucasian people,
said: “Condescension in the eyes of Asiatics is a
sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am
inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds
of Russians from destruction, and thousands of
Muslims from treason.” (Walter Richmond, The
Circassian Genocide, 2013). Extremely cruel
murders, beheadings, rape, starvation, deportations,
and burning entire villages. These strategies were
presented as attempts to “cleanse” the Caucasians
of their perceived savagery, and to instill the idea of
Russian superiority as a steadfast axiom.
As is the case with many other colonial contexts,
the seizure of territories and the extermination of
indigenous peoples were envisioned as a civilizing
mission carried out for the benefit of humanity.
This is a key concept for understanding strategies
of racialization in Russian colonialism. The
preservation of differences was always accompanied
by a compulsion to russify, as this guaranteed
Russian domination. Caucasians were expected
to despise their appearance, culture, language,
customs, and religion, and continually strive to
become more like Russians, including changing
their names and surnames. The genocide of the
Circassians has never been recognized by Russia,
and any mention of it causes a storm of indignation.
This is because recognition of these crimes
undermines the construction of modern Russia
as an empire, where white Russians bring peace
and enlightenment to all. This would compromise
the idea of the empire, which further leads to
questioning the integrity of Russia itself.
From the conquest in the 18th–19th centuries,
throughout the Bolsheviks’ restoration of empire at
the beginning of the 20th century to the collapse
of the Soviet Union and the consequential attempts
to rebuild it, the racialization of Caucasians occurs
28
through the naturalization of aggression and,
consequently, danger.
The entire space of the Caucasus has
been described as a zone of calamity
and lawlessness.
Ascribing these features to the territory legitimizes
the employment of the most aggressive methods
of control. This has been facilitated by the trope of
the white captive, which is integral to the entire
history of cultural reflection on the colonization
of the Caucasus: from the works of Pushkin and
Tolstoy to the famous film War by the praised
Russian director Alexei Balabanov, which was
released internationally in 2001, at the peak of the
Second War in Chechnya. Despite the differences,
in all three cases, the Russian invader appears to
be a victim of vicious Caucasians, marking the
potential future of Russia, unless applying the most
brutal tactics in the conquest. Again, the issue of
control over the circulation of bodies turns out to
be essential: Russian culture demonstrated to the
audience that the one who manages the value of the
body, its movement, and position in space wins.
The film War begins with footage of Chechens
capturing British actors and Russian men who call
themselves “slaves,” which serves as an obvious hint
that the Russian authorities and the international
community are not tough enough on the Chechen
rebels. The narrator is a young Russian soldier
freed from captivity. Throughout the film, in their
conversations, Chechens constantly express their Fig.4
desire to move to Moscow, that they are eager to
send their children to study there, that some of
them have a restaurant business there—all this was
meant to sow panic among Russian society. If we
are not cruel to the “Cherniye”—that is how the
Chechens are called in the film—they will flood Two ways of exercising colonial to commit particularly brutal violence against
regions of Russia. Drawing on this, it is not the people. Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-
Russians and the British who should be in captivity, control are implemented precisely Balkaria are regions where people are regularly
in prison or solitary confinement, but the Chechens.
When a Russian soldier and British actor return to
out of the described racialization accused of terrorism, with up to 700 criminal cases
every six months in each republic. Torture is the
Chechnya to redeem the latter’s fiancé for several of Caucasians—policies of backbone in the fabrication of these cases. They
million pounds, they defiantly shoot the Chechen are used even in the preliminary investigation
woman and throw her down a mountain into the
incarceration and migration, which stage to force confessions out of people. Caucasians
river. As a child, I saw this film many times. It are linked to each other. regularly die in prisons from beatings and other
was regularly shown on TV to affirm the public forms of torture, to which they are subjected
perception of the war: Russia was bringing order to more often than other prisoners. In 2017, after the
the ever-raging Caucasus and fighting terrorism for People living in the republics of the North Caucasus death of a Chechen prisoner, his former inmate
the placid existence and prosperity of white people. are most often prosecuted under the harshest said, “Since 2003, Chechens, Dagestanis, Ingushs,
The peace-making narrative has been used as a tool criminal charges—the so-called “terrorist articles,” and other Caucasians were taken from our camp
of colonial subjugation. which allow the police and other secret services and other prisons to colony number 16. It is a
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 29
Fig.5
tuberculosis zone. [...] They have been infected, of
course, and are leaving this world.” Incarceration
for Caucasians is, to put in words of José Rubio,
a Chicano inmate from Brownsville cited by
Alan Eladio Gómez, “death on the installment
plan.” (“Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal
Penitentiary, 1972,” 2006).
Thus, entire indigenous communities of the
Caucasus are criminalized on some of the most
serious criminal charges, making it completely
impossible for them to organize politically and
resist colonial violence. Do we hear as much about
their detention conditions as we do about what
Russian white oppositionist Alexei Navalny faces
in prison? In his case, torture is perceived as
something extraordinary, and reconstitutions of his
confinement cell are erected in Berlin and Paris.
Racialization, which subjects colonized communities
to an “endless war”—which in fact means “endless
death”—enables this state by naturalizing it. The
notion of “life” is not reserved for Caucasians,
as their region is viewed as being intrinsically
Fig.6
30
linked with violence, stemming from “savage
mountaineers” who have failed to be civilized.
The connection between racialization and proximity
to death is fully revealed in the policies of European
states toward Caucasians seeking political asylum
or refugee status. A large number of people of
North Caucasian ethnicities, particularly from
Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, are on
preventive police registers as prone to “terrorism”
or on lists of extremists. Russia submits requests to
extradite these people as suspected collaborators
with “armed formations,” to which European states
respond positively and deport people to a knowingly
dangerous environment in which they are
subjected to torture and extrajudicial executions.
In 2020, France not only deported a 19-year-old
man who later died in Chechnya but also provided
confidential information about the organizations
and people who had helped him. At the same
time, a number of white Russians are put on lists
of extremists due to the tightening of dictatorial
policies, but in this case, European states and media
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
identify this as an act of political repression and
would never extradite them to Russia.
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of
Ukraine in 2022, the imperial sentiments in Russia
have been skyrocketing. It is not a coincidence that
Alexei Balabanov’s works became widely exploited
in war-justifying propaganda. By portraying Russia
as a problematic yet sacred Christian place, he
drew a clear racial distinction between “white” and
“black.” His most renowned film, Brother (1997),
features a bus dialog between a Russian man and
two Caucasians whom he forces to pay the fare at
gunpoint. This dialog is the answer to the question
of whether Caucasians have ever been white or not:
“Brother, don’t kill. Brother…”
“You are not my brother, black-ass louse” ■
Keto Gorgadze is a researcher and writer of Georgian descent.
Her work is focused on policies of occupation and race-making
in the context of Russian colonialism. She investigates medical
infrastructures as facilities for colonial expansions.
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Fig.6
Fig.1 “Manner in which the Tchernomorski guard and sentinels are stationed
along the banks of the river to reconnaitre the movements of Circassians, their
huts being filled with smoke, in the greatest heat of summer to keep out the
mosquitoes.” / Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia,
and Africa (London, 1813).
Fig.2 A photograph was captured at the camp of Russian troops in Kbaade (now
Krasnaya Polyana) on May 21, 1864. A parade of Russian troops took place here,
symbolizing the end of the Caucasian War./ Unknown photographer.
Fig.3 The abandonment of the village by the mountaineers as the Russian troops
approached by Pyotr Nikolayevich Gruzinsky (1872).
Fig.4 “USSR. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia. Main projects of the eighth and ninth
five-year plans, 1972” / Source: Pan Caucasus (Twitter).
Fig.5 Circassian activists commemorate and demand the recognition of the
Genocide and Exile of 1864 on May 20, 2012 in Istanbul. / Photo by Fulya Atalay.
Fig.6 Data “Papa” Vanishvili woke up one day to find himself behind the barbed
wire installed by Russian troops through his yard at the South Ossetia-Georgia
ABL. Data Vanishvili died on March 19, 2021 at the age of 90. / Photo by Jelger
Groeneveld (May 2016).
31
 WHITE SKIN, WHITE MASKS:
ASHKENAZI JEWS IN
SOUTHERN AFRICA
MITCHEL JOFFE HUNTER
Are there any nuances of whiteness within a settler population?
This text by Mitchel Joffe Hunter does not answer the question.
However, it presents the trajectories of Yiddish-speaking
Ashkenazi Jews in 20th century South Africa, between other
European settlers’ antisemitism and their own assimilation of
the processes through which white supremacy operates. From
there, Mitchell asks whether part of the Jewish identity can be
exhumed to humbly contribute to anti-colonial solidarities.
Arriving in Southern Africa ///
In 1904 my maternal grandmother’s paternal
grandmother, Ella Lurie (nee Gutman) stayed behind
in the port city of Libau, Latvia (now Liepāja) while
her husband, Elkanan left to seek opportunity. They
spoke Yiddish (and perhaps German and Russian),
had no formal education or training, and no money.
The Luries were a part of an already numerous
diaspora of Ashkenazi Jews, Yidn, who were
leaving the Russian Empire as refugees. They were
a subjugated population of the Russian Empire, but
when they reached Southern Africa to seek a better
life for themselves, they were inserted close to the
top of a rapidly reifying racial hierarchy.
Elkanan landed in Cape Town, in the British
Cape Colony, and started trading goods, buying
items on credit and reselling them making small
profits. Two years later, he got a bank loan and
a merchant credit to set up a general goods shop
in Kraaifontein. Ella then made the journey with
their two-year-old son and kept the shop running
until the 1940s when my granny would visit, as she
recounted to me. Kraaifontein is now an outlying
suburb of Cape Town, but back then, it was a small
town on the train line from Cape Town to Paarl.
There were only two white families in town when
the Lurie’s settled there, the Jewish shopkeepers
and a Christian family who ran the hotel.
In this context, Yidn were white: they could own—
rather than rent—property and businesses, they
were given loans and credit, they could work in
white-reserved positions, they could travel freely
32
without a passbook, they could vote and run for
office (once naturalized). Between 1907 and 1910,
there were six openly Jewish mayors of prominent
South African cities, though they were English and
German Jews, rather than Yidn.
Economically and politically,
Ashkenazi Jews have been white in
Southern Africa from the moment
they stepped out of the customs
house.
In an oral interview, Geoff Sifrin recounts that
his grandfather told a story from when he just
disembarked in Southern Africa and walking
along the sidewalk some Black people had quickly
stepped aside for him and averted their eyes, he was
astonished. “In Russia, nobody would have stepped
aside for a Jew!” (The Wandering Jew, 2010).
While the Yidn were arriving in South Africa, fleeing
intense overcrowding and poverty, violent and deadly
racial discrimination, forced removals and massacres,
they settled in a South Africa in which the British
were usurping more land through wars against the
Pedi, Tswana, Zulu, and Xhosa polities, and where
the Boer (later self-re-identified as Afrikaners)
Republics were dispossessing the Venda.
After 250 years of these wars of dispossession, the
end of the Anglo-Boer war in 1902 solidified the
British Empire’s control over the region and allowed
them to fashion society in such a way as to ensure
their supremacy, and increase their profits. The
alliance of the “two White races,” British and Boers,
was based on an extension of “the supremacy of the
White man,” and was reflected in political debates
and legal plans that resulted in the 1910 Union of
South Africa.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
Joining white society ///
Elkana and Ella arrived, like many other Yidn,
at this moment. Not into a settler state with a
homogenous white identity, but with a white
alliance that specifically made space for cultural,
linguistic, and religious difference within its
understanding of whiteness. The tacit agreement
was that whatever infighting occurs between white
groups—and tensions remained between English
and Afrikaners throughout the 20th century
including divided loyalties on who to support
during the world wars—they would be united as a
settler class based on what Tunisian anticolonial
theorist Albert Memmi describes as a consciousness
of “profit, privilege, usurpation” (The Colonized and
the Colonizer, 1957).
More economically well off and politically minded
Jews than my ancestors were aware of this move
and sought to become considered as another white
group. As one pertinent example, in many an
editorial of the leading English language Jewish
newspaper, the South African Jewish Chronicle,
Lionel Goldsmid in 1905 explored and encouraged
fellow Jews to “lead a White man’s life,” stating
firmly that Jews, “if they wish to act up to their
name, are pledged to maintain the superiority of
the white man in this country.”
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Fig.1
He had picked up that to be accepted
into the settler class, Jews could not
just be white, they had to act white
too. So they donned a white mask.
This was not always simple for newly arrived Yidn,
as British settlers brought their antisemitism from
home. In the early 1900s, Yidn were often regarded
as dirty Others, described sometimes in national
media, and perhaps more worryingly by state
officials, public health officials, and politicians, as
“slovenly,” “unkempt,” “unwashed peregrinators of
disease,” “parasites,” “depraved,” and “scum,” were
scapegoated as responsible for illicit trading, and
speaking a “disreputable gibberish.”
There were early worries from Ashkenazi
communities that Yiddish (as it is written in
Hebrew), would be considered an “Asiatic” language
and, hence, that Yidn would be treated as “Asians”
for the purposes of immigration, business, and
later the vote. This concern was raised again as the
“Jewish Question” in the 1930s. In the early 1900s,
it prompted the formation of the Jewish Boards
of Deputies whose first project was to get Yiddish
recognized as a European language. Fully invested
into showing the colonial state their alliance,
33
they put their effort into uplifting poor Jews, ie
making sure, as Riva Krut describes, they “lived a
white man’s life,” and assisted in the “deportation
of unwanted Jews”—mostly Jewish sex workers,
and illicit liquor traders—(Building a Home an
a Community, 1985). They also worked with the
state to provide Yiddish speaking customs officials
for immigration checks, worked with the colonial
police to arrest Jews involved in criminal activity,
and with Jewish orphanages to ensure that Jewish
children weren’t being raised by African women or
with African children.
