Nearly half a century ago, Allison Blakely produced Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought. The landmark text explored Black people’s lives and experiences in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union and how non-Black people in those spaces received them and conceptualized blackness from the seventeenth century to the 1980s. Since its publication, many of the Black characters and historical episodes adorning Russia and the Negro have become the terrains or mainstays of scholarly debates about Black life and experiences and ideas of blackness in Slavic, eastern, southeastern, and central European, as well as Eurasian societies.1 Roughly two decades later, others took up the mantel.

This article examines African American intellectual Louise Thompson Patterson’s 1932 journey to the Soviet Union as a lens through which to explore the complexities of transnational racial identity across ideological borders. It argues that Patterson’s experiences reveal both her political commitments and the contradictions of Soviet internationalism for Black women seeking alternatives to racial capitalism and gender oppression. Rather than viewing her engagement as naïve or disillusioned, the article situates it within a historically rooted, politically intentional search for liberation. The paper further contends that Soviet reactions to Patterson’s identity illuminate a rigid understanding of blackness, complicating claims of anti-racism and revealing internal hierarchies. By analyzing Patterson’s unpublished writings alongside broader historical currents, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of Black women’s transnational activism, the racial politics of the USSR, and the ongoing challenges of forging solidarity across different conceptions of race and justice.

This essay looks at blackness in the USSR from its contested margins. Focusing on South Africans categorized as “Coloured,” I explore dynamics of translation, solidarity, misunderstanding, and invisibility that arose when differing systems of racial classification interacted. In South Africa under segregation and apartheid, an intermediate category emerged between the dominant white minority and the subjugated black majority: Coloured. As the USSR became involved in South African anti-racist struggles, Soviet citizens did not know how to see and understand these lighter-skinned people who did not fit neatly into Soviet preconceptions about darker-skinned people of African descent. A handful of Coloured activists took on particularly prominent roles representing the plight of black South Africans for Soviet audiences, and being lighter skinned shaped their experiences of the USSR in significant ways. Traversing the realms of Soviet policy, scholarship, cultural production, and everyday interactions, we see remarkable inconsistency in how Coloureds were regarded: as invisible and also hypervisible, artificial and also real, black and also not black. This essay traces Soviet trajectories of the liminal category “Coloured” to explore the extraordinary chaos at the edges of blackness in the USSR.

This essay examines how blackness is lived, perceived, and negotiated in (post)socialist Kazakhstan by placing the experiences of two “dual heritage” women—Aminata Uėdrаogo, a contemporary media personality, and Yelena Khanga, a Soviet and Russian-era journalist—in conversation. Prompted by a visit with Uėdrаogo in Almaty, I use autoethnographic and Black feminist methods to explore how blackness functions as both a limit and a possibility within shifting frameworks of race, ethnicity, and national belonging. While scholarship on intermarriage and ethnic mixing in Soviet Central Asia exists, contemporary experiences of people of African descent—particularly women—remain largely absent.1 Through their narratives and embodied experiences, I argue that blackness in Central Asia complicates the presumed rupture between socialist and post-socialist periods and unsettles dominant Eurocentric paradigms of race. This analysis calls for further inquiry into African diasporic presence and theorizations of blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian contexts.

This article examines the experiences of African students at the Gorʹkii Literary Institute in the 1960s and 70s, a period when the Soviet Union positioned itself as a champion of anti-imperialism and racial equality. Through case studies of Gaoussou Diawara and Fikre Tolossa, it explores the contradictions between the public celebration of African writers and the more complex, often racialized, dynamics they encountered. While officially embraced as symbols of socialist internationalism, these students were also subject to exoticization and subtle forms of exclusion. Based on archival materials, memoirs, interviews, and literary texts, the article argues that African writers in the USSR responded to these tensions with ambivalence, expressing admiration for the Soviet project while downplaying or reframing discrimination. Their experiences reveal how the ideals of socialist solidarity retained meaning even when undermined in practice, offering insight into the strategic ways postcolonial intellectuals negotiated belonging, dignity, and ideological commitment.

