Books by Piro Rexhepi
Duke University Press, 2023
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European cities Modernity, race and colonialism, 2022
In what other registries and imaginaries might we locate cities along the Northern Medditerranean... more In what other registries and imaginaries might we locate cities along the Northern Medditerranean shores that are now thought of as European? This chapter looks at Barcelona and Thessealoniki as Europeanized but not neccessarly European cities. In examining their historically diverse urban centers, contact points of migration patterns and more recently sites of migrant settlement, we try to provide insight into different approaches to migrant claim and contestations to both the cityscapes and their embedded memories. Eurocentric readings and makings of these cities have flattened out or erased their not-so European urban and social fabric. Situated in decolonial de-linking and divesting from the ways in which these cities are molded and modelled in eurocentric epistemologies and imaginaries, this chapter looks at migrant and queer of color politics and historicity that circumvent the pressure and strengthening of ethnic, racial, national, and post-national European mythologies by identifying with the city and its neighbourhoods while producing multicentred and intersectional narratives and spaces of belonging, becoming that de-europeanizing urban space.
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Preko duge u Evropu ispituje mnoštvo političkih, društvenih i kulturnih implikacija sve relevantn... more Preko duge u Evropu ispituje mnoštvo političkih, društvenih i kulturnih implikacija sve relevantnije simboličke povezanosti evropeizacije, LGBT aktivizma, prava LGBT osoba i neheteronormativnosti. Nakon agresivnog etnonacionalizma, ta pojmovna mešavina stvara višestruku diferencijaciju između zemalja bivše Jugoslavije i EU, ali i unutar postjugoslovenskog prostora i regionalnih aktivističkih „scena”. Sprega evropeizacije i pratećih, ideologijom zadojenih pojmova evropske modernosti, slobode i demokratije, s jedne, i „gej borbe”, s druge strane, ima prilično ambivalentan efekat: naime, ta veza zadaje težak udarac represivnom poretku patrijarhalnih rodnih odnosa, jer „nenormativne” seksualne identifikacije izvlači iz isključivo privatnog prostora, ali i remeti delovanje aktivističkih inicijativa na lokalnom nivou i otuđuje borbu za neheteronormativnu emancipaciju od domaće političke arene. Tako se, tamo gde EU još nije u potpunosti stigla, stvara „disciplinarni gej subjekt sposoban za evropejstvo” i proizvodi „međunarodno-domaća javna sfera” povlašćenih glasova u kojoj zapadne ambasade i njihovi predstavnici počinju da promovišu politički program vezan za prava LGBT osoba koji se obavezno ne podudara s lokalnim problemima niti ih povezuje s drugim izvorima opresije.
Ovaj zbornik, zasnovan na opsežnim etnografskim istraživanjima, nudi briljantnu analizu kompleksnog odnosa između LGBT prava i evropskih integracija, i predstavlja značajan doprinos ne samo literaturi o aktivizmu na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije, već i sociološkoj građi o LGBT aktivističkom delovanju uopšte. U tom smislu, Preko duge u Evropu će biti korisna referenca svima koji se bave studijama roda i društvenih pokreta.
Džil A. Irvin
Univerzitet Oklahome
Ovaj izrazito originalan zbornik ne predstavlja samo pionirski doprinos istraživanjima LGBT aktivizma, nego nudi i odličan primer kako se političkim i društvenim konfliktima u jugoistočnoj Evropi može pristupiti na teorijski utemeljen i angažovan način. Rezultat takvog pristupa je knjiga koja je impresivna i po širini empirijskog zahvata i po akademskoj rigoroznosti individualnih priloga.
Erik D. Gordi
Univerzitetski koledž London
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Papers by Piro Rexhepi
ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies, Aug 14, 2020
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Desde El Margen, 2020
¿De qué otra manera podemos entender la disposición del migrante post-colonial en la metrópoli eu... more ¿De qué otra manera podemos entender la disposición del migrante post-colonial en la metrópoli europea de hoy si no a través del abandono, la austeridad, el cautiverio y encarcelamiento de refugiadxs en sus fronteras? ¿En el marco de #thisisyou? y en reconocimiento de la abolición como «verde, roja e internacionalista» según las palabras de Ruth Wilson Gilmore, en este artículo queremos hacer una antología de la cuestión de reparaciones en la praxis decolonial y preguntar ¿Cuáles son las formas en que lxs sujetxs poscoloniales resisten y rechazan las lógicas coloniales de despojo y desplazamiento como praxis de abolición? Si pensamos en la abolición desde el llamado de Patrisse Cullors: «no solo para desestabilizar, deconstruir y destruir los sistemas, instituciones y prácticas opresivas, sino también para reparar las historias de daños en todos los ámbitos»(2019, 1686) Nuestra tarea no es solo abolir las cárceles, la policía y la militarización, que se ejercen en nombre de la «seguridad pública» y la «seguridad nacional». También debemos exigir reparaciones e incorporar una perspectiva de justicia reparadora en nuestra visión de la sociedad y la construcción comunitaria en el siglo XXI" (2019).
