Resurfacing Remains of 1990s Albanian Islamophobia
Piro Rexhepi, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL)
Overview
Abstract
On December 12th, 1985, six members of the Popaj family from Durrës approached the Italian embassy on Elbasan Street in Tirana speaking in Italian. They had taken extra care to conceal their Albanianess by dressing up as tourists. Their plot worked as the Albanian security of the embassy assumed them to be Italians and allowed them to enter the embassy grounds casually. Once inside, they claimed political asylum and for the next five years would go on to live under the protection of the Italian government. It was only in May of 1990 in the context of the larger transformations of the Cold War, that the Albanian government gave in to Italian and UN pressure to allow the family to transit to the airport and depart for Italy. By June 1990, around 10,000 Albanian citizens entered Western embassies in Tirana seeking political asylum. As the socialist state started to crumble, unaccounted numbers of Albanians made their way by land into Greece and Yugoslavia with the largest numbers departing with ships from the ports of Vlora and Durrës towards Italy. By March 1991, 25,708 Albanians had reached Italy and sought political asylum. In August of that same year, an additional 10,000 Albanians reached Italy with the commercial vessel “Vlora”. In Albanian, the massive crossing into Italy as well as Greece came to be known as the exodus of the 1990s, as the socialist state collapsed under the student chants “We want Albania like the rest of Europe”.
In 2019, Pajtim Statovci’s book Crossings made headlines in literary circles in Europe and the United States. The novel’s protagonist Bujar, an Albanian who wishes to be anything but Albanian, moves through Europe as a migrant, able to transpass gender, sexuality and class by acquiring “a new way of walking, a new body language… or [just by] dressing differently”. Albanians, the protagonist reflects, have been telling themselves so many lies about who they are “in such a way that it’s not lying at all” and the lies have become so real that they are not lies at all but a “way of being”. There is nearly nothing that the protagonist can’t become, “I do, however, believe” reflects Bujar, “that a person’s desire to look a particular way and behave in a certain manner can directly impact the breadth of a shoulder, the amount of body hair, the size of a foot, one’s talent and choice of profes¬sion. Everything else can be learned, acquired – a new way of walking, a new body language, you can practice speaking at a higher pitch or dressing differently, telling lies in such a way that it’s not lying at all. It’s just a way of being”.
Reviewing the novel in the New Yorker as part of a “literary tradition in which identity is seen as fluid and performative”, Garth Greenwell notes “Statovci’s critique of identity politics” as his main protagonist “consistently rejects collective identities, from the classification of refugees as ‘barbaric’ to the liberal championing of minorities”. Yet what allows Bujar to move seamlessly through these spaces and evade the regulatory racist gaze, in a narrative set in the supposed post-racial and colour-blind Europe, is his seemingly white but ostensibly racialised body that achieves freedom to do as it pleases in a moment of intensified racial anxiety that makes distinction of east and west European bodies inconsequential. Yet, for his body to attain transmutability and passing, any indication of non-whiteness and non-westerness or relation to the new others must be cancelled and concealed. In changing his identity, Bujar can and wants to be “French or German or Greek, but never Albanian”.
Crossings could be a convenient narrative about migration, mutation, movement and the monstrosities of Europeaness, but it is not because it falls short of mentioning racism, the undercommons and the necropolitics of borders, instead it offers a cheery diversity novel about the supposed ability of everyone to pass and mask – because if an Albanian passes in Europe, why shouldn’t everyone else? It is a colour-blind celebration of queerness not as an act of defiance of hegemonic white heterotopias but an instruction manual on how to accommodate our bodies, gestures and genders to it not against it.
In the last thirty years, Albanian bodies have started to vibrate and communicate the kind of white matter that conveniently matters to Western white curators, publishers and audiences, because we can seemingly look like them while simultaneously offering some necessary safe and small difference needed for the neoliberal discourse on diversity to work. At a time when subjecthood in the West is reduced to what new materialism calls vibrating matter, Albanian white bodies appear apt to reproduce that vibration to be saved, capitalized and celebrated in light of their slight difference. It is not surprising perhaps that in the age of white ‘woke’ audiences in the West, Albanian stars like Rita Ora, Dua Lipa, Bebe Rexha or Loredana emulate the kind of off-whiteness that meets the minimal criteria for difference and diversity with a side appeal of ‘queerness’. But what makes Rita Ora, Dua Lipa or Pajtim Statovci or Petrit Halilaj desirable, is not only the post-racial pop that affirms white Western audiences’ disdain for ‘identity politics’, but also their narratives of being saved by the West with all four artists being promoted as models of saved refugees turned into successful stars.
This presentation works through Frantz Fanon’s The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized, to examine how the colonized subject is encouraged to replicate the colonizer’s identity in a deeply alienating and aspirational effort to “become white”. For Fanon, this aspiration is fraught with shame, overcompensation, self-hatred, and trauma – all of which serve to perpetuate the inferiority and dependency complex of the colonized. Specifically, it engages with Fanon’s argument that the colonized subject’s sense of inferiority manifests in a yearning to be loved by the white subject, even when that love is unattainable, to examine the aspirational Europeanness of Albanians in the last three decades.
Introduction to the speaker
Piro Rexhepi is a Research Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL, London. Dr. Rexhepi holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Strathclyde, and before his current appointment, has held research fellowships at the Davis Center for for Russian and Euroasian Studies, at Harvard University, Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, and teaching positions at the State University of New York, City University of New York, and New York University. He has also held the position of Assistant Professor in Global Studies at Northampton Community College.
His research focuses on decoloniality, sexuality and Islam, the politics of religion, sexuality and coloniality in international relations, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the Balkans and the Middle East. Previously, his work has examined the intersection of EU enlargement politics with sexual rights, exploring the production of Islamophobia in Muslim-majority countries in the Balkans. He is the author of White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route, (Duke University Press, 2023). Email: p.rexhepi@ucl.ac.uk.