This article engages with the construction of blackness in the socialist public sphere in state socialist Poland by analyzing two case studies: the visit of Kwame Nkrumah to Poland and the career of the US basketball player Kent Washington. While these two cases are embedded in different historical and political moments, they reveal how blackness was familiarized in a visually concrete yet abstract way. What were the promises that came with how blackness was constructed in the late socialist public sphere? How did they resonate within diasporic communities? Drawing on various types of sources, we argue that blackness in the public sphere was neither a danger nor the antithesis of whiteness but revered for political purposes. This framing of blackness—as postcolonial political empowerment or successful career in sport—also created unrealistically high bars for the visual incorporation of Black people.

Although blackface minstrelsy is considered to be one of the first American pop culture products, its circulation in central and eastern Europe is relatively unknown. This article engages with the history of blackface performance and imagery in Poland, treating it as a lens granting insight into ways of imagining blackness in the region. It focuses on the interwar period as a time of rapid adaptation of colonial imagination with its global racial hierarchies in the public sphere of the newly independent country. Against the ideology of “colonial exceptionalism” and “white innocence” based on an assumption that Poland—as a state with no history of overseas colonies and Black slavery—is free of anti-black racism, we describe the active involvement of large groups of society in transnational colonial imagination, developed especially in the sphere of entertainment. The article not only demonstrates the existence of the tradition of blackface in Poland and reconstructs its distinct character but also suggests structural determinants that continue to affect ideas about blackness in Poland today.

This essay explores possibilities for theorizing blackness in relation to modern art and performance in Romania by tracing the trajectories of two African American men who spent significant time in the country. Dancer Bob Hopkins performed with Romanian entertainment troupes for a decade before being deported, while entertainer and cabaret manager Peter Johnson settled in Romania and continued to perform for factory workers under state socialism. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic (1993), the essay centers the experiences of Hopkins and Johnson, providing new perspectives on transatlantic cultural exchanges. It further examines the participation of Romania, and eastern Europe more broadly, within global racial hierarchies and formations, drawing on recent scholarship. It concludes by considering the challenges of such research and interrogating the (im)possibility of recovering traces of the Black experience in Romania, while nonetheless advocating for a reckoning with the specters of past histories.

This article addresses the underrepresentation of “blackness” within Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), which has historically concentrated on the United States, western Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Despite calls for global expansion, CWS has so far inadequately engaged with the ways in which individuals perceived as “Black” were excluded from the idealized national community in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The marginalization of blackness profoundly influenced discussions around national belonging throughout the twentieth century and continues to shape debates on race in the region today. We re-examine the significance of blackness, particularly through the racialization of Roma communities in interwar Romania and the implications of blackness elsewhere in CEE, while challenging the portrayal of this region as homogeneous and exclusively white.

Building on my research about racialization and marginalization, this article examines race and the global color line in terms of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism, asking how such inquiries can shed light on the ways that blackness and whiteness are configured across southeast Europe and Europe as a whole. This paper has three primary goals: the first is to probe the complexities of the meanings of blackness. The second aim is to examine antiblackness and anti-Romani racism as parallel processes configured by European whiteness. The third objective is to explore how this type of critical analysis can expand scholarly inquiry beyond the discourses that move past race as individualized and immoral, and towards more comprehensive examinations of regional and global racial logics that structure social relations.

Audre Lorde (1934–1992), a renowned figure in the American Black feminist canon, shaped feminist and antiracist struggles globally, including those in Europe. Drawing on Piro Rexhepi’s framing of the Balkans as a white enclosure marked by European colorblindness, non-aligned racial innocence, and semi-peripheral “desire for the West,” I use content-based digital ethnography to examine Lorde’s presence in Serbian feminist production since the 2000s. The results show that while Lorde’s figure circulates, the engagement with her work stays mainly quotational, decontextualized, and stripped of racial specificity. Relying on critical theory of blackness, especially the work of Hortense Spillers and Afropessimist thought of Frank B. Wilderson III, I argue that Lorde in Serbia does not escape the American race grammar. The symbolic use of her work signals antiracist virtue, allowing the wounded semi-peripheral white subject proximity to global liberal whiteness. At the same time, Lorde’s blackness anchored in American geopolitical dominance remains canonical, while local Roma mahala-blackness stays unacknowledged, if not impossible.