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Feminist Critique. East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies, 2020
Marina Gržinić, Tjaša Kancler, Piro Rexhepi
This conversation started in the summer of 2018 at... more Marina Gržinić, Tjaša Kancler, Piro Rexhepi
This conversation started in the summer of 2018 at the first Balkan Society for Theory and Practice workshop that took place in Prizren, Kosova. Scholars, activists, and artists came together to engage in a very much needed debate about the past, present, and future of anticapitalist politics, feminism, queer and trans studies, critical race theory, postcolonial and decolonial critique in the context of the post-socialist Balkan countries and former Eastern Europe. The idea for this tri-logue came out of late night and early morning conversations based on common concerns and collaborations that have taken various forms through years of exchange and engagement with one another. What follows is a discussion among the three of us based on the questions posed in the open call for this special issue Breaking with Transition: Decolonial and Postcolonial Perspectives in Eastern Europe. To articulate some critical points, we find it necessary to rethink the conflicts and tensions and to envisage important analytical turns and political tactics within our ongoing struggles against turbo-racializing capitalism.
read the article here: https://feminist.krytyka.com/en/articles/decolonial-encounters-and-geopolitics-racial-capitalism
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History and Anthropology, 2019
Looking at the architectures of governance that have characterized the Islamic Community of Bosni... more Looking at the architectures of governance that have characterized the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this essay explores the ways in which imperial inventories of colonial institutions come to influence and arbitrate contemporary debates over what constitutes legitimate practices of Islam in Bosnia–Herzegovina and Austria. Examining the larger political context in which these debates emerge, including the criminalization of Muslim communities that refuse to submit to the authority of state-sanctioned Islamic religious institutions, I detail the ways in which colonial histories are recruited to curate a homogenized, continuous representational mandate for Muslim communities and practices in Austria and BiH. Attending to nostalgic invocations of the late Habsburg governance of Islam and Muslims, I argue that these discourses serve to legitimate specific Muslim institutions and actors in Austria and BiH that privilege the Habsburg legacy through the exclusion of outlawed/illegal Muslim communities and practices in both countries.
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Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , 2018
To observers of contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina, the years 2013–2016
have been marked by heighten... more To observers of contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina, the years 2013–2016
have been marked by heightened public discontent and the emergence of
civil prrotests. While early protests surrounded sites unmistakably
pertaining to the country’s socialist legacy, such as privatized factories,
more recent dissatisfaction is being articulated around sites that point to
Bosnia’s past as a colony of the Hapsburg Empire. This essay argues it is
not accidental that these colonial markers have become instigators of
protest and dissent articulated through the memory of the recent Socialist
past. Under the claim of cultural heritage protection, former colonial sites
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and throughout the Balkans are unearthed tangibly
to mark new realities of postcoloniality. The resurrection of Hapsburg
heritage in Bosnia is instructive as it helps illuminate the wide range of
tensions and contradictions inherent in the move from colonial Europe to a
(post)colonial European Union. Far from wiping the slate clean and
offering a fresh start, as EU actors often claim, this process is paradoxically
reinstalling institutions that were once the embodiment of colonial
expansion. In arguing for the expansion of postcolonial critique to include
the Balkans, this essay examines the political, economic, and symbolic ways in which Hapsburg colonial sites and institutions are restored into public visibility as registers of Sarajevo’s European futures.
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Ethnic and Racial Studies , 2018
Engaging with critical border literature, this article examines how racial and religious categori... more Engaging with critical border literature, this article examines how racial and religious categories are mobilized in materializing EU borders in the Balkans. Exploring the tensions that emerge in Muslim communities in post-Socialist and post-conflict Macedonia during the Syrian “refugee crisis” in 2015, it looks at how racialized categorizations of difference are deployed along the Balkan Route to differentiate local, white European Muslims from refugee Arab Others. Through policy analysis and fieldwork, the article questions the standard, colour-blind and equal-to-all European integration by highlighting political divisions that emerge within Muslim communities. While these tensions were present long before the ongoing refugee crisis, this article argues that the current geopolitical context allows for these tensions to be utilized in the surveillance and securitization of EU border regimes.
