Encountering Race in Albania
An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife

Chelsi West Ohueri (Author)

9781501781865

Hardback, published 15 June 2025

240 pages, 15 b&w halftones, 1 map - 15 Halftones, black and white - 1 Maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.907 kg

Encountering Race in Albania is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania. Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often limited to Western processes of modernity that exclude Eastern Europe, racialization processes are global, and the ethnography of everyday Albanian socialities makes visible how race operates. Historical and political science frameworks prevail in the study of post-Cold War East European societies, yet as West Ohueri shows, anthropological and ethnographic knowledge can equip scholars to ask questions that they might otherwise not consider, illustrating how racialization is ongoing and enduring in a period that she terms the communist afterlife. Encountering Race in Albania, through the unexpected optic of Albania, a small, formerly communist country in Southeast Europe, offers significant insights into into broader understandings of race in a global context.

Introduction
1. The Communist Afterlife
2. The Trial of the Anthropologist
3. Peripheral Whiteness
4. On Blackness: A Story in Six Names
5. A Question of Racism in Three Acts
Conclusion