Similarly, the South African Zionist Federations’ first
major local success consisted in being recognized
as the “Jewish consulate in South Africa” to help the
state distinguish between desirable and undesirable
Jews (who did not have a country to represent them).
Their 1905 national congress ran a naturalization
campaign, encouraging Jews in South Africa to act
as model citizens to prove to the British that they
were ready for governance—consciously drawing
links between being colonizers in South Africa and a
desire to colonize Palestine.
This relationship between official Jewish
organizations, most South African Jews, and
antisemitism from the rest of the white settler
society continued through to the end of Apartheid,
with the official organization very weary to
“provoke” existing antisemitic allegations and
doubling down on the Jewish population to “whiten
up” and to “live a white man’s life.” They understood
what Frantz Fanon had later noticed: that for Jews
in European/white society “his actions, his behavior
are the final determinant” (Black Skin, White
Masks, 1952).
The official Jewish community organizations’
use of patronage and policing was deployed both
for disciplining individual lives and the Jewish
collective writ large and functioned to transform
Jews to colonialists, not only inhabiting the
structural position of a settler population but also
34
the ideological and practical allegiance to white
supremacy. Overtime this created, and continues to
maintain, a greater Jewish identification with other
white South Africans, and deepens the divide, both
structurally and psychologically between Jews and
African and Asian communities.
Antisemitism and its lessons ///
Despite ongoing efforts to secure their place in
white society, antisemitism was always around
the corner in its changing guises. Besides, the
early forms of British antisemitism, the 1930s
also brought a rising Afrikaner antisemitism
most virulently expressed through groups such
as the Ossewabrandwag (lit ox wagon sentinel)
that attacked Jewish people and businesses and
protested at docks to prevent further German
Jewish refugees from entering. During Apartheid,
the antisemitism from various sectors of white
society changed form but remained present. In
the 1960s, my mom attended an Afrikaans school
in a small town whose principal, in the morning
assemblies, would go on an anti-Jewish tirade
and encourage a boycott against the local Jewish
businesses, mentioning them by name. My uncle
jokes that he learned to run from having to escape
from the older boys who would beat him up for
being Jewish.
Yidn in South Africa all carry both
intergenerational and personal
trauma: intergenerational trauma
from either the pogroms or holocaust,
or from early experiences in South
Africa, and personal experience with
antisemitism.
And yet, Yidn have never not been white in South
Africa. In the settler colonial context, in a system
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
Fig.2
brutally designed to oppress, dispossess, exploit,
and murder Black people, Jews occupied a position
of security and opportunity. This combination
of a psychology of victimhood combined with a
condition of privilege war turned into a lesson in
self-preservation.
This ethic of self preservation produced heart
wrenching contradictions. In the early 1900s,
Jewish groups of different political persuasions
were involved in raising money and political
support for Jews that were victims of forced
removals in Eastern Europe, and at the same time
bought land in the cities and rural areas of South
Africa was only available due to recent forced
removals (let alone speaking of the colonial land
dispossession). Jews later bought land in parts of
the urban areas made available to white citizens
through the forced removals of the Group Areas
Act. They advocated for and celebrated access to
citizenship rights just as a white only franchise was
instituted and further entrenched between 1910 and
the 1940s. They never wished to “plead on behalf
of undesirables” (Morris Alexander in Cape Times,
1903) with regards to immigration restrictions, only
that Jews were not undesirable.
In my lifetime, elderly Jews would still use racist
slurs in Yiddish to refer to Black people, despite
strong advocacy against antisemitic slurs. The
contradictions are numerous. This lesson—that Jews
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
are always at risk of becoming an underclass again
and that the only solution is to virulently uphold
their position as white by living “a white man’s life”—
has sunk deeply into everyday Jewish life.
The tendency to explain away complicity with
a violent past as a form of protection from
antisemitism can be explained by Steve Biko, South
African freedom fighter and founder of the Black
Consciousness movement. He dismissed ideas of
internal difference within white society from the
perspective of Black liberation: “Basically, the
South African white community is a homogenous
community. It is a community of people who sit to
enjoy a privileged position that they do not deserve,
are aware of this, and therefore spend their time
trying to justify why they are doing so” (“Black
Souls in White Skins?”, 1970).
However, other options have always
been available. Many Yidn have taken
the more difficult path and become
accomplices in the struggle against
white supremacy.
Yeshua Israelstam is an early example. A
Lithuanian born socialist, he founded the Yiddish
35
 speaking branch of the International Socialist
League in South Africa, and raised money for
victims of pogroms in Eastern Europe. He was also a
frequent accomplice to antiracist actions and strikes,
and guest to the founding of the South African
Native National Congress in 1912 (the forerunner to
the African National Congress, ANC). He argued
in the Jewish and national press against racist
thinking.
Another example is Ray Alexander Simmons. She
worked for the communist party and the militant
Food and Canning Workers Union until she was
banned in the 1950s. She then joined Lilian Ngoyi,
Florence Mkhize, and others to found the multiracial
South African Federation of Women in 1954, which
launched a major pass strike and the women’s
charter. Exiled from the country, she moved to
Lusaka to work with the ANC headquarters in exile.
Simons rejected parochialism, an approach taken
by many in these later generations: “I didn’t think
of myself as being Jewish, because I just felt that I
belong to the world. I am an internationalist” (Milton
Shain and Richard Mendelshohn, The Jews in
Southern Africa, 2008).
There are many such biographies of radical Jews
who threw their lot in with the African majority
in fighting against oppression. It is true and often
stated that proportionally more Jews were involved
in the struggle against Apartheid than any other
group. For example, Jews made up over 8% of those
accused of Treason at the 1956 Treason Trial despite
never constituting even close to 1% of the population.
This is an important recognition that many Jews
refused the lessons explored above. However many
Jews were involved though, they were still only a
tiny minority of the Jewish community and were
often socially and even officially excluded from
the organized Jewish life. From calls to exclude
Israelstam in 1904, to banning anti-zionist Jews
from Jewish conferences in 2018, there are common
practices to squeeze out the radical recognitions that
our history of victimization should lead not to self-
preservation, but to work in solidarity with all those
who resist oppression and fight for freedom.
A 21st century Yid? ///
It has been almost 120 years since Elkanan and
Ella Lurie arrived in South Africa. I am a fifth
generation Jew in South Africa, but am I a Yid?
Acculturating to whiteness has forced, required, and
rewarded Ashkenazi Jews to lose or adapt many
parts of our culture into the strangle settler blend.
My Yiddish is a set of idioms and exclamations
rather than a language, Klemzer is gone, the
36
landsmanshaftn (hometown societies) are forgotten,
bundist organizing for a socialist and antifascist
struggle against antisemitism has disappeared. This
is an immense and painful cultural loss that can be
placed at the feet of global antisemitism and Zionism
and, in South Africa, at the feet of whiteness as the
tribute it demanded for its barbed rewards. Our
ancestors would not recognize us.
We cannot turn back the clocks though, nor would
we want to. Reclaiming our cultural heritage back
from assimilation does not constitute resistance to
whiteness. It is important work for ourselves but
inconsequential to the structures of oppression and
exploitation.
Black people are resisting whiteness throughout
the country, and the world. From everyday acts of
resistance, to adhoc collaborations, and decade-long
movement building such as Abahlali baseMjondolo
(shack dwellers), in every sector of society there are
pockets of revolutionary, generative practices.. Fig.5
As 21st century Jews, we can perhaps be recognized
by our ancestors through the embrace of the lessons
learned by Israeltam, Simmons, and others: that
antisemitism and other forms of racism come from
the same white supremacist politics, that systems
of oppression should be fought whether you are the
intended target or not, that resistance is possible,
and that in South Africa, we should throw our lot in
with emancipatory politics and be accomplices to the
struggle. It’s time to take off our white masks. ■
Mitchel Joffe Hunter works in a public library. Previously he
lectured in Sociology at the University of the Western Cape
where he completed his MA in Sociology, which theorized
the historical transformation of Jews in South Africa from
colonizers to colonialists through their mobilization of race
and racism in the early 20th century. Mitchel has been involved
in student and labor activism, as well as Palestinian solidarity
organizing through South African Jews for a Free Palestine.
He tries to intervene in Jewish community discourse, but isn’t
always welcome.
Fig.1 Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain’s 2008 illustrated history of The
Jews in South Africa held in front of the Garden’s Community Centre, which hosts
the Jewish Museum, the Holocaust and Genocide Centre, a Jewish Library,
synagogue, and many offices of Jewish organizations behind an entrance with
airportesque security features including bag and body scanners, and ID verification
and home address verification.
Fig.2 Ray Alexander Simons (center) with officials from the Food and Canning
Workers Union. / Mendelsohn and Shain, The Jews in South Africa, 2008.
Fig.3 The 156 people accused in the 1956 Treason Trial with ten of the thirteen
Jews highlighted./ Photo by Eli Weinberg (available at
https://www.ethnicradicals.co.za/treason-trialists). Fig.3
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 37
 GADJONESS: AN UNCOUNTED
SHADE OF WHITENESS
MARGARETA MATACHE
ARTWORKS BY MAŁGORZATA MIRGA-TAS

The Roma question is central to this issue. On the one hand, narrative from the periphery towards dialog
Romani people are often deceivingly perceived as white in and solidarity with other racialized communities
the U.S.-centric epistemology, on the other hand, “gadjoness” across the globe.
tends to transform the many shades of whiteness described in
this issue into a single one, complicit with the implacable pan- The seeds of gadjoness ///
European processes of anti-Roma structural racism. In this Soon after the arrival of our ancestors in European
text, Margareta Matache provides a brief history of gadjoness, territories, European gadje began to cast Romani
with an attempt to situate it in the broader framework of race, families and groups in and as an absolute periphery.
racialization, and slavery. The peaceful arrival of the Romani people was not
met with a warm welcome. Notably, the settlement
Across eras, political regimes, and civil and political or movement of the Romani people in the territories
society, Roma people have endured the challenges of Europe did not mirror or mimic Europeans’
of overlapping peripheries: an absolute periphery horrific means to institute white settler colonies,
of a people labeled forever inferior and criminal occupation, and exploitation outside Europe. Yet,
outcasts in all societies; an auxiliary periphery early on, European sovereigns employed two
of a dispersed people that cuts across and gets predominant models of supremacist projects:
amplified within hierarchies established between ownership over Roma people and exclusive gadjo
superpowers, semiperipheral, and peripheral control and living in their lands.
states; and a shunned periphery as an uncharted
racialized people in global spaces of periphery and The Romanian principalities of Moldova and
solidarity against whiteness. Wallachia were the pioneering European
establishments to implement customs, laws, and
However, the enduring power dynamics and practices of (proto)racial slavery. They seized and
processes that have pushed Roma people into zones exploited Roma people within their territories
of inferiority, non-humanness, and criminality have and crafted a division of labor, power, and social
simultaneously upheld white Europeans in zones hierarchy; all while placing gadje at the top. The
of normativity, humanness, and civilization. This enslavers—the Crown, the Orthodox Church, and the Fig.1
has resulted in the formation of two relational, nobility—instituted the Roma as the natural slave in
hierarchical, and antagonistic identities. the 14th and 15th centuries by setting our ancestors
apart as property and nonhumans and weaponizing For instance, archival documents I found in my also became an issue of interest and a marker
characteristics such as nomadism, skin color, ethnic county, Ilfov, included detailed descriptions of of identity in travelogs and the local academia.
distinctiveness, language, and other group traits. fugitive enslaved Roma from estates. Enslavers For instance, Mihail Kogalniceanu, well-known
In this text, I discuss the construction often sought institutional support to recapture and celebrated abolitionist, described Vătrașii
of gadjoness, an early shade of enslaved individuals, and in their descriptions Roma girls as beautiful, with skin like tar, uniting
would often mention features such as black eyes, “the features of the Greek and the fire of their
whiteness, crafted as a specific During and after the era of slavery, black hair and the color of their skin. An example ancestors.”
hierarchy between European gadje skin color became one of the is a statement that reads, “Two nights ago, a g*psy
washerwoman escaped from the estate; her true In fact, this system of inherited bondage,
and Roma. apparent markers used to identify name is Safta. She is 30 years old, short and thin, characterized by exploitation, extraction,
with black skin, two spots on the cheek and one on violence, and racialization, gradually created
and ascribe some groups of the nose, and several items of good clothing. She is the foundation of a particular form of ethnic and
My objective is to contribute to co-centering of the enslaved Roma, a major element accompanied by Negoiță, a g*psy of chef Petrache social stratification, establishing a distinct and
Roma experience in European and global history, Perățean(u), same age, medium height, black skin.” lasting consciousness of gadjoness among gadjo
specifically in the context of racialization and in the long-lasting bond between Despite the diversity within the Roma community, Romanians.
whiteness. By doing so, I aim to shift the Roma
gadjoness and whiteness physical appearance, particularly phenotype,

38 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 39

 Fig.2

40 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 41

Other European establishments took a divergent
approach, one of rejection, employing various
tactics, such as expulsions, prohibitions on Romani
families and groups from entering their territories,
or G*psy hunts and killings. These methods became
paradigmatic expressions of the sovereign power
to kill and, later, the state’s “murderous function”—
understood also as indirect murder, which Michel
Foucault defines as “exposing someone to death,
increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite
simply, political death, expulsion, rejection…” (Society
Must Be Defended, 1976). Mass expulsions, entry bans,
and killings aimed to achieve absolute separation and
spatial purity, leading to the racial cleansing of some
neighborhoods, public spaces, cities, or provinces,
effectively purging them of Romani people, thus
establishing gadjikano zones. Although the language
of laws, the historical and political contexts, and the
levels of intentionality varied, the end goal of creating
gadjikano zones persisted.