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Eastern Europe unmapped: Beyond borders and peripheries, 2017
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The cultural life of capitalism in Yugoslavia, 2017
This chapter examines the deployment of LGBT rights discourses in securing strategic American For... more This chapter examines the deployment of LGBT rights discourses in securing strategic American Foreign Policy goals in Bosnia and Kosovo. Specifically, the author looks at the incorporation of LGBT politics in the neoliberal reforms enacted in both countries through post-conflict humanitarian interventions. In tracing the genealogy of sexual politics in this context, the author details how the representation of these LGBT communities as victims of homophobic crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo converge with larger homonationalist geo-temporalities that conceptualize homophobia as a residue of socialist past and/or Islamic present.
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Big Data & Society, 2016
This paper reflects on the continued potency of veillance theories to traverse beyond the taxonom... more This paper reflects on the continued potency of veillance theories to traverse beyond the taxonomies of surveillance inside liberal democracies. It provides a commentary on the ability of sousveillance to destabilise and disrupt suer/ violence by shifting its focus from the centre to the periphery, where Big Data surveillance is tantamount to sur/violence. In these peripheral political spaces, surveillance is not framed by concerns over privacy, democracy and civil society; rather, it is a matter of life and death, a technique of both biopolitical and thanatopolitical power. I argue that the universalist, and universalizing, debates over surveillance cannot be mapped through the anxieties of privileged middle classes as they would neither transcend nor make possible alternative ways of tackling the intersection of surveillance and violence so long as they are couched in the liberal concerns for democracy. I call this phenomenon ''liberal luxury,'' whereby debates over surveillance have over-emphasised liberal proclivities at the expense of disengaging those peripheral populations most severely affected by sur/violence.
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Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, 2017
15 years after the civil conflict in 2001, the main challenge of Muslim communities in Macedonia ... more 15 years after the civil conflict in 2001, the main challenge of Muslim communities in Macedonia remains the reconstruction of mosques and waqf buildings destroyed during the conflict. Requests by the Islamic Religious Community of Macedonia (IRCM) in the city of Prilep to rebuild the central Čarši Džamija (mosque) burned in 2001 have been rejected by the local authorities on grounds that the reconstruction of the mosque is possible to the extent that the mosque can only serve as a monument of culture and cannot be used for religious ceremonies. Under a rubric of “restoration of history,” architectural projects of urban renewal around Macedonia have undermined or erased Islamic sites by either transforming them into multicultural historical sites which prevent access and administration of those sites by Muslim communities. Moreover, the controversial government sponsored “Skopje 2014” project, meant to transform Skopje into a proper “European capital,” has deepened the grievances of Muslim communities on issues relating to land appropriation and designation of historical Islamic sites for new urban projects that do not acknowledge the multi-ethnic and multi-religious population of Skopje.
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EU, Europe Unfinished: Mediating Europe and the Balkans in a time of crisis, 2016
Utilizing queer and postcolonial theory, this chapter looks at the representation of queer Muslim... more Utilizing queer and postcolonial theory, this chapter looks at the representation of queer Muslims in contemporary semi-realistic historical fiction and film to explore the construction of heteronromative secular and nationalist narratives. I argue that complex queer subjectivities among Muslims in Albania and Bosnia are essentialized and reduced to Eurocentric binary sexualities to promote European belonging of these two countries. Specifically, I look at how these attempts to incorporate sexual orientations in the service of European orientations change over time to assure Bosnia’s and Albania’s compatibility with dominant European epistemological and ontological categories of gender and sexuality. If in the Albanian historical novel the queer Muslim is employed in the production of the heterosexual European Albanian, in Bosnian film, the queer Muslim is staged as a sexualized victim who can only find salvation by either escaping to Europe or brining Europe home to Bosnia. Sexual orientations thus are not only articulated in relation to Europe but they become the markers of Europe orientations, where queers are represented as Muslim villains or victims. In this context, cultural texts trade sexualities in the European postcolonial and post-modern cultural marketplace where the division between history and fiction is neutralized, contributing to the legitimization of larger processes of European enlargement.
