'Race’, racism and anti-racism in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1948-1989

Dr Matej Blazek (University of Newcastle)

8th October 2024, 3pm

Roxby Building 6th Floor Seminar Room

This presentation seeks to take the geographical scholarship concerned with anti-racist politics and genealogies of racism beyond the context of European and North American (post-)colonial histories. It explores how the notion of ‘race’ was culturally produced in science, education and literature during the forty-one years of the Communist Party’s rule in Czechoslovakia. It tracks the earlier effort of the Communist state to formulate anti-racism as a scientifically grounded politics aligned with its principal ideology, before this effort dissipated on the back of the contradictions with the state’s own perception of the decolonial movements of the 1960s and with its own racial politics towards Roma people, and explores the implications of this history for geographical scholarship on racism and anti-racism.

Part of the Seminar Series “Critical Theory, Critical Practice” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.