Similarly to the system of slavery, some oppressors,
witnesses, observers, or travelers also framed,
narrated, and justified the ‘must die’ policies and
practices targeting the Romani people, and in those
processes, also normalized and solidified gadjoness.
In the 1500s, a French lawyer claimed that “[i]t was
very necessary to remove these terrible persons
from the simple common people on whom they had
played a thousand tricks and subtle swindles.” In
Germany, representatives of some provinces labeled
Romani people as “bands of harmful vermin.” The
essentialized depictions involved dehumanization,
criminalization, and association of Romani people,
primarily nomadic families, with an inferior “way
of life.” Notably, many of these accounts did not
explicitly mention gadjo Europeans. The oppositional
narratives of the ‘G*psies” were constructed against
an unnamed and invisible white gadjo portrayed
as “superior and civilized,” gradually establishing a
widely accepted standard and norm.
Epistemic violence accompanied violent policies
and practices in solidifying this shade of whiteness
in stone, as well as other forms of whiteness.
White supremacy became arguably the most overt,
explicitly stated, and openly defended of the 19th-
century theories of race across Europe.
Although the major race theories did not target
Romani people, our ancestors did not escape
their epistemic violence. For instance, Arthur de
Gobineau, a highly influential author of racial
ideology, categorized Romani people as pariahs
and essentialized Romani physical and cultural
characteristics to oppose theories regarding the
42
influence of climate on the physical changes of races.
In 1853, Gobineau claimed that “[t]he Bohemians,
or Z*ngaris [...] show the same early development
as the Hindus, who are akin to them; and under the
most inclement skies, in Russia and in Moldavia,
they still keep the expression and shape of the face
and the physical proportions, as well as the ideas and
customs, of the pariahs.”
Prior to the 19th century, other scientists, travelers,
and philosophers were also intentional in linking
characteristics related to our ancestry, phenotype,
and identity to an idea of race (or protorace),
introducing narratives of what I call paired
racialization—a process that ties together two
racialized groups to transfer the prejudice tied to
one against the other—to boost whiteness further. In
1775, Immanuel Kant claimed that “[t]he olive-yellow
color of the skin of the Indian, the true g*psy color
which lies at the base of the more or less dark brown
of other eastern peoples, is also just as characteristic
and persistent in regeneration as the black color
of the N*gro, and together with the remaining
formation and the distinct natural disposition
appears to be just as much the effect of a dry heat, as
the latter appears to be that of a humid heat.”
Thus, Gobineau and Kant, along with other
scholars, employed phenotype, along with
other traits and tropes, as a joint element of
reciprocal race-making of different communities
to further strengthen whiteness. However, the
racialization processes of various Romani groups
were not exclusively based on phenotype. In Fig.3
some geographical locations and contexts, other
common characteristics or identity markers such as
language, crafts, family history in the community,
clothes, or itinerancy were also weaponized to cultural norms, and all spheres of society, keeping Phenotype has remained a marker used in
identify or target Romani families or groups. But Roma people in the absolute periphery of the identifying and targeting some Roma groups,
the underlying purpose of establishing whiteness corpus of protected legal subjects and social families, and individuals including in practices of
not only as “looking white” but more so as a structures—reinforcing gadje’s “legal legitimation police racial profiling, everyday racism, hate crimes,
performance of culture and an enactment of power of expectations of power and control” that Cheryl hate speech, and more.
(cf. Steve Garner, The Politics of Whiteness, 2007) Harris refers to in Steve Garner’s Politics of
remained in place. Whiteness (2007).
Generally, the systems of knowledge and power
intersected and fortified each other in normalizing On both the micro and macro levels, gadjo powers However it is important to note that,
gadjoness and all other shades of whiteness. Thus, have maintained and remodeled the old legacies phenotype has not represented a
when we discuss the history of whiteness and and traditions of rejecting or offensive against
racism, I suggest we also explore the history of Roma people’s proximity, blending, and bonding fundamental element of identification
Romani people as a point of reference. within geographic, national, religious, or cultural
boundaries. They have also preserved, updated,
or racialization of all Romani groups
The continuum of gadjoness /// and reshaped the fictionalized sovereign race-made and individuals; on the contrary, in
The birth of nation-states, the rule of law, human G*psy as an identity, religion, security, contagion, or
rights, and democracy did not bury gadjoness and biological threat—not an adversary against Us (gadje) the U.K. or the U.S., some institutions
racism in the past. Instead, they have continuously
been instated in the framework of state affairs,
but as the face of the absolute unwanted, savage, and
antithetical racial Other rejected by Us (gadje).
categorize Romani people as
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 43
 white, as do members of some
Romani groups in Nordic or Western
European countries and beyond.
Nevertheless, appearing white or passing as
white has not granted power to Romani groups
or individuals, although in certain circumstances,
it may have yielded limited white privileges. But
indeed, manifold elements of the racialization of
the Romani people, whether based on phenotype,
itinerancy, or other characteristics, often
intersectional, have given rise to this distinct form
of whiteness. Yet, gadjoness quietly or violently
has persisted in norms, laws, policies, institutions,
values, beliefs, actions, attitudes, research, and
in all aspects of our lives designed by and for
hegemony.
Today, states aim to have “a positive influence”
on their citizens’ lives, but full citizenship is often
granted only to particular categories of white
individuals. In some cases, states employ similar
tactics and methods to target both Roma and other
racialized groups using. Although in the age of
human rights, the methods and justifications of
racism have become more sophisticated, states have
refined the methods of “killing” and their legal and
moral rationales. Yet, while the era of slavery may
be in the past, present-day anti-Roma expulsions
and entry bans echo similar historical tactics,
technologies, and narratives of sovereign power.
In general, contemporary state’s offensive toward
Roma people has not been fictionalized as a defense
of the state or the society against a conquering
or life-threatening G*psy enemy, as in the case of
other racialized communities. ​​However, among the
tools legitimizing “the acceptability of putting to
death,” the State has at times placed Roma people
in a state of exception, security, or emergency.
For instance, in Italy, the government’s Council of
Ministers issued a decree in 2008 titled “Declaration
of the State of Emergency with Regard to Nomad
Fig.4 Community Settlements in the Territories of
Campania, Lazio, and Lombardia regions.” In effect,
the decree, and the accompanying decrees designed
for other regions, paralleled the presence of Roma
people in Italian cities with a natural disaster or
catastrophe, giving contentious powers to prefects
and other local authorities to solve the “emergency.”
Thus, Italian leaders, as well as leaders of other
EU States, did not shy away from using the claim
of security and emergence to break the EU laws,
democracy, and human rights principles in order to
shield their borders from EU-mobile Roma people,
44 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
as well as other migrants, refugees, and other
people who were not considered worthy of the
white European category.
Other States and stakeholders persist in
implementing both overt and veiled manifestations
of anti-Roma racism. While some have abandoned
explicit language of white superiority, the
deeply ingrained and long-held myth of gadje’s
superiority over Roma continues to manifest in
actions, practices, laws, policies, racially-coded
vocabulary, and more. Gadjoness remains implicit
and normalized as the prototypical standards—the
blueprint—the norm within societies, cultures,
policies, laws, and scholarships, furthering
marginalizing and relegating Roma people to the
absolute periphery. ■
Margareta (Magda) Matache is a Lecturer on Social and
Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health, and the co-founder and Director of the Roma Program
at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard
University. She is also a member of the Lancet Commission
on Reparations and Redistributive Justice and the O’Neill-
Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination
and Global Health. She is the co-editor (with Jacqueline
Bhabha and Andrzej Mirga) of Realizing Roma Rights (2017), an
investigation of anti-Roma racism in Europe, in collaboration
with, as well as (with Jacqueline Bhabha and Caroline Elkins)
Time for Reparations (2021), a volume exploring the issue of
reparations across a broad range of historical and geographic
contexts and academic disciplines.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a Polish-Romani visual artist, sculptor,
painter, educator and activist. Born in 1978, she lives and
works in Czarna Góra, a Romani village at the foot of the Tatra
Mountains, where she also works as an educator and activist.
She combines various techniques to talk about the convoluted
Roma and Roma-Polish identity and show the daily life of her
community. Her work explores themes around history of the
Romani people and transcultural and transnational experience
of being a Roma.
All artworks by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.
Fig.1 & 2 Out Of Egypt (Wyjście z Egiptu), 2021.
Fig.3 My Mom, 2020. / Photo by Marcin Tas.
Fig.4 Sisters, 2019. / Photo by Marcin Tas.
45
 ON PERIPHERAL WHITENESS
AND BEING CENTRAL
EASTERN EUROPEAN
KASIA NARKOWICZ
Through three specific space-time cases considering ‘white’
Poles as racialized subjects, Kasia Narkowicz demonstrates
how shades of whiteness are formed contextually. The urban
outskirts of Stockholm in the 1990s, the space of the 2017
EU referendum in Britain, or the recent borderland separating
Poland from Belarus and Ukraine are three distinct sets
of conditions through which Polish proximity to Western
European whiteness evolves from aspirational to effective.
Whiteness and Europeanness so starkly marks
out Central Eastern European identity because at
different times throughout our history the promise
of being fully embraced as Europeans, with all
that it grants, has been dangling in front of us
as a carrot. And no matter how eagerly we have
responded, implementing imposed shock therapies,
voting almost unanimously to enter the European
Union, or integrating as model migrants in Western
Europe, it was never quite enough. But still, it
harbored a promise of the possibility of being white
enough that tipped us over in our solidarities, and
we became the keen handmaidens of European
white supremacy.
Being Eastern European in Sweden: 1992///
As Stuart Hall argued, race is a “floating
signifier” (1997), which means that it is a marker
of difference that is shifting and not stable.
Within the racial divisions that still cloud our
contemporary life, those from Eastern Europe
have historically occupied a much more fragile
position in relation to whiteness than our Western
European white counterparts. But we have still
been embraced, if conditionally, by whiteness. The
complexity of Central Eastern European whiteness
has haunted me my entire life, starting as subtle
realizations when I first migrated illegally from
Poland to Sweden in 1992 as a child migrant
following my mum who, some years earlier, left
Poland in search of work.
In Sweden, we were all poor, mostly first- and
some second-generation immigrant and refugee
children, housed in concrete gray apartment blocks
46
at the edges of Sweden’s capital, Stockholm. Part
of Miljonprogrammet, the Swedish public housing
program introduced by the Social Democrats during
the 1960s, was meant to encourage affordable
collective living with common laundry rooms,
common waste facilities, common playgrounds,
and relatively low rents for all. In the early 1990s,
the residents in these suburbs were a unique
amalgamation of disastrous global politics; Iraqis,
Afghans, Chileans, Somalis, and Bosniaks fleeing
dictatorships and wars, and then us Poles, escaping
the aftermath of the post-communist transition to
capitalism.
We lived together in conditions not always mirroring
the promises of Swedish welfare, sometimes with
cockroaches in our kitchens that many of us would
see for the first time. We were uprooted, having
often left behind family and friends. We had names
that the Swedish struggled to pronounce and we
lived in a bubble far away from white Swedish
people, mainly communicating either in English or
sign language with one another until, one by one,
we would be placed in an integration class in one
of the local neighborhood schools. In our minds, we
were the same. We were all undesirable and our
small kids’ bodies already knew that and, in that,
there was solidarity and true friendships.
But not long after starting school something that
would disrupt our innocent togetherness started
happening; as a Central Eastern European I was
being singled out and given different, better,
opportunities than my ‘darker’ friends from the
concrete blocks. While it didn’t register critically in
my tween mind back then, it nevertheless taught
me my first lesson about racial hierarchies and
whiteness.
As an immigrant from Poland, my
whiteness, however shifting and what
Manuela Boatcă calls “less than”
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
in The Eastern Margins of Empire
(2007), still held the promise of
assimilation to Swedish whiteness.
When skipping school or not handing in school
assignments on time, I was met with teacher’s
disapproval and disciplined for it. Cutting alongside
the frustration of not being allowed to skip school
as much as the other immigrant children from
outside Europe, was another, more profound and
desperately desired feeling; one of belonging.
Of being potentially good enough to warrant a
punishment, good enough to be seen by the Swedish
teachers. One can only disappoint if there is an
expectation to do better, and this was not granted
to my other diasporic friends. Our difference? I was
from Poland, Central Eastern Europe and the others
were from either further east; Bosnia, Serbia,
Turkey, or altogether far off from what could be
comfortably embraced by European whiteness.
Despite that our histories were entangled and
solidarities were present in these shared histories
(as mapped in James Mark’s 1989: A Global
History of Eastern Europe, 2019) Central Eastern
Europeans differentiated “us” from “them” in order
to demarcate and protect an imagined belonging.
Those coming from the former Yugoslavia and
Turkey would be spoken about as less civilized,
less clean, and more criminal: exactly these same
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Fig.1
racialized tropes that we were trying to scrub off
our migrant bodies and that have been used to
describe our region for centuries.
When some of Eastern Europe first joined the
European Union in 2004, the divisions within our
region took on a whole new set of meanings. Poles,
Hungarians, and Czechs were among those groups
chosen to enter the EU first, followed only some
years later and with less generous immigration
benefits with Bulgarians and Romanians. Arriving
en masse to seek work opportunities, often over-
qualified for the jobs they agreed to undertake,
the Poles quickly became a model minority. Not too
different but still occupying a lower position in the
racial hierarchy, they did not disturb the workings
of racial capitalism; they were to be grateful to be
doing below living-wage labor and enjoy benefits
that migrants from outside Europe were often
barred from accessing. But then Brexit happened,
followed by Covid and the bubble burst for Central
Eastern Europeans.
Being Eastern European in Britain: 2017 ///
Britain’s EU referendum was a way of barricading
and blaming immigrants for a decline in living
standards accompanied by an increasingly
aggressive political climate. And for the first time,
it was Eastern Europeans, until now protected by
their status as EU migrants, that felt the impact
of British hostile environment policies first
47

Fig.2
introduced in 2012 by the Conservative government.