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Southeastern Europe, 2016
This paper investigates the convergence of European Union enlargement strategies and queer politi... more This paper investigates the convergence of European Union enlargement strategies and queer politics in the production of Islamophobia in Kosovo. Through a reading of recent homophobic attacks in Kosovo, it examines how the incorporation of lgbti politics into the eu enlargement assemblages generate a representational praxis of queer communities in Kosovo under threat by Muslim extremists. This paper proposes that the Europeanization of lgbti rights depoliticizes queer communities and singles them out for protection as victims of Islamic fundamentalism by creating binary and exclusionary Queer/Islam divisions that prevent the emergence of intersectional soli-darities and subjectivities such as queer and Muslim. In this context, European financed 'coming out' projects gain a new meaning in Kosovo, one where the promotion of visibility for certain queer subjects works simultaneously to expose Muslim 'extremists'. Queer acceptance in Islamophobic times, then, becomes the ultimate test of who can and cannot become European citizen. Keywords Kosovo – eu enlargement – Eastern Europe – homonationalism – Islam – queer – orientalism Queer1 political formations in Eastern Europe have increasingly become another discursive space where eu multicultural citizenship is negotiated, often at a 1 For the purpose of this article, I am using the term queer as an umbrella to include all non-heterosexual and gender-variant people.
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East European Quarterly, 2015
This article examines Islamophobia not as an exclusive feature of far-right politics in Europe bu... more This article examines Islamophobia not as an exclusive feature of far-right politics in Europe but as a constitutive part of mainstream European Union enlargement processes. Looking at EU commission and parliament reports, as well as enlargement strategies, I examine security practices and policies that stem from recent policy debates on the " crime-terror nexus. " Specifically, I look at how EU taxonomies of Islamophobia come to influence broader securitization and bordering practices that mark and produce Muslim populations in the Western Balkans as suspect communities in need of disciplinary violence under the promise of EU integration.
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Book Reviews by Piro Rexhepi
The Maydan, 2023
"Feel-good Orientalism and the Question of Dignity" | A Review Essay on Emily Greble's Muslims an... more "Feel-good Orientalism and the Question of Dignity" | A Review Essay on Emily Greble's Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe
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Journal of Muslims in Europe, 2017
In The Revival of Islam in the Balkans, editors Elbasani and Roy have attempted to reconceptualiz... more In The Revival of Islam in the Balkans, editors Elbasani and Roy have attempted to reconceptualize the contemporary history of Muslims in the Balkans as the ‘historical stronghold of Muslims in Europe’, an ambitious, if problematic, attempt that abstracts complex current political realities through area studies categories such as Europe/Eastern Europe/Balkans/ Middle East and a socialist/post-socialist periodization. Editorial politics, however, should not cause us to dismiss the contributions themselves, as most of the chapters provide good in-depth analysis and in- sights into the Orientalist prism through which Muslims in the Balkans have been approached in academia and media in the last three decades.
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Books by Piro Rexhepi
Ovaj zbornik, zasnovan na opsežnim etnografskim istraživanjima, nudi briljantnu analizu kompleksnog odnosa između LGBT prava i evropskih integracija, i predstavlja značajan doprinos ne samo literaturi o aktivizmu na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije, već i sociološkoj građi o LGBT aktivističkom delovanju uopšte. U tom smislu, Preko duge u Evropu će biti korisna referenca svima koji se bave studijama roda i društvenih pokreta.
Džil A. Irvin
Univerzitet Oklahome
Ovaj izrazito originalan zbornik ne predstavlja samo pionirski doprinos istraživanjima LGBT aktivizma, nego nudi i odličan primer kako se političkim i društvenim konfliktima u jugoistočnoj Evropi može pristupiti na teorijski utemeljen i angažovan način. Rezultat takvog pristupa je knjiga koja je impresivna i po širini empirijskog zahvata i po akademskoj rigoroznosti individualnih priloga.
Erik D. Gordi
Univerzitetski koledž London
Papers by Piro Rexhepi
This conversation started in the summer of 2018 at the first Balkan Society for Theory and Practice workshop that took place in Prizren, Kosova. Scholars, activists, and artists came together to engage in a very much needed debate about the past, present, and future of anticapitalist politics, feminism, queer and trans studies, critical race theory, postcolonial and decolonial critique in the context of the post-socialist Balkan countries and former Eastern Europe. The idea for this tri-logue came out of late night and early morning conversations based on common concerns and collaborations that have taken various forms through years of exchange and engagement with one another. What follows is a discussion among the three of us based on the questions posed in the open call for this special issue Breaking with Transition: Decolonial and Postcolonial Perspectives in Eastern Europe. To articulate some critical points, we find it necessary to rethink the conflicts and tensions and to envisage important analytical turns and political tactics within our ongoing struggles against turbo-racializing capitalism.