This paper analyzes imperial Russian images of Black captivity from the mid-nineteenth century. I am concerned foremost with Karl Briullov’s formal techniques for picturing the deferential figure of the Moor. A deracinated, mobile signifier of wealth and sovereignty, the Moor depicts captivity through ornamentality: an aesthetic procedure that attests to the figure’s taming, domestication, and attempted assimilation within the narrative of Russian imperial ascendancy. The Moor belongs to everywhere and everyone yet is made to project national fealty whenever it appears. Of course, to designate a single image or figuration of the Black as “captive” is tautological: within theories of the Black’s interfacing with performance, visual, and media technologies, the compulsion to act, show, and be seen restates captivity, spectacularity, and death as preconditions for the representation of embodied Black life. I argue that in its perspectival alienation on the Russian canvas, the Moor—a generic image of the Black—both materializes Russia’s construction of a racial imaginary and alerts us to its place in global regimes of race-making.

“Blackness” in the meaning under discussion here is too elusive to consistently discern because it defies clear definition. For instance, it was not Africans who designated themselves as “black,” nor even as Africans, since their self-identification was with their own respective cultures. The concepts the term “blackness” evokes are mainly what others have associated with Africans and other people of Black African descent. In many respects the purveyors of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades committed the greatest identity theft in world history. When the concept of “blackness” is brought to earth, a common thread that runs through it is a struggle over personal and group identities. It is also at times cloaked in other cultural behavior such as xenophobia. The original European attitudes evincing “blackness” were significantly influenced by Christian tradition surrounding the so-called Curse of Ham, an age-old myth concerning human beings of darker complexion that was shared by the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious traditions and came to foster racist concepts positing inherent inferiority of Black Africans in many modern societies. Especially pertinent here, the Russian Primary Chronicle of the early twelfth century begins with an overview of the genesis of nations based on this Hamitic myth.1 Therefore, because of shared Christian traditions, Russians and other Slavs spread this concept alongside western Europeans even in the period before close direct contacts with the west were established. This is the broader historical background of the themes treated in this timely collection of essays “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies.”

This contribution explores the non-aligned era labor migration of Yugoslav men to postcolonial Zambia. Based on oral history and archival research conducted in Lusaka and Belgrade, it seeks to provide a gendered account of Yugoslavs negotiating their role as white Europeans in a postcolonial milieu and the ways in which Zambian colleagues understood Yugoslavs to have positioned themselves. Drawing upon contemporary social anthropological research from post-Yugoslav space, I argue that two modes of masculinities were in simultaneous operation and can help to make sense of the tensions inherent in the role of Yugoslav male workers in Zambia. An adventuring young Yugoslav man (frajer) might have driven fast, drunk heavily, and boasted about sexual conquests, but according to the motif of the “father,” the same person would also understand himself as a provider, whose responsible, serious, and protective characteristics would be used in assisting Zambians to develop as industrial workers.

The bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, like military and civil servants in late imperial Russia, underwent significant “aging,” with the median age rising substantially as a result of greater life expectancy. In contrast to existing scholarship, which advances a political explanation for staffing in the episcopate (above all, the high rate of turnover and transfers), this study seeks to show that demography and the service structure were the key factors. Rather than rely on the politicized memoir literature, this analysis is based on the diary of the presiding member of the Synod, which focuses on the rationale and problems in staffing the episcopate. Significantly, the diocesan bishops were not only overaged but overtasked, finding it ever more difficult to perform traditional, let alone, additional roles. All this provides a new perspective on the Church’s capacity to address the growing social and confessional challenges in late imperial Russia.