Since Poland joined the European Union in
2004, overwhelmingly voting for inclusion or
“return back” to what then President Aleksander
Kwaśniewski referred to as “the European family,”
a steady flow of Poles arrived in Britain with one-
way tickets in hand. They undertook hard work,
often low-paid and precarious, soon becoming the
country’s largest foreign-born population, peaking
at one million just before the Brexit referendum.
Although there is no doubt that we enjoyed
privileges not available to migrants from outside
the EU, our Eastern Europeanness was a marker of
difference that traversed racial divides in complex
ways: white enough and European enough to be
allowed entry into Britain, but not white enough
to escape being racialized as what József Böröcz
48
analyzes as “dirty white” (“‘Eurowhite’ Conceit,
‘Dirty White’ Resentment,” 2021). The British tabloid
press frequently reported on dangerous Polish lorry
drivers, criminal gangs and Eastern Europeans
eating swans (a historical trope at various points
attached to different racialized groups). Poles
in Britain are hesitant to speak of being treated
differently, partly because they aspire to whiteness
and Europeanness that continue to be conditional.
Eastern Europe, historically and still today, is
narrated as in a permanent state of ‘catching-up’
with Western modernity.
Here, again, is that promise of
belonging that is never quite achieved
but therefore so sought after.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
Daily microaggressions where Eastern Europeans
are disciplined or ridiculed for their language,
accents or their “unpronounceable” names are
common. Having one’s name butchered countless
times during the day and being told that one
“doesn’t look like an Eastern European” in the way
of a compliment, grinds one’s sense of dignity and
belonging. What until now was continuous, but
bearable, became more and more virulent in the
lead up to the EU exit vote, resulting in increased
attacks on the Polish community in Britain.
If Brexit was a first realization for many Central
Eastern Europeans that their whiteness was
more precarious than initially hoped for, the
global Covid-19 pandemic cemented that. Many
Eastern Europeans are employed in so-called “key
professions” doing jobs that are essential yet often
offering little security but high levels of potential
exploitation. These jobs include nurses, bus drivers,
food and parcel deliveries, teachers, and cleaners.
When Covid hit, these workers were unable to
shield themselves at home because their essential
jobs required them to go out to work each day. Even
home, often with shared occupancy, was not a safe
space and government guidance overlooked the
very specific circumstances and needs of migrant
essential laborers. When most citizens were shielded
in their homes, labor migrants from Eastern Europe
were flown into countries like Germany and Britain
on charter flights to pick fruits and work on farms.
For many Polish and other Eastern Europeans
working in factories, their already fragile everyday
life became that much harder when accused by
locals of not following Covid guidelines. When
going back and forth between work in the factory
where no distancing measures were kept and their
overcrowded accommodation where bedrooms were
shared with people working for different factories
across town, physical distance was not possible.
For the Polish community in Britain working in
frontline roles, the convergence of Brexit and
Covid had serious impacts on financial security,
health and mental wellbeing, social isolation, and
plans for the future. Some of its members suffered
deep depression, others made firm plans to return
to Poland, hoping to counter the lack of family,
friends and support that Covid laid bare in Britain.
While returning “home” can be undoubtedly a hard
choice to make, it nevertheless is a possibility for
a border crossing not afforded to other migrants
from outside Europe. In this, the relative whiteness
of Central Eastern Europeans does not only allow
them to cross borders, it also gives them the
mandate to engage in border fortification and thus
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
be an active participant in the ongoing European
border imperialism.
Being non-European in
Central Eastern Europe: 2022 ///
Cutting through beautiful national parks is the
border between Central and Eastern Europe,
also the Eastern border of the EU. In the words
of Nicholas de Genova, it is the site of a “border
spectacle” (“Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’,” 2013):
the practice of exclusion, but also of inclusion
through exclusion. The Polish border has become a
contested space, depending on where one’s point of
entry is. If crossing at the various open checkpoints
in the southeastern part of Poland from Ukraine,
the border customs website helpfully maps out over
twenty-five border crossing points, specifying the
waiting time at each. A few kilometers to the North
is the Białowieża National Park, a dense forest
and home to thousands of bisons. In it, is another
border, between Poland and Belarus. Each border,
Ukraine–Poland and Belarus–Poland, is around
500 kilometers long. Who gets to cross Polish
borders into the EU depends on two things that are
intimately welded; where on that stretch of the 1,000
kilometers one finds itself, more North or more
South, and how one gets racialized.
At the end of 2021, when news of Polish border
guards responding with violent push backs to the
growing crowds at the Belarus border started
circulating, there was no lack of international
condemnation for the barbaric handling of the
migrants. It was indeed horrific when volunteers
at the Polish–Belarus border started finding bodies
of people in the dense forest. Migrants had died
in the forest in subzero temperatures and among
them were children and young people. Every day
there are new updates about people being found
from Grupa Granica (Border Group), an informal
group of volunteers providing medical, legal, and
humanitarian assistance on the Eastern border. But
the violence at Europe’s Eastern borderlands is part
of a larger, deeper, violence that is what Harsha
Walia calls “border imperialism” (Undoing Border
Imperialism, 2013), making European borders the
most deadly, both those in Western and Eastern
Europe. Still, whatever happens in the East of the
EU is always going to be read as less civilized.
Which is why the claim to Europeanness, and by
extension, to whiteness, is crucial for Poland and
thus also for Poles and the larger Central Eastern
European region. Having eagerly joined the EU
in 2004, Poland has since become one of its most
staunch defenders. Because, not dissimilar to how I
was lifted out of the crowd of undesirable diasporic
49
Fig.3
migrant children back in the 1990s, it lifts these
countries out of an undesirable crowd and allows
them access into Europeanness. But this is not
unconditional, for it comes with the expectation
that Poland and Poles will be the guardians of that
enclosed community.
In that, Poles and Poland are not
innocent or passive receivers of
European benevolence, just like
we never have been innocent of
engaging in racism despite being
racialized ourselves within Europe.
There is a long history of Central Eastern Europe,
placing itself at the heart of Europe, capitalizing on
its in-betweenness to make its claim to whiteness
through racial exclusions. From engaging as the
perpetrators in murders of its Jewish and Roma
populations, to its grand (if unsuccessful) ambitions
to colonize parts of Africa, Poland has often
50
chosen to align with or aspire towards Western
European nations as is teased out in the work
of scholars Marta Grzechnik (“Aspirations of an
Imperial Space,” 2018) and Bolaji Balogun (“Polish
Lebensraum,” 2018). Consequently, the push backs
of Black and brown people at the Belarus border is
only the most recent example of when Poles got the
chance to racially distinguish themselves from those
placed below them and jumped at the opportunity to
advance in the racial hierarchy.
Many of the migrants are Muslims or migrants
assumed to be Muslims who, despite small numbers,
have in the last decade become the national folk
devil in Poland, supposedly threatening European
Christian civilization as the Polish right-wing
populist government would argue in their bid to
“save Europe.” Those migrants who lose their lives
on the Poland–Belarus border are often buried
in an old Muslim cemetery in Bohoniki, a Tatar
village in Eastern Poland. The Polish Tatars, while
stepping up to conduct burials for Europe’s most
unwanted according to the Islamic requirements,
also occupy a complex racial position in Poland and
have themselves Othered Muslim migrants when
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
distancing themselves as the white, indigenous,
and thus more deserving Muslim community. Little
hints at this tension more than a jarring sign that
hangs just meters away from the mosque where
the burials are held, it reads: “Thank you for your
service and the protection of our border.”
To Europe yes, but only with our dead ///
As late Polish scholar Maria Janion described in
her work Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna (Uncanny
Slavdom, 2006), the invention of the concept of
Central Eastern Europe was intended for the
purpose of marking out countries like Poland and
stress their cultural closeness to the West. Janion
also wrote another book in the context of Poland
joining the European Union, or as the narrative
went “rejoining” to where it always belonged. The
book is called Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi
umarłymi, which translates to To Europe yes, but
only with our dead. When she was writing, “our
dead” was mainly designating Jewish people. Now,
our dead, those who die and continue to die because
of both our precarity and our complicity with
whiteness, must include the most recent victims
of European border violence in Central Eastern
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Fig.4
Europe; those stuck at the border between Belarus
and Poland that has been termed both a “graveyard”
and a “migrant hunting ground.” ■
Kasia Narkowicz is a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University
London. Her research interests are migration, borders, and
Eastern Europe. Kasia’s recent work explores the complex
positionality of Eastern European migrants in the UK, who
experience racism and are also invested in racial exclusions.
She is currently working on an edited book entitled
Migration and Race in Central and Eastern Europe: Decolonial
Perspectives (forthcoming, Routledge).
Fig.1 Residential neighborhood of Fittja in the outskirts of Stockholm, built as part
of the Miljonprogrammet and where a majority of the residents are immigrants. /
Photo by Holger Ellgaard (2007).
Fig.2 Silent march in honor of Arek Jozwik, a 40 year old Polish migrant worker
murdered by English teenagers in Harlow town center on August 27, 2016. / Photo
by Alan Denney on September 3, 2016.
Fig.3 The Polish army guarding the militarized border between Belarus and the
European Union, while thousands of exiled people attempt to enter Poland. / Photo
by the Wojska Obrony Terytorialnej (so-called “Polish Territorial Defence Forces”)
on November 15, 2021.
Fig.4 Small church, set up in a welcoming center for Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
/ Photo by ProPics Canada Media Ltd (March 2022).
51
 MESTIZAJE: WHEN THE SHADES
DISSIMULATE WHITENESS
A CONVERSATION WITH MÓNICA G. MORENO FIGUEROA
Insisting on the many “shades of whiteness” always bears
the risk of making whiteness as a racial project disappear.
As such, this conversation with Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa
about mestizaje (the ideology of racial mixture in so-called
“Latin America”) became urgent. Our discussion focuses on
how mestizaje came about historically, how it dissimulates the
settler colonial conditions of Abya Yala, and how it constitutes a
faulty national assimilationist project in Mexico and other states.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: In this issue, we’re trying to
articulate the many shades of white(ness), which
mostly means showing that whiteness is more
complex than what it’s usually painted to be. But
this also means that we should reveal whiteness
in systems of racialization that have deliberately
hidden it. This is the context for this conversation
about mestizaje with you Mónica.
If we begin to consider whiteness in the way it’s
conceptualized at a global scale, we are forced to
recognize that we are strongly influenced with the
knowledge production emanating from the settler
colony we call “the United States of America” (not
be confused with “the United States of Mexico,”
which we’ll talk about in just a moment!). This
has a strong consequence on the way racialization
operates in Mesoamerica since the geographies
situated south of the U.S. border and the people
who come from them, indistinctly, are flattened
into a single racial identity (whether it’s been
colonially called “hispanidad” or “latinidad”). Could
you tell us whether this has an impact on the way
Mesoamerican societies think about their systems of
racialization?
MÓNICA G. MORENO FIGUEROA: I think that it is
interesting that we start there, because it is the
first myth we need to dispel in a way. It is the first
idea that we need to make clear that discussions
about race, as you rightly say, do not have to always
have a reference to the United States and the way
it’s discussed there. However, it would be false to
say that there’s no influence and correlations and
flows of information and impact of different ways in
which racism works in different parts of the world.
So in that sense, it is correct to say that there is some
impact, some correlations, and flows. And of course,
52
U.S. imperialism is not just a political thing, it also
has to do with media flows, cultural flows, etc.
The way I like to think about it to separate them,
to clarify our influences, but also to see the
particularities, is to think that every region, area,
country... has a particular racial project, and that
there are different racial projects around the world.
This is the way in which racism gets organized
differently in each place. And we can broadly
say these racial projects are defined in terms of
assimilation and segregation as a first distinctive
way of understanding them. The United States of
America, together with other places like South
Africa, and maybe some similarities with Europe
have to do with logics of segregation, where people
are more physically separated. This, of course, is
not the only thing going on in these places as there
are also some strong assimilation logics, but that
the defining idea is that people should not mix:
they should be separated. Mixture is a big problem
for places where segregation is a tendency that
occupies most of the racist imagination.
On the other hand, in places like Latin
Fig.1
America, mixture is at the center of
how the racial project is organized,
makes us as great or as worse as we are…” is a MGMF: Well, it is obviously a very long history
and assimilation therefore, becomes strong distinction of Latin America from Europe or with many different complicated things. What
a really important process by which the U.S.. This thinking creates different systems of I would say is a very summarized account and,
racialization, if we put it in the terms that you were surely, I’m leaving many details aside, but the way
societies are building themselves, mentioning, and gives us a different entrance to a I like to explain mestizaje is that it is a multiple
creating nations and creating discussion of how racism is experienced in different
parts of the world.
definition idea: it has a multiplicity of versions or of
definitions, and none of them necessarily contradict
different communities. each other, but they are built on top of each other.
LL: One thing mestizaje conveniently dissimulates And sometimes you see one of these versions
as a white ideology, is the settler colonial conditions coming up and sometimes others.
This is important to understand, because it is quite that structure all nation states in Abya Yala (the
different to think about whiteness in a context Americas). We are invited to believe that if there The first understanding that many people have, is
where mixture is valued, and where mixture is are no Indigenous people nor settlers, then settler that Mestizaje refers to the process of colonization,
at the core of the national project, at the core of colonialism is no longer a relevant framework to and of the building of the new colonial situation
people’s imagination, at the core of who they are. politically analyze these states. Could you take us where you have Spanish and Portuguese people
To say, “We come from a mixed background, we through the way this concept of racialization (or arriving and mixing biologically and culturally with
are mixed, this is what defines us, and this is what rather the denial thereof) was formed? the Indigenous people who were already there in
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 53
the Americas. This is how they created these new
peoples: the mestizos. So it has to do with peoples
and cultures. Mestizaje is a historical moment in the
history of mixture: cultural mixture and biological
mixture. However, these have a lot of variants. For
some, it’s simply a mixture of peoples. Basically, if
a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman have a
child, this child is a mestizo/a, i.e. a mixed person.