read the article here: https://feminist.krytyka.com/en/articles/decolonial-encounters-and-geopolitics-racial-capitalism
have been marked by heightened public discontent and the emergence of
civil prrotests. While early protests surrounded sites unmistakably
pertaining to the country’s socialist legacy, such as privatized factories,
more recent dissatisfaction is being articulated around sites that point to
Bosnia’s past as a colony of the Hapsburg Empire. This essay argues it is
not accidental that these colonial markers have become instigators of
protest and dissent articulated through the memory of the recent Socialist
past. Under the claim of cultural heritage protection, former colonial sites
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and throughout the Balkans are unearthed tangibly
to mark new realities of postcoloniality. The resurrection of Hapsburg
heritage in Bosnia is instructive as it helps illuminate the wide range of
tensions and contradictions inherent in the move from colonial Europe to a
(post)colonial European Union. Far from wiping the slate clean and
offering a fresh start, as EU actors often claim, this process is paradoxically
reinstalling institutions that were once the embodiment of colonial
expansion. In arguing for the expansion of postcolonial critique to include
the Balkans, this essay examines the political, economic, and symbolic ways in which Hapsburg colonial sites and institutions are restored into public visibility as registers of Sarajevo’s European futures.
Book Reviews by Piro Rexhepi
Ovaj zbornik, zasnovan na opsežnim etnografskim istraživanjima, nudi briljantnu analizu kompleksnog odnosa između LGBT prava i evropskih integracija, i predstavlja značajan doprinos ne samo literaturi o aktivizmu na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije, već i sociološkoj građi o LGBT aktivističkom delovanju uopšte. U tom smislu, Preko duge u Evropu će biti korisna referenca svima koji se bave studijama roda i društvenih pokreta.
Džil A. Irvin
Univerzitet Oklahome
Ovaj izrazito originalan zbornik ne predstavlja samo pionirski doprinos istraživanjima LGBT aktivizma, nego nudi i odličan primer kako se političkim i društvenim konfliktima u jugoistočnoj Evropi može pristupiti na teorijski utemeljen i angažovan način. Rezultat takvog pristupa je knjiga koja je impresivna i po širini empirijskog zahvata i po akademskoj rigoroznosti individualnih priloga.
Erik D. Gordi
Univerzitetski koledž London
This conversation started in the summer of 2018 at the first Balkan Society for Theory and Practice workshop that took place in Prizren, Kosova. Scholars, activists, and artists came together to engage in a very much needed debate about the past, present, and future of anticapitalist politics, feminism, queer and trans studies, critical race theory, postcolonial and decolonial critique in the context of the post-socialist Balkan countries and former Eastern Europe. The idea for this tri-logue came out of late night and early morning conversations based on common concerns and collaborations that have taken various forms through years of exchange and engagement with one another. What follows is a discussion among the three of us based on the questions posed in the open call for this special issue Breaking with Transition: Decolonial and Postcolonial Perspectives in Eastern Europe. To articulate some critical points, we find it necessary to rethink the conflicts and tensions and to envisage important analytical turns and political tactics within our ongoing struggles against turbo-racializing capitalism.
read the article here: https://feminist.krytyka.com/en/articles/decolonial-encounters-and-geopolitics-racial-capitalism
have been marked by heightened public discontent and the emergence of
civil prrotests. While early protests surrounded sites unmistakably
pertaining to the country’s socialist legacy, such as privatized factories,
more recent dissatisfaction is being articulated around sites that point to
Bosnia’s past as a colony of the Hapsburg Empire. This essay argues it is
not accidental that these colonial markers have become instigators of
protest and dissent articulated through the memory of the recent Socialist
past. Under the claim of cultural heritage protection, former colonial sites
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and throughout the Balkans are unearthed tangibly
to mark new realities of postcoloniality. The resurrection of Hapsburg
heritage in Bosnia is instructive as it helps illuminate the wide range of
tensions and contradictions inherent in the move from colonial Europe to a
(post)colonial European Union. Far from wiping the slate clean and
offering a fresh start, as EU actors often claim, this process is paradoxically
reinstalling institutions that were once the embodiment of colonial
expansion. In arguing for the expansion of postcolonial critique to include
the Balkans, this essay examines the political, economic, and symbolic ways in which Hapsburg colonial sites and institutions are restored into public visibility as registers of Sarajevo’s European futures.