Editors: Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET Wien) and Hans-Christian Petersen (BKGE Oldsenburg)
Is there racism against people from Eastern Europe in Germany, Western Europe or North America? Few people would ask this question until recently, although the global anti-racist mobilization of recent years has increasingly brought the issue of racism to the forefront of public and academic debate. People from Eastern Europe, many of whom have been living in the West for decades, were not included in the debates for a long time. This omission is surprising in light of the long historical tradition of devaluing 'the East'. Such degrading discourses and practices underwent many transformations throughout history, became racialized from the end of the 19th century (anti-Slavism) and shaped restrictive policies directed against migrants from Eastern Europe in countries such as Germany, Great Britain and the USA, in some cases with long-term effects. In the form of German occupation and extermination policies during the Second World War, the "colonial gaze to the East" (Christoph Kienemann) even had genocidal consequences.
In recent years, anti-East European racism has become more of a topic for debate. In Germany, young ‘post-East’ activists talk about anti-Slavism on Instagram, through pod-casts and videos and demand recognition of their experiences. The same applies to lit-erature: authors with roots in Eastern Europe such as Paul Bokowski, Lena Gorelik, Dmitrij Kapitelman, Emilia Smechowski, Artur Weigandt and Natascha Wodin write in their books about their arrival and growing up in Germany, including experiences of re-jection and racism. Painful and often silenced experiences thus become sayable. At the same time, however, there are always controversial discussions about whether the expe-riences of Eastern European migrants can be subsumed under 'racism' at all, as they are 'white' and 'privileged'.
While the (post)colonial and racist dimensions of German history in Eastern Europe up to 1945 have long been the subject of research, the investigation of continuities, changes and ruptures in racializing discourses and practices towards Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans after the end of the war is still largely lacking. Particularly with regard to the topic of migration from Eastern Europe, research on Great Britain since the EU's east-ward enlargement in 2004 and increasingly also on Germany provides important impuls-es on the related processes of "racialization" (Fox, Morosanu & Szilassy 2012) or "am-biguous racialization" (Lewicki 2023) of Eastern Europeans, who can also be understood as "internal others" (Klingenberg 2022). Ivan Kalmar (2022) speaks of a pan-European positioning of Eastern and Central Europe as "white but not quite", while Claudia Sa-dowski-Smith (2018) has described the "new immigrant whiteness" of post-Soviet immi-grants in the USA. The editors of this volume are writing the first monograph on the histo-ry and present of anti-East European racism (to be published in 2024).
The JKGE 2025 aims to take up and continue this dynamic development. An expanding field of research will be surveyed and examined with regard to its epistemological poten-tials and limits as well as empirical gaps and interdisciplinary research perspectives. Contributions on the following and other topics are welcome:
- Historical continuities and transformations of anti-East European and anti-Slavic racism before and after 1945
- Colonialism and racism in Eastern Europe
- Intersectional entanglements of racism and other forms of discrimination (anti-Slavism, antisemitism, antiziganism, classism, sexism, etc.)
- Anti-East European racism in Western Europe or North America since 1945
- Alternative concepts to racism/racialization
- Eastern Europeans and "whiteness"
- Perspectives for greater visibility of the topic, also in relation to other racisms
Please send, by 10 March 2024, an abstract of the (unpublished) article you are propos-ing, in German or in English (max. 2,500 characters, incl. spaces), together with a brief biographical note. Email to apl. Prof. Dr. Jannis Panagiotidis (jannis.panagiotidis@univie.ac.at) and PD Dr. Hans-Christian Petersen (hans-christian.petersen@bkge.uni-oldenburg.de) as well as to the editors of the JKGE (redaktion@bkge.uni-oldenburg.de).
The articles selected for publication by the beginning of April must be submitted, in Ger-man or in English, by 1 November 2024 (max. 50,000 characters). For quality control purposes, articles submitted will be subjected to double-blind peer review before publi-cation online in open access and in a printed issue.