During the colonial period, there was what we call
a caste system: people of all kinds of mixtures, and
of course, the forced arrival of African enslaved
peoples, and also the arrival of people from Asia,
and of course European peoples. The creation of
these castes is done through all these different
variations of possibilities of people who were
recorded and registered.
There’s another process added to that, which
has to do with the confirmation of nation states
during the 19th century and early 20th century,
which became a process of establishing this idea of
mixture as the official ideology that would create
the new states, the official kinds of people. How
we got to that from having that initial mixture 300
years ago is a long historical process. It has to do
with almost a rejection of scientific racism coming
from Europe, or eugenic policies in the Americas,
where Mestizaje then becomes this proposal of a
project that wants to unite the population, but with
a very clear task of whitening, through mixture.
It proposes that we mix the population, but in a
particular direction. This already tells you that it’s
not just any mixture or that any mixture works.
Additionally, there is a further understanding
of mestizaje as an everyday logic of racist and
racialized differentiation that organizes people’s
everyday life.
Mestizaje logics are intersectional
in nature, as most social relations,
and it gives pointers to how people
establish their social relations, their
cultural tastes, their understanding of
54
belonging and citizenship. It creates
racialized cultural imaginaries,
cultural products, as well as racialized
material culture and geographies.
So all these different understandings of mestizaje,
a mix of individuals, specifically Indigenous
Spanish, where mixture operates towards a
particular official goal, the logics of the caste
system, the official national ideologies developed
throughout the Americas and the everyday logics
of racialisation, we can understand making
mestizaje kind of quite complicated.
LL: You use the instance of a Spanish man and
an Indigenous woman, which probably could not
be less of an innocent example. The gendered
dimension of mestizaje is very important, isn’t it?
MGMF: Yes, and we can bring the gender component,
the class component, and you can see that all these
variations imply dominance, a lot of violence...
If we go to the colonial experience of mestizaje, Fig.2
this is not a story where the Indigenous women
were “hanging out” and wanted “to go out” with
European men who came and flirted, and then got
engaged. Mestizaje started as an alliance: some
of the Indigenous peoples were offering their
women to the colonizers as a way of establishing of caste systems, which is essential to the notion What it wants is to say: “yes, we want to mix
relationships of power for the new colonial state— of mestizaje, claims that if an Indigenous woman because we can accept that your blood can be
I’m not a historian so I won’t be able to tell you the and a European man have a child, they become cleaned, that it has some defects, but European
details with precision; there are people that can a mestizo/a. If a mestiza woman has a child with blood is going to make it better.” Women’s bodies
talk about that process (see for example the work a European man, they become a castizo/a. And are a site of control for this process. This ideology
of Fe Navarrete for Mexico). Generally what we if a castiza woman has a child with a Spanish is completely embedded in the ways of thinking in
see is that the colonizing process was a violent man, they become Spanish themselves. So in three Latin America, in everyday practices nowadays: this
process, not unique to Mexico or Latin America generations with the appropriate mixing and with is not just happening in the colonial paintings of the
and the Caribbean, but to that moment of European a continuous gender dominance, you can “improve 18th century.
expansion throughout the world. the race.” This is not the case for Black people:
Black women who mixed with white Europeans LL: In the case of “the United States of Mexico”—I
Once you start seeing the development of the caste would produce a lineage that could never be fully purposely insist on the official name of the state
system, you see that the aim was this building redeemed. to show its similarity with its settler colonial
towards whiteness, and the creation of a discourse northern neighbor—mestizaje seems to even be
that Indigenous blood could be redeemed. This a national project to flatten the differentiation
means that you can dilute the Indigenous line This notion of “improving the race” is (except perhaps cultural differentiation) of the
through continuous violence over Indigenous essential to understanding mestizaje various political communities that live under
women or Indigenous women descendants, Mexican sovereignty. Could you tell us what is
mixing with European men. One of the examples as a whitening ideology. to be gained by the state through this national
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 55

project? Is it the end of Indigeneity and its
sovereignty claims?
MGMF: Mestizaje was a project of nation building
that very much tried to impose these logics of
mixture when facing the impossibility of killing
and disappearing all the Indigenous population. It
was obvious by the 17th century that Indigenous
people were still there, that there were mixtures,
and that this notion of purity was just not holding.
So it was an ideological solution for building a
nation that could compete with European nations
and the United States that had a much more strict
56
Fig.3
“one drop” notions of purity and whiteness. So
that project, which had strong ties with the 1910
Mexican Revolution, or rather the aftermath of
the Revolution, with the establishment of the first
governments that really wanted to deal with the
Indigenous problem and that denied the presence
of African descendants, Black people, and other
people. Everybody got deleted to become Mexican.
This was built around a lot of ambivalence, because
it gives the impression of inclusion, something
like: “Everybody can join in! You just need to stop
being who you are. And then you can be this and
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
when we can all be together.” However, this came
to an explosion in 1994, showing that it didn’t
work, that the promise of inclusion, of welcoming
was built on top of a lot of historically developed
colonial legacies and the 19th century development
of capitalism in terms of who owns what, from the
development of big haciendas to the development
of industries... We started seeing a society divided,
built on a Indigenous/mestiza/white pyramidal
system. What happened in 1994, is the Zapatistas
rebelling and declaring: “Your idea of us as being
one didn’t work, it hasn’t worked, because we’re
still in the worst situation we are, without the
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Fig.4
resources, without the promise of development,
without anything.” Of course, I’m simplifying here,
and there’s so much more to say about development
in Latin American countries, and how it triggers
poverty and violence.
What we can say is that Indigenous people got
together, got organized, and started demanding
change. It was so strong that we can say that the
Zapatista movement has impacted and imprinted
many other Indigenous mobilizations throughout
the Americas and maybe in other places of the
world. They envisioned an anti-capitalist and anti-
57

Fig.5
racist world—well, anti-racism might not have
been at the very center of their explicit discourse
but it is very much part of it. This was definitely a
statement on how mestizaje did not work, even in
its multicultural aspect—a contradiction in the terms
if you ask me. This multiculturalism constructs a
situation where we have a certain allowance for
Blackness, for Indigeneity, for even Asianness to
appear, while these principles of improving the
race, of whitening the population still continue.
So you can say it is not the end. And on the
contrary, you have now generations of Indigenous
intellectuals and professionals who are claiming
their nations and saying that it didn’t work and it’s
not working... It’s a new moment.
LL: In the 1980s, French comedian Coluche was
telling this joke—I have to warn you, it’s very
French, quite bad taste, but telling too I think. It’s
about a group of Black and white pupils fighting
for seats on the school bus. The exasperated driver
(who we can definitely assume to be white although
of course it is not said) yells: “That’s enough! In my
bus, there is no Black, there is no white, you are
all blue!” And then: “Okay so now dark blues you’re
going to the back and light blues you’re coming to
the front.” It feels that Mestizaje is the ideology of
58
the “You are all blue!” while the racialized reality of
it makes it clear that there’ll always be “dark blues”
and “light blues.” Is what we came to call “colorism”
an apt reading grid to understand it? Or is that
accepting to debate Mestizaje on its own terms and
taking the risk to dilute a bit further identifiable
political groups and their specific histories:
Indigenous people, Afro Mexicans whose ancestors
were subjected to the transatlantic slave trade,
refugees, and settlers?
MGMF: In a way, it takes us to the first question. I
mean, colorism is a very U.S. specific term that
has to do with Black people having different skin
color shades. And the idea that the lightest you are,
the better. So I cannot say that it has nothing to do
with it, but I would say that there’s other logics at
play when you think about mestizaje. Skin color is
very definitely important for the understanding of
how racism is experienced in Mexico and in Latin
America. But when we think of skin color, we’re
not just saying literally just skin color, you know,
we are saying skin color with facial features with
the whole embodiment of how gender and class are
also imprinted in bodies. It’s a complex phenomena,
and maybe it’s reductive when we just want to put
it in terms of justice in color, but it is a good way
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
to start and to organize it. If you think about facial
features, if you think about the physical body, in the
embodiment, what the body does, what the body
can do, then the thing gets a bit more complicated,
but definitely what we can find is that the lighter
someone is, the better the outcome. This has been
now proven by many different surveys and studies
and we can see that there’s no way out of the
discussion where skin color is not relevant.
However, the issue here is that one
of the main differences that I found in
my own work is that skin color in the
Latin American context is relative and
contextual.
What I mean is that one person could be light-
skinned—light brown for instance—in one context,
and then be considered as dark-skinned in another
context, and that’s going to completely shift their
experience. People are constantly shifting the way
they are perceived, the way they’re treated, and
the way they are going through life. This makes
us all aware of how our embodiment impacts the
place we are in, and the spaces that we interact
with. So we have to think with the context. It also
has to do with that particular understanding of
what are the characteristics of Indigenous people,
of Black people... People are very good at reading
bodies, at reading their body, the body of others
and constantly locating themselves in relation
to those spaces. And that is what you’re trying
to do in racialized societies, where your body is
your capital. So there might be many similarities,
but I just want to point out that in places where
assimilation is at the center, and where mixture
is prioritized, the question of how somebody looks
like is very important and will determine your
fate. You find that even within families. If I were to
show you a picture of my own family: I have from
the very blondest cousin, to me, the darkest cousin,
but in another context, I might be the lightest dark
skinned person.
I guess we didn’t quite talk about whiteness in
Mexico or in Latin America, per se, but we talked
about mestizaje as a whitening project. Perhaps,
I could just finish by saying that we can also
understand that mestizaje is a form of whiteness
that is ambivalent, that is porous, that is always
centering the whitest body: what I mean is not
necessarily the “white body,” but the “whiter” or
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
“whitest” body. I think that characteristic makes
the experience of whiteness in Mexico a tricky one,
very movable and shifty. There are new studies
about white people, people that self identify as
white, and there is this new term, “whitexican”:
people who consider themselves to be white
Mexicans. This is bringing interesting debates, and
we need to be more able to understand the flows of
different racial projects, and to see how they impact
each other and we cannot think that nation borders
actually stopped racial projects... But we just need
to know how to contextualize them historically, and
with the wider situation. It’s not just an input from
the U.S. or from Europe to Mexico. So, yes, there is a
lot to think about. ■
Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Black-mestiza, Mexican-
British, Associate Professor in Sociology at the University
of Cambridge. She is also a Fellow in Social Sciences at
Downing College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on the
intersectional lived experience of ‘race’ and racism in Mexico
and Latin America; antiracism and academic-based impact;
feminist theory, intersectionality and racism. The book
Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America
(Pittsburgh University Press, 2022), edited by Peter Wade, is
based on their project on anti-racist practices and discourses
in Latin America, comparing experiences in Brazil, Colombia,
Ecuador, and Mexico.
Fig.1 Monumento al Mestizaje (1982) by Julián Martínez and M. Maldonado in the
Jardín Xicoténcat in Mexico City. / Photo by Javier Delgado Rosas (April 2009).
Fig.2 Lexicon of mestizaje in the Americas. “The vocabulary is taken mainly from the
Diccionario de la Lengua Española (Real Academia Española) and the inscriptions
upon the drawings of people called “retratos de castas,” from painters like Miguel
Cabrera, or the c. 18th anonymous kept at the Museo Nacional del Virreinato.” /
Photo by Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas (2018).
Fig.3-4 La cena del capitalismo (The Dinner of Capitalism) and La orgía (The Orgy)
depicting whiteness and mestizaje together. / Murals by Diego Rivera (1928) at the
Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City.
Fig.5 Allegory of the Mestizo in Chetumal, Mexico. / Photo by Rafael Saldaña
(December 2018).
59
 SELF-PORTRAITS
JULIE DOWLING
Each self-portrait in my career has been painted to
be a signature to a solo exhibition I have completed.
They are part of a documentary process of the
theme of those shows. In 2004, I painted a series
of self-portraits and I have not done this since. In
essence, these self-portraits are comments about the
lasting impact of eugenics theories upon me and
my family. I have lived my life as a litmus test for
race relations in Australia. I have walked between
two worlds but always lived as a strong Badimaya
woman with a deep connection to my traditional
country in the Central-West of Western Australia.
I have witnessed the devastating impact of racial
code-switching on fair-skinned First Nations
people in my family and community. It causes
psychological damage so profound that sustained
mental health can be impossible, and suicide can
seem like the only option. I am fortunate to see
my self-portraits as biographical to speak about
the situations I have experienced at a specific time
and they are about the world around me. I fully
understand my placement within my family stories
and especially how these stories are placed within
the white colonial male patriarchy. Deeply impacted
by the stolen generations, I am a product of the
“breeding out program” imposed upon my maternal
family going back only three generations. The
“stolen generations” describe a long period from
1900s to 1970s whereby thousands of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly
removed from their families by federal and state
government policies to culturally and biologically
assimilate them within white society. Many of
these children never to saw their families again
resulting in intergenerational trauma experienced
by their descendents. The majority were raised in
government and church institutions facing often
extreme physical, sexual, and psychological abuse.
These successive government policies were fueled
by international notions of eugenics whereby my
people were deemed lowest on the evolutionary
chain and soon to die out. We did not die out. I
know that my Badimaya culture cannot be erased
so easily despite everything that has happened.
Aboriginality is not a mathematical equation.
I was born as an identical twin. My twin sister
Carol Dowling and I have always been very close.
