Suchergebnisse

The legacies of eugenics in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and their connections to global colonialism remain uncharted. Therefore, it is worth pondering over this relationship, which requires a historical perspective and a repositioning of the recent postcolonial 'turn' in CEE to include the history of eugenics. For the most part of the 20th century, eugenics took shape within both colonial and nation-building projects. Eugenic strategies devised to preserve the colonial system outside Europe have always coexisted with programmes designed to improve the well-being of nations within Europe. This convergence between colonial, racial and national dimensions of eugenics requires a critical rethought. While this key line of inquiry has been a major focus in Western Europe and the US, it remains under-theorised in CEE. By highlighting the colonial implications of nation-building in the region, we attempt to destabilise the all-too-pervasive historiographic misconception that CEE nations are largely untouched by the global circulation of eugenics and scientific racism.

" Race: A Global History seeks to re-conceptualize the political history of race from the Enlightenment to the present day. It proposes a new perspective that aims to re-examine the Western-centred approach to the history of race within a more integrative global framework. This book does not attempt to reinstate the importance of individual cases in the history of race. What it proposes instead is to unearth traditions of racial thought which, while originating from the general European debate about human difference during the 17th and 18th centuries, nevertheless remained alive throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, only to re-emerge in explicit form in current populist, xenophobic and anti-immigration movements. "--

This article suggests that the arguments used to justify the deportation of Roma to Transnistria in 1942 were racial and eugenic. As a selfstyled scientific theory of human betterment, eugenics aimed to sanitize Romania's population, proposing a new vision of the national community, one biologically purged of those individuals believed to be "defective", "unfit", and "unworthy" of reproduction. Based on new archival material we suggest that the racial definition of Romanianness that prevailed at the time aimed to remove not just Jews but alsoRoma from the dominant ethnic nation ("neamul românesc"). To define Romanianness according to blood, ethnic origin, and cultural affiliation had been an essential component of Romania's biopolitical programme since the 1920s. During the early 1940s, it served as the political foundation upon which the transformation of Romania into an ethnically homogeneous state was carried out. At the time, the "Roma problem", similar to the "Jewish Question", was undeniably premised on eugenics and racism.

"This volume addresses the question of 'identity' in East-Central Europe. It engages with a specific definition of 'sub-cultures' over the period from ca. 1900 to the present and proposes novel ways in which the term can be used with the purpose of understanding identities that do not conform to the fixed, standard categories imposed from the top down, such as 'ethnic group', 'majority' or 'minority'. Instead, a 'sub-culture' is an identity that sits between these categories. It may blend languages, e.g. dialect forms, cultural practices, ethnic and social identifications, or religious affiliations as well as concepts of race and biology that, similarly, sit outside national projects"--

The last volume of the Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770-1945 series presents 46 texts under the heading of 'antimodernism'. In a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the antimodernist political discourse in the region offered complex ideological constructions of national identification. These texts rejected the linear vision of progress and instead offered alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one as well as various narratives of decline. This shift was closely connected to the rejection of liberal democratic institutionalism, and the preference for organicist models of social existence, emphasizing the role of the elites (and charismatic leaders) shaping the whole body politic. Along these lines, antimodernist authors also formulated alternative visions of symbolic geography: rejecting the symbolic hierarchies that focused on the normativity of Western European models, they stressed the cultural and political autarchy of their own national community, which in some cases was also coupled with the reevaluation of the Orient. At the same time, this antimodernist turn should not be confused with rightwing radicalism - in fact, the dialogue with the modernist tradition was often very subtle and the anthology also contains texts which offered a criticism of 'modern' totalitarianism in an antimodernist key.

This volume is a collection of chapters that deal with issues of health, hygiene and eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, specifically, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Romania. Its major concern is to examine the transfer of medical ideas to society via local, national and international agencies and to show in how far developments in public health, preventive medicine, social hygiene, welfare, gender relations and eugenics followed a regional pattern. This volume provides insights into a region that has to date been marginal to scholarship of the social history of medicine

The history of eugenics and racial nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe is a neglected topic of analysis in contemporary scholarship. The 20 essays in this volume, written by distinguished scholars of eugenics and fascism alongside a new generation of scholars, excavate the hitherto unknown eugenics movements in Central and Southeast Europe, including Austria and Germany. Eugenics and racial nationalism are topics that have constantly been marginalized and rated as incompatible with local national traditions in Central and Southeast Europe. These topics receive a new treatment here. On the one hand, the historiographic perspective connects developments in the history of anthropology and eugenics with political ideologies such as racial nationalism and anti-Semitism; on the other hand, it contests the 'Sonderweg' approach adopted by scholars dealing with these issues