We have lived together now for the last twenty-
60
three years and, due to my disabilities, Carol is my
carer—she often jokes that she is my unpaid artist’s
assistant. Carol is an award winning radio producer
and long term university academic in Aboriginal
Studies. Collaborating with each other’s careers, we
are each other’s intellectual support. Carol is also an
anthropologist/sociologist who has often discussed
issues of sovereignty, self-determination and
decolonization with me over many years. Whereas
I manifest these discussions into my works, Carol
has equally written and lectured about them too.
This process has worked for over thirty years in our
respective careers. We both hold doctoral degrees.
When looking into a mirror as part of my painting
process for these self-portraits, I reflect on who
I am as an individual twin. This mirror image is
my twin. You are often unconscious about your
individualism when you are an identical twin
because everyone reminds you of your similarity to
someone else. You are conscious that your twin is
different from you fundamentally, but the outside
world wishes you or even pressures you to explain
yourself. Such inquiries fill me with sadness and
fear because they will never know this deep love
and connection with another human being. Being a
twin makes you a better friend, and family member
and it definitely makes you a better commentator on
human interactions and life. Intuition and empathy
are important for twins. It is also important to
stop racism because such violence comes from
ignorance and a lack of compassion. When
you become connected to other human beings,
especially since the womb, your connectedness
to the non-self becomes more evident. My works
are about connection and wanting the viewer to
become compassionate about what my people have
experienced. The gaze upon me, my family and
community within my paintings calls for connection
and for a commitment to justice.■
Julie Dowling is a Badimia First Nations artist and activist.
She was born in Subiaco, Western Australia, and grew up in
both semi-rural and urban areas in a large Badimia extended
family. Her work is both personal and political. Drawing on
a diverse range of artistic traditions, including Flemish and
Renaissance portraiture, Orthodox Roman Catholic and
Russian icons, Badimia First Nation iconography and mural
painting, Dowling’s poignant portraits bear witness to the
past, both her family’s and more broadly.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) Fig.1
61
62 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 63
64 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 65
 UKRAINE AND THE TRAPS OF
PROXIMITY TO EUROPEAN AND
RUSSIAN SLAVIC WHITENESS
DARYA TSYMBALYUK
While the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, Darya
Tsymbalyuk attempts to reckon with the complex layering of
racialization Ukrainians are subjected to. In being presented
unequivocally as “white” when they receive support from
western nations, we ought to question the peremptory
dimension of this characterization and reflect instead on the
conditionality of this temporary access to European whiteness.
In the beginning of the Russian invasion of
Ukraine that started on March 4, 2022, Syrian
writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh published an essay
entitled “Why Ukraine is a Syrian cause.” In it,
he offered a generous gesture of solidarity from
a place of pain and embodied knowledge of
Russian imperial violence. Several weeks later,
Saleh published another piece, this time reflecting
on the failure to condemn Russian imperialism
in Syria in comparison to Ukraine and exposing
profound racism within western institutions of
power, including towards people fleeing the war
as refugees, where he frames this dynamic as
“selective solidarity.” Saleh’s work deeply speaks to
me because he is able to address both violences of
racial capitalism and of Russian military invasions,
exposing their complexities and entanglements. It
is this multiplicity of regimes of violence which is
unfortunately often missing in some perspectives on
Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the war’s international
impact, and which I try to understand in this text.
The escalation of Russia’s eight-years long war
on Ukraine to a full-scale invasion resulted in
millions of people instantaneously crossing into
the European Union, where the EU’s response
exposed deep structural racism and organization
of life according to white supremacy and
perceived proximities to European whiteness.
People perceived as not-belonging to Ukrainian
whiteness or racialized citizens of non-European
countries residing in Ukraine have been obstructed,
mistreated, and in some cases detained while trying
to flee the Russian invasion. Moreover, the same
eastern borders of the EU that opened to welcome
Ukrainian refugees have for long been a place of
systematic violence against other refugees trying to
66
cross from the Belarusian side. The unprecedented
fast and efficient EU response in helping fleeing
Ukrainians by activating the Temporary Protection
Drive has also clearly demonstrated that such
actions are possible when the EU deems certain
lives “worth saving.” Finally, the racist public
discourse that surrounded the situation and which
privileged and pitied Ukrainians against other
people that have been fleeing violence globally,
revealed the hypocrisy of the values of human
rights and the deadly structuring of life according
to the proximity to European whiteness. Rightfully,
these racist dynamics provoked a wave of outrage
and condemnation.
At the same time, and in response to western
hypocrisy, there has been a tendency among many
people involved in the global anti-racist movement
to wrongfully conflate a rightful rage at racial
capitalism with Ukraine’s ability to continue
resisting colonial aggressor, where this ability is
conditioned by the support of the western allies.
This tendency is often articulated by explaining
Russia’s war on Ukraine through the frame of
“white European war.” According to this logic, if
Ukraine is only supported because it is seen as
white and European, it means that by supporting
Ukraine one perpetuates the ordering of life
according to white supremacy. Such kinds of (mis)
interpretations of the war result in direct or indirect
suggestions of reducing and denying support for
Ukraine’s anti-colonial struggle.
In “Fighting for Whiteness in Ukraine” (2023),
U.S.-based law academic Marissa Jackson Sow
discusses “Ukraine’s leveraging of the Russian
invasion to negotiate enhanced status within the
global white body politic.” As Jackson Sow points
out, the narrative of Europeanness and associated
whiteness is indeed instrumentalized by some
Ukrainians, yet the argument that Ukraine is
“leveraging” the war diminishes the existential
nature of Ukraine’s anti-colonial resistance and
misrepresents geopolitical complexity of Russia’s
imperial invasion and its impact.
Fig.1
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 67

Fig.2
Constructed as belonging to
European whiteness, Ukrainians are
both seen as pawns in western racist
geopolitical games and as complicit in
perpetuating white supremacy.
When it comes to Ukraine, however, the violence
of racial capitalism does not cancel the violence of
a colonial invasion. In relation to Russia’s war on
Ukraine, these violent phenomena co-exist producing
a set of global and intersecting complexities and
articulations. What strikes me in interpreting
Ukraine’s anti-colonial resistance only as a “white
European war” is that by homogeneously framing
Ukrainian people as white, and therefore privileged,
one is erasing or diminishing other very real and
material aspects of millions of Ukrainians which
are not necessarily structured by whiteness only.
Indeed, many Ukrainians are living under murderous
Russian occupation, others live in the threat of being
killed daily, and/or do not have access to basic goods
because of the Russian invasion. Moreover, Russia
has been justifying its colonial invasion of Ukraine by
claiming that it is de-nazifying the country. For years,
on both domestic and international levels, Russia
has engaged in complex propaganda campaign that
misleadingly constructed Ukraine as a far-right
and neo-Nazi state —it’s worth noting that far-right
parties failed to pass the electoral minimum at the
last parliamentary elections in Ukraine in 2019—and
where Ukrainian democratic revolution of 2013-2014
against state violence and the rise of authoritarianism
has been wrongly portrayed as a far-right coup. It is
therefore important to be aware where the narratives
of linking the support for Ukraine with perpetuating
68
white supremacy risk overlapping and feeding
into deadly Russian propaganda that mobilizes and
legitimizes the daily murder of people in Ukraine.
At the same time, Ukraine (like any other country)
is not a place free of racism, and of course, the
experience of Russia’s war on Ukraine is also
multilayered, where those belonging to racially
marginalized groups, sexualities, and genders
outside the constructed norm, and impoverished
classes are often in much more vulnerable positions.
For example, in the first days of Russia’s full-scale
invasion, there were numerous instances of racism
on Ukrainian borders, where non-Ukrainian and/
or non-white people were often deliberately slowed
or obstructed in their exit, or even detained. Scholar
of race in Ukraine and the Soviet Union Kimberly
St. Julian Varnon has commented on these cases
at length in her crucial work. Ukraine has also
been complicit in policing EU borders through the
operation of three detention centers, open with EU
funding and as a condition for liberalizing a visa-free
regime for Ukraine. The centers have continued, to
operate after Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Ukraine is not a homogeneously white country,
though people who, within the Ukrainian context
would be considered as white do constitute an
overwhelming majority. Still Ukraine is ethnically
diverse, consisting not only of white Ukrainians,
but also of Jews, Gagauz, Roma, as well as people
indigenous (korinni narody) to Crimea (Crimean
Tatars, Krymchaks, and Crimean Karaites…).
People from all ethnicities inhabiting Ukraine have
joined and united in the anti-colonial struggle
against the Russian aggression. At the same time,
construction of whiteness and racialization within
Ukraine operates through the systematic exclusion of
Romani Ukrainians and other racialized Ukrainians.
Initiatives addressing these processes of racialization
in the country have been growing, especially in
response to anti-Roma pogroms in 2018. At the same
time, the work of anti-racist activists has also been
affected by the invasion. One of the most prominent
defenders of the rights of refugees, migrants,
stateless and displaced persons in Ukraine, and
an anti-racist activist Maksym Butkevych joined
the Ukrainian army in 2022. Several months later,
he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Russian
military and sentenced on fabricated charges by an
occupation court to thirteen years in a high-security
prison. While anti-racist activists have been laboring
tirelessly, larger Ukrainian society still needs to do
a lot of work to address complicity in (domestically
and internationally) upholding racialized categories,
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
as well as to combat structural racism against Roma
people and other racialized groups in Ukraine. This
exclusion based on racialization is also part of the
colonial trap of proximity to hegemonic (European or
Russian Slavic) whiteness in Ukraine and of larger
colonial dynamics.
Racialized categories and whiteness
are always contextually articulated,
and construction of whiteness in
Ukraine and in relation to Ukraine is
inextricably linked to the country’s
legacies of being positioned at the
intersection of multiple colonial
regimes.
For a long time, Ukraine has been imagined as a
borderland between East and West. This borderland
imaginary is strongly linked to Ukraine’s perceived
proximity to different colonial metropoles whether
in Russia or in Europe, where these metropoles
remain at one point seemingly close and yet forever
unattainable.
At the same time these proximities to colonial
centers and to the hegemonic (European or Russian
Slavic) whiteness operated differently from each
side of Ukrainian borders. In the Russian empire,
Ukraine was called Malorossiya, “little Russia,” a
name that originated before Russia’s imperial rise
and had different meanings, but which came to
signify Ukraine as a lesser and integral part of
“greater Russia.” The term Malorossiya is invoked by
Vladimir Putin in his imperial rhetoric, including his
2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and
Ukrainians.” Russian colonial politics in relation to
Ukraine is based on the denial of the very existence
of Ukrainian culture, language, state, as Putin also
proclaimed in his invasion speech on February 21,
2022. Russian colonial erasure of Ukraine is therefore
based on constructing Ukrainianness as a deviation
from Russianness, where Ukrainians have been
either represented as caricatured and burlesque, or
as morally corrupt by the West and brainwashed
by neo-Nazi ideologies. In the history of Russian
colonialism of Ukraine, Russia attempted to eliminate
this “deviation” and return “the lost Slavic sibling” to
the “family” through politics of russification or the
murder of the hopelessly “deviated” ones, and we
clearly observe both dynamics today.
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Perceived and constructed proximity to colonial
metropoles and European whiteness is also a
defining feature of Ukraine’s colonial relationship
with Europe, though operating in a very different
fashion. In relation to Europe, Ukraine is always
catching up and striving to be recognized as fully
European, but yet always remaining the “Other,”
exploited, sexualized, romanticized, corrupt,
and sacrificed. Ukraine has its own history of
European colonialism, where parts of Ukraine
were colonized by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Ukraine is also one of the places butchered the
most in Nazi colonial expansion in World War II,
where more than 1.5 million of Ukraine’s Jewish
and Romani people were assassinated in the
Holocaust—for example, Babyn Yar in Kyiv is the
site of the largest single Holocaust massacre)—
while many other Ukrainians were killed, injured,
or exploited as forced labor, Ukrainian lands
were occupied. If direct colonial subjugation
by European powers is in the past for Ukraine,
following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the
country became inscribed in global capitalism as a
site of cheap labor force, including sex trafficking.
This can be observed in the trope of a sexualized
and impoverished Ukrainian woman, often the
only representation of Ukrainian women on a
western screen—see for example The Unknown
Woman (Italy, 2006), Import/Export (Austria,
2007), and Olla (France, 2019). Numerous other
instances can be found in Andriy Pryymachenko’s
video collage entitled “56 Years, 89 Titles, and
a Single Story about Ukraine,” assembling
the moments Ukraine has been mentioned in
Hollywood films. The video provides an interesting
glimpse into the tropes through which Ukraine
has been perceived in the West; in addition to
sexualized women, there are also narratives of
nuclear apocalypse and around Chornobyl, toxic
masculinity, and condescending humor around the
seemingly absurdity of Ukrainians insisting on not
being confused with Russians.
Perceived proximity to imperial
metropoles set several colonial
traps for Ukraine, including a forever
catching up game, and gaslighting,
where colonial violence can be easily
obscured or underestimated by the
perceived proximity to the colonial
centers of power.
69
Whiteness of most Ukrainians is part of the
privilege of perceived proximity to the imperial
metropoles, whether it is the Slavic whiteness at
different points of Russian and Soviet imperial
histories constructed in opposition to the non-Slavic
Other, or it is European whiteness constructed
in the opposition to non-white Other in western
colonial rhetoric. This trap is, for example, visible
in the unprecedented western support to the
Ukrainian state and army, as well as Ukrainian
refugees. Yet, where in the eyes of many, Ukraine
seems to be showered with western aid, from the
perspective of many Ukrainians, western deliberate
slowness, in providing military support for example,
also indirectly contributes to the growing number of
people killed by Russia in Ukraine.
At the same time, construction of whiteness in
Ukraine is also conditioned by the colonial trap of
proximity to the imperial metropoles, where white
Ukrainians have been always constructed as not
white enough in comparison to the hegemonic
Russian Slavic whiteness or the hegemonic
European whiteness. Racial capitalism orders the
value of life according to whiteness. In the context
of Ukraine, the hierarchy of white supremacy
conditions the ones who are perceived as almost
white to strive for whiteness, where being white
is constructed as the only possibility to survive.
This, in turn, often results in Ukrainians being
complicit in the construction of white supremacy.
This dynamic has been much critiqued with
regards to Ukraine’s relation to and construction
of Europeanness, and it can also be observed in
the history of Ukrainian Canadian communities on
Indigenous land, for example. This dynamic and its
logic need to be urgently examined and dismantled,
if one is willing to envision inclusive imaginaries
for the post-war Ukraine which are grounded in
freedom and liberation for all people everywhere.
There is a lot of anti-racism work that has to be
done in Ukraine, and this work cannot be done
without understanding Ukraine as a site of multiple
colonialities and ways in which these different
colonialities have operated and continue to operate
through racialization. Moreover, the anti-racist
struggle in Ukraine and in relation to Ukraine
cannot be separated from the existential anti-colonial
resistance against the Russian invasion, as the illegal
imprisonment of Maksym Butkevych poignantly
reminds us. Racial capitalism is not the only
structure of power that organizes life in Ukraine
today and that decides who is privileged and white
enough to be worthy of being saved or to live. Hence
it would be inaccurate to interpret Russia’s war
70
on Ukraine and its global implications exclusively
through the lens of “white European war”—as some
of the members of the global anti-racist movement
falsely suggest—and without a thorough engagement
with the impact of Russian imperial violence, which
structures life and death not only in Ukraine,
but also in Saqartvelo (Georgia), Syria, Moldova,
Chechnya, and many other places.
Furthermore, Russia’s imperial violence also operates
as racial violence, which is clearly visible in the
unproportionate recruitment of non-white Russian
citizens and indigenous people into the Russian
military, as well as in the Russian colonial occupation
of Ukraine, where, in the settler colonial regime
installed in Crimea (occupied since 2014), indigenous
Crimean Tatars have been targeted through
persecution. Therefore, when it comes to Ukraine, it
is important to understand complex layers in which
racial violence overlaps with the multiplicity of
colonial legacies through which Ukraine has been
shaped and the ongoing Russian colonial invasion
and occupation and its role in structuring conditions
of life and death for all people living in Ukraine
today. Only then can we also start untangling
and confronting the dynamic of colonial traps of
proximity to imperial metropoles and to hegemonic
(European or Russian Slavic) whiteness, and the
Ukrainian role in upholding racial structures
of oppression inside the country and globally. Fig.3
Understanding the dynamics of these overlapping
phenomena is the first step in addressing and for the Syrian Revolution—and we should add: for Darya Tsymbalyuk writes, researches, and draws. She comes
dismantling these entangled regimes of violence, other places struggling for survival, freedom, and from the south of Ukraine and in her work engages with
and like with everything else, such work is only dignified life. contexts and stories of Ukraine. She was a Max Hayward
possible in solidarity and in labor with others. Many communities that have been standing in Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford
solidarity with Ukraine have helped materially, (2022–2023), and received her PhD from the University of St
but have also shared their own knowledge of Andrews, Scotland.
The generous support of Ukraine resistance, of surviving wars, of the difficulties of
by other people who lived through post-war reconstruction, and tactics of responding to
“westsplainers.” The labor of solidarity is not easy,
violence (Taiwan, Syria, Qazaqstan, especially when someone is fighting for survival,
and when, after nine years of war, communities
Saqartvelo, Bosnia…) opened up new of Ukraine (inside the country and abroad) are
lines of exchange and possibilities of emotionally and physically depleted, as are so many
of the communities who live through violence and
building anti-colonial non-Western oppression daily in other parts of the world.
solidarity networks. To conclude, Ukraine’s freedom cannot come at the
expense of the lives of others, and Ukrainian people
It also created the possibility of collective work cannot be sacrificed for the logic of opposing western Fig.1 Symbolic beheading of the Russian figure on Ukraine-Russia Friendship
towards dismantling different and overlapping hypocrisy in the global anti-racist struggle. We must Monument in Kyiv on April 26, 2022. The eight meters tall statue had been erected in
structures of oppression: Russian imperialism, find a way to fight against several violent regimes, 1982 for the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union. / Photo by Studio Melange.
racial capitalism, Eurocentricity. Saleh warns such as racial capitalism and Russian imperialism Fig.2 Crimea Tatar and Ukrainian flags in a street of Kyiv on April 29, 2021. The Ukrainian
flag bears the name of Bakhchisaray, a town in Crimea. / Photo by Andrii Koval.
against “Syrianizing” Ukraine and instead calls for at once and tackle their articulations with attention Fig.3 Darya Tsymbalyuk and Ahmed Abozaid at a vigil in St Andrews, Scotland on
“Ukrainizing Syria,” meaning that the same support and knowledge of sociocultural and sociohistorical February 28, 2022, a few days after the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of
mobilized for Ukraine should be also mobilized contexts. There is no justice and if not for all. ■ Ukraine. Ahmed’s sign reads “No to War No to Occupation.” / Photo by Fayaz Kacho.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 71
 A FABRICATED “ALMOST-
WHITENESS”: THE COLONIAL
RACIALIZATION OF POLYNESIANS
A CONVERSATION WITH MAILE ARVIN
QUESTIONS BY ANAÏS DUONG-PEDICA
In this contribution, Funambulist friend Anaïs Duong-Pedica
asks questions to Maile Arvin about the research she
conducted for her book Possessing Polynesians: The Science
of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania. In it, she
shows how Polynesians have been racialized by European
and U.S. colonizers as being in proximity with whiteness, in
contrast with Melanesians and Micronesians in Oceania. She
argues that far from affording them political power, this racist
myth legitimized the settler colonial appropriation of land and
people.
ANAÏS DUONG-PEDICA: One of one of my first
encounters with your work was with the text you
entitled “Polynesia is a project not a place” (2018),
drawing on Martinican poet and theorist Édouard
Glissant, who wrote “the West is not in the West,
it is a project not a place.” In it, you write about
the ways in which Polynesia was born out of the
imaginations of European imperialists. Could you
talk about this and about the racial logic behind
the division of Oceania into three areas, which are
Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia?
MAILE ARVIN: I think that a lot of the representations
of the Pacific that white people in North America
or Europe are familiar with are representations
of Polynesia, and they have to do with a tropical
island paradise, a natural, lovely vacation place.
My work really looks at how the history of these
representations is really deep and inextricably
tied to colonialism and imperialism in the Pacific.
When I was doing the research for my first book,
I was looking at the history of scientific writing
about race: Western folks coming to the Pacific and
assigning Western ideas about race to Indigenous
peoples from the Pacific.
As I was doing that, I kept coming
across these references to
Polynesians as white, or almost white,
or various conditional phrases being
72
placed on Polynesian whiteness, but
constantly showing that Europeans
understood Polynesians as white in
some manner.
This is from the earliest travelog writings by Cook
and others. But my book looks a little bit more at the
social scientists who came after, and who continued
some of those ideas.
Another way to frame it would be to say that
Polynesians were understood as the “noble savage.”
My book tries to understand and go into the history
of how that idea of Polynesians as being the “noble
savage” is tied with Polynesia being understood as
“almost white” when other parts of the Pacific were
racialized in a mutually constitutive thing where
Melanesia was understood to be black. And so my
work tries to understand the legacy of these ideas,
particularly in Polynesia, because I’m Hawaiian,
but I don’t think you can really understand the
ways that Polynesians are represented as “almost
white” or as “noble savages” without also seeing
that Melanesians are understood as the opposite of
that: as the “savage savages.” And then Micronesia
can go either way in the historical writings on race
in the Pacific. Sometimes they’re more lumped with
Polynesia and sometimes more with Melanesia,
depending on the colonizer or whoever is writing,
and what arguments they’re trying to make. But I
think what this history shows us is that ideas about
race, antiblackness, and white supremacy are all
really, really important and a primary logic that
goes along with settler colonialism in the Pacific
context.
ADP: Yes, and actually, what I particularly
appreciated in your book is how you connect white
supremacy, settler colonialism, and antiblackness in
Oceania, and how they’re articulated in that specific
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
context. Perhaps, building on that, something that
would be useful at this stage for listeners is an
explanation of how indigeneity and race are not
the same thing, but they, however, work together in
settler colonial contexts. So could you explain what
you understand by indigeneity in your work, and
how it is mobilized? And in the context of Hawai‘i
more specifically, and Oceania more broadly?
MA: When I explain indigeneity to the students in
my classes, I try to get them to understand it as a
social category that is like race or gender, and often
intersects with those other social categories, but
it’s also distinct. Indigeneity refers to the unique
social category that Indigenous people inhabit.
And, you know, indigeneity can look different
to different Indigenous groups. But maybe just
speaking for Native Hawaiians, but I think this
is applicable more broadly as well, indigeneity
is to us just how we understand our relationship
to our land. We are descendants from the land:
the land is literally our ancestor. Because of
that, genealogy is really important to us. And
because the land is our ancestor, we have certain
responsibilities to take care of it, as that land takes
care of us. So indigeneity is not the same as race,
from an Indigenous perspective, in the sense that
it’s really about genealogy in a broad sense, and
the responsibilities that you have because of your
genealogy.
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Fig.1
The way that settler colonialism
works to break Indigenous ties to land
and within Indigenous communities is
actually by imposing ideas about race
onto Indigenous peoples.
A really prime example in the Hawaiian context
is that ideas of blood quantum were introduced.
Blood quantum is a Western notion of race that
says that Indigenous blood is diluted through racial
mixture with other races, other kinds of peoples.
In settler colonial logic, through this measuring
of people through blood quantum, the idea is that
Indigenous people are destined to die out and just
eventually become part, in a lower position, but part
of the white race. These ideas are really harmful
to Indigenous peoples, because for Hawaiians,
traditionally, genealogy was a really broad
expansive thing. So as different kinds of people
started coming to Hawai‘i, having an ancestor who
was Chinese or white or of another race, that didn’t
make you any less Hawaiian at all, right? It even
broadened Hawaiian ties to the rest of the world.
And so it wasn’t necessarily seen as a betrayal of
your race or your nation, but just an expansion.
That’s really different from the ideology brought by
white Americans and British and other Europeans
73

to Hawai‘i, which said that if you had different
ancestors from different races, then you were
becoming less Hawaiian. That was and continues to
be a really damaging idea for Hawaiians. It’s a way
to diminish Hawaiian epistemologies, relationships
and kinships. It particularly places a certain burden
on Native Hawaiian women. Over the years, some
of these ideas have been internalized by Hawaiian
people and, sometimes, Hawaiian women face a
certain amount of pressure to only have children
with Hawaiian men who have a certain amount of
Hawaiian blood so that their children will have a
certain amount of Hawaiian blood so that they can
be recognized by the state for certain programs. All
that’s to say that places a lot of unfair pressure and
sometimes even sexual violence on Native Hawaiian
women, in particular. So these ideas about race
that go along with settler colonialism are also very
heteropatriarchal which, again, was not necessarily
how Hawaiians thought about these things before
colonialism.
ADP: In your book there’s a lot of this idea of this
tragic loss of authenticity and purity, through
this concept of blood quantum. You analyze the
science behind this logic of the Polynesian race
as “almost white” and you explore how in the 19th
century, there was a shift in Western writing about
the Pacific from “first contact” travel narratives
74
Fig.2
and reflections on geographical regions and
names to what you call like a scientific fascination
for Polynesian origins, which you explain was
nicknamed by scientists the “Polynesian problem.”
Could you tell us about this literature and its
legacies today?
MA: As I mentioned earlier, when I was doing
my research for the book, I was looking at these
histories of science, which start in the late 1800s,
with particularly folks who are linguists or
philologists, so the people who trace genealogies
of language. So the first chapter of my book looks
at these folks who are looking at comparing
Polynesian languages to Sanskrit, and trying to
make certain kinds of arguments about how close
or far Polynesians are to Sanskrit. This was all
being couched in terms of Aryanism. The original
discourses about Aryanism were fairly literal in
the sense that these white linguists and philologists
were seeing that the Aryans were this ancient race
from northern India. In their view, Europeans were
distantly descended from these Aryans, who were
different from modern Indian people somehow.
These philologists would compare different
languages back to Sanskrit and, based on their
proximity to Sanskrit, would say that certain races
were more or less white or Caucasian or Aryan.
This happened with a lot of different races but
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
this happened with Polynesians and people were
consistently saying that Polynesian languages were
close enough to Sanskrit that it could be argued
that Polynesians were a distant ancestor, or the
Aryans were a distant ancestor of Polynesians.
And therefore, because Europeans also shared that
ancient Aryan ancestor, that there is this kinship
between Europeans and Polynesians, that would
then get deployed by imperialists and colonizers
to say that, “we’re family and our are coming to
Polynesia and taking over the governments and
installing plantations, on your lands, it’s not it’s not
colonialism, it’s just a family reunion,” right?
So it’s very convoluted, in some ways. But there,
there are people like Edward Tregear in the New
Zealand context who wrote a book called The Aryan
Maori (1885), and that was literally his argument:
that the British and the Māori people are distant
long lost relatives, and that it’s just destiny for the
British to come to Aotearoa/New Zealand and take
it over and lift up their little Māori brothers. As
you can hear, it’s a very paternalistic discourse.
Then following from that into more around the
turn of the century, there comes the era of physical
anthropology and eugenics. At that period, there
were a lot of physical anthropologists traveling
from the U.S. and Europe to the Pacific and doing
a lot of detailed measurements of people’s heads,
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
Fig.3
cataloging the size of their noses, the kinds of ear
lobes they have, the frizziness of their hair, and,
again, taking all of these things and comparing
it to “Caucasian people” (the term physical
anthropologists were using at the time), and based
on how close those characteristics are, arguing that
certain races are more or less white or Caucasian.
So this is where Polynesians are being compared to
Europeans and, again, arguments are being made
about how the true ancient “Polynesian type” was a
“Caucasian type,” or “almost Caucasian.” Of course,
if you look at the actual research that these people
were doing, the actual people that they’re looking
at would not be understood as white, right? But
there are all these kinds of different discourses and
convoluted logics that these scientists are using to
make this argument that Polynesians are somehow
conditionally white. And again, that logic has been
used not to extend the privileges of whiteness to
Polynesians, but to justify white settler colonialism
in Polynesia.
Then, in my third chapter, I look more at sociology
and sociological studies that were being conducted
in Hawai‘i, more in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
These studies were a lot about racial mixture—
this so-called discourse of racial mixture. There
were all these ideas that Hawai‘i in particular, was
this magical, racial melting pot that the Chicago
75
school of sociology really represented as the
solution to a lot of the race problems that were
really evident in the continental U.S.. And so these
white sociologists who came to Hawai‘i would do
interviews with mixed-race people, and based on
their interpretation of the surveys would say “oh,
there’s no racial prejudice here in Hawai‘i.” But
when I read the surveys, I argued that there’s
actually a lot of evidence of racism in the surveys,
including internalized racism, because a lot of the
interviews that the sociologists were doing were
with mixed-race Chinese and Hawaiian people.
The majority of the interviews are really saying
“oh, Hawaiians are bad,” “Hawaiians are stupid
or backwards,” “they’re criminals.” These are
Hawaiian people saying this about the Hawaiian
people. But by contrast, they see their Chinese
heritage as more positive and more industrious,
more fitting into the ideas of the “American
dream.” So with the racial melting pot idea, the
idea is that Hawaiians will blend into whiteness,
and again, this is justifying and naturalizing U.S.
control of Hawai‘i, and imposing white supremacy
on Hawai‘i, even if white people have never been
the majority in Hawai‘i, and still are not. Yet,
white people still control a lot more wealth and
power in Hawai‘i than Native Hawaiian people. So
what I’m saying is that these ideas about the racial
melting pot were one way that white supremacy
flourished in Hawai‘i, even as white people have
never actually outnumbered Hawaiian people.
ADP: Continuing on this idea of the melting pot ideal
or this really positive perception of racial hybridity
in Hawai‘i, could you tell us a little bit more about
the sexual and racial politics that are at play?
Earlier you talked about this pressure that it puts on
Native Hawaiian women, this idea of this tragic loss
of authenticity, but also at some point in your book
you write about the figure of the hybrid Hawaiian
girl. And so can you talk to us about this figure in
relation to this “ethnic rainbow,” and how the hybrid
Hawaiian girl is also enabled by what you call this
settler logic of possession through whiteness?
MA: Absolutely. In the chapter in which I talked
about those sociological interviews that I was just
mentioning, I also just talk about this figure that
emerges around this time, which I argue is partly
enabled by these sociological discourses about the
melting pot, which is the half Hawaiian, or in some
way, mixed-race Hawaiian woman, which becomes
very emblematic in many arenas, including tourism.
But especially in the 1940s, there’s a lot of photos
published in the newspapers of so-called half or
mixed-race Hawaiian women performing for the
76
U.S. troops who were stationed in Hawai‘i during
World War Two and after. What I’m arguing about
that figure is that by seeing that these Hawaiian
women are mixed-race, it makes them preserve
some of the exotic “noble savage” ideas about
Hawaiians, but also makes them more familiar and
more available to white settlers and men.
Throughout the book, I talk about this logic of
possession through whiteness, which is just another
way of saying that, again, there are ways through
which white settlers extend this very conditional
whiteness to Polynesian people.
This is never a logic that actually
includes or extends the privileges of
whiteness to Polynesian people, but
it underwrites this logic that white
people have a natural claim to land
and other resources, and even people
and in this case, especially mixed-
race Hawaiian women.
They all become natural possessions of whiteness.
Because through this convoluted social scientific
logic about the origins of Polynesia somehow in
Northern India, having this ancient relationship to
Europeans, then there’s this idea that “Oh, white
people are indigenous to Polynesia, too, right?” And
so by colonizing Polynesia, they’re just reclaiming
what was always their birthright. This applies to
land and water in Polynesia, which gets taken up
to build these large scale sugar plantations and,
later, pineapple plantations. But I also think that the
same logic is really evident in the blood quantum
discourses, or these discourses about racial mixture,
where Hawaiian bodies, especially female-identified
bodies, are also seen as natural possessions of
whiteness.
ADP: Something else I wanted to talk about is the fact
that it’s very clear that you look at different groups
of scientists. On the one hand, there are the white
settler scientists who you’ve talked about in this
interview already, and on the other, there are also
Polynesian scientists with different positionalities
than those settler scientists, and also different
political agendas and purposes than their white
colleagues, but who were nonetheless involved in
the discourses of Polynesian exceptionalism, and
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48
Polynesians’ supposed proximity to whiteness. Could
you talk more about these distinct positions and
what was at stake in these discourses based on the
background of the scientists taking part in them?
MA: I look at two main Polynesian people who were
also engaging with some of these discourses at the
time. One is King Kalākaua who had this scientific
society called the Hale Nauā. With that society, he
was engaging, keeping up on some of these studies
about the Polynesian race, and sometimes trying to
see how they would fit with Hawaiian genealogies
and Hawaiian ideas about race, and sometimes
trying to use them for the benefit of the Hawaiian
nation in ways that would maybe bolster ideas that
the Hawaiian Kingdom was civilized and modern,
and maybe white to some extent. Another figure
that I look at is Te Rangihīroa, who was a Māori
anthropologist, among many other amazing things.
And he also wrote a couple of books that were
really engaging with this literature on the so-called
“Polynesian problem” or the origins of Polynesians.
He ultimately actually agrees with a lot of the white
social scientists and argues that Polynesians did
come from somewhere in Asia, but that they didn’t
so-call mix with Melanesian people or Micronesian
people, and therefore, Polynesians are a really
distinct race that is ultimately whiter and implicitly
or explicitly better than Melanesian people and
Micronesian people.
I raise these things not to say “Oh, Te Rangihīroa
was so colonized or so wrong,” although, I do think
it’s important to critique the legacies of those ideas
and the ways that they’ve been internalized. This
is to point out that these ideas are actually not our
ideas. Hawaiians and other Polynesians have really
different ideas about our genealogies and our
relationships, which often emphasize that we are
family with Melanesian people and Micronesian
people. But I think if you can see the writings
of Kalākaua and Te Rangihīroa in this larger
context of this discourse about Polynesians being
white, it makes sense that they were trying to get
a handle on this discourse and see how it might
be used to bolster confidence and empowerment
for Polynesian people. Again, it’s not to critique
Kalākaua and Te Rangihīroa, but to show how they
were honestly trying to bolster their communities
and their nations in this colonial time. I think it’s
important that we, today, are able to see how much
we’ve internalized some of those ideas ourselves
still, and are able to do it differently. So in Hawai‘i,
it’s really evident that there is a lot of racism
against Micronesian people, including sometimes
from Hawaiian people. And there might be many
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
roots of that racism, but I think one of them is this
history of this idea imposed on the Pacific that
Polynesians are whiter and better than Melanesians
and Micronesians. And I think if we’re better able to
see where these ideas come from, and how and why
they’ve been internalized, then hopefully, we can
understand these ideas as a really central part of
decolonization more broadly.
ADP: Perhaps we can come back to this idea of
Melanesian and Micronesian people being family
with Polynesians, and that’s the way a lot of people
in the Pacific see this as well. In the second part of
your book, you show how the logic of possession
through whiteness continues to inform the way
white Americans see and value Native Hawaiians
and other Indigenous Pacific Islanders today.
But most importantly, you also demonstrate how
Indigenous Pacific Islanders resist these settler
colonial discourses and use strategies against
the logic of possession through whiteness in
various fields. And you do so by coining the term
“regenerative refusals.” Could you give us some
contemporary examples of this and tell us more
about what you mean by “regenerative refusals,”
and how they help foreground radically decolonial
oceanic futures?
MA: In that second part of the book, I try to show
different examples of the legacies of these ideas as
well as how Native Hawaiians and other Polynesian
people are grappling with these legacies today. I
look at it in a couple of different areas, including
legal forms of recognition and legal debates over
blood quantum, also looking at contemporary
genomic studies, where we see again largely white
or non-Polynesian scientists trying to determine
the exact origins of the Polynesian race, but now
through using more genomic technologies. I then
also look at our contemporary Indigenous artists
who engage with a lot of these ideas.
That idea of “regenerative refusal,”
in my usage, came out of seeing
how often Indigenous people’s
engagement with things is often
dismissed as hopelessly futile.
For example, in 2014, the Department of Interior
of the U.S. Federal Government came to Hawai‘i to
hold hearings about so-called federal recognition
of Native Hawaiians, which has a very long
77
and convoluted history. But to put it briefly, the
Department of Interior wanted to make Native
Hawaiians into a status that would be equal to
a federally recognized Native American tribe.
Native Hawaiians have never had that because
the history of colonialism in Hawai‘i is related, but
also distinct to colonialism that has impacted and
continues to impact Native Americans. So in 2014,
the Department of Interior came to Hawai‘i, and
held these hearings about “What are Hawaiian
communities thoughts about being federally
recognized?” Meeting after meeting on all of the
islands, in different locations, and consistently,
probably at least like 90% of all of the people who
spoke at these meetings said: “We don’t want to be
recognized by the federal government as Native
people under the Department of Interior, please send
the Department of State to come talk to us about
restoring our independence as an independent
country.” And also really interestingly, in the
hearings, there was a lot of pushback against
ideas about blood quantum as well. The way that
these hearings and Hawaiian responses were
portrayed in the local media at the time, with a lot
about “Oh, Hawaiians are just so rude or being so
mean to these Department of Interior people. The
Department of Interior people are just trying to
help, but Hawaiians are so backwards and hopeless.
They’re rejecting this help…”
So the idea I was trying to capture with
regenerative refusals is just that all of those people
who spoke at those hearings, who said “no” to this
offer from the Department of Interior, a lot of those
refusals were being dismissed by mainstream
media, but I think what they were doing was
something really radical and regenerative. Even
as eventually the Department of Interior did pass
the rule that recognized Hawaiians in some way.
But what I think came out of those hearings was
something bigger and more exciting and not related
to the Department of Interior at all. As people spoke,
it was a chance for Hawaiians to say what we
78
thought our relationships were to each other and
what nation we wanted, or how we wanted to be
recognized, or how we could recognize each other.
So the regenerative refusal idea is really just trying
to point out just how productive sometimes saying
“no” is. Even though I think, in a lot of mainstream
discourse, there’s a lot of dismissal of refusal as
being difficult to work with. So I talk about those
hearings and that example in the book; also in
terms of genomic science. There’s also a refusal
at certain points by Hawaiians to participate in
genomic studies or to agree to genetically modify
kalo or taro, which is our staple plant and staple
food. And, again, trying to point out how a lot of
how that has been represented by the mainstream
has been like “Oh, Hawaiians just don’t know what’s
best for them, or they’re so difficult,” but I’m trying
Fig.5
to show, in the context of these longer histories
of colonialism, just how powerful and important
those refusals can be, even if it does not appear
necessarily, to outsiders, that something productive
is happening, because they’re shutting down the
settler project. But the idea of regenerative refusals Fig.4
is to really see those moments as actually really
producing something different decolonial that is
really essential for our communities. ■
Maile Arvin is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) feminist
scholar, and an associate professor of History and Gender
Studies at the University of Utah. She is also the director of
Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Utah, as well as
the co-host and co-producer (with Angela Robinson) of a
podcast called Relations of Salt and Stars. Her first book,
Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Following figures from Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler
Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, was published with Duke Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, Duke University Press (2019).
Fig.1 Plaster casts of Harriet Beamer, James Apo, Moses Kamakawiwoole, made
University Press in 2019.
by George Usborne under the direction of Louis R. Sullivan in 1920–21. Three of
fifty-four plaster casts prepared for the Second International Congress of Eugenics
Anaïs Duong-Pedica is a white-Vietnamese PhD researcher in October 1921. / Bishop Museum Ethnology Collections, in Honolulu.
from Kanaky-New Caledonia (KNC) temporarily based in Fig.2 “New Race Growing Up in the Pacific,” published in the Oakland Tribune
Finland. Her thesis is on the politics of mixed-race identity and newspaper in 1930.
Fig.3 “A century of change in Hawaii’s population,” in the Cold Spring Harbor
settler colonialism in KNC. She currently teaches on whiteness, American Eugenics Movement archive (circa 1922).
womanhood and feminism and participates in anti-racist and Fig.4 Anaïs Duong-Pedica’s copy of Maile Arvin’s book, accompanied with a few
anti-colonial interventions in/from Finland. other books and items from Oceania (2023).
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°48 FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS) 79
THE FUNAMBULIST
ISSUE N°48 JULY – AUGUST 2023
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITE(NESS)
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NEXT ISSUE N°49 SEP – OCT 2023
SCHOOLS OF THE REVOLUTION
CO-EDITED WITH SÓNIA VAZ BORGES
Contributors: Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Camille Bacon, Sabrina Citra,
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 HOW TO DESIGN FOR THE ELDERLY AND THEIR CAREGIVERS?
A FILM CONCEIVED BY GIOVANNA BORASI
AND DIRECTED BY DANIEL SCHWARTZ.

We present the third and final film in our three-part documentary series, that examines
the ways in which changing societies, new economic pressures, and increasing population
density are affecting the homes of various communities. Where We Grow Older makes its
world premieres at the 10th Arquiteturas Film Festival in Porto 2023. Watch the first two
films When We Live Alone and What It Takes to Make a Home on YouTube @CCAchannel

EUR 12,00 ISSN 2402-5895