Imagining "In-between" Peoples across the Atlantic

Imagining “In-between” Peoples acrossthe Atlantic

MIGLENA S. TODOROVA

Abstract In the early twentieth century, a wave of immigration from Eastern andSouthern Europe to the United States caused natives’ anxiety and debates over theracial purity of “the nation.” By mid-century, these new-comers would be acceptedin the ethnic wing of the white race. Across academic disciplines, this immigranthistory has become emblematic of how “white people” in the United States are notborn but made. Focusing on narratives on “the Balkans” in the popular at the timescientific magazine the National Geographic, this study examines American racialideas of immigrants from the region from a comparative and cross-nationalperspective.

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If former Massachusetts Governor and presidential candidateMichael Dukakis was campaigning for office a century ago, hisGreek immigrant heritage would have presented a serious obstacleto overcome. Back in the 1910s and 20s, natives and “old” immi-grants in the United States viewed newcomers from Southern andEastern Europe as neither “white” nor “black” peoples who threat-ened the racial purity of “the nation.” These “in-between” immi-grants became central to public debates over immigration policy,assimilation and citizenship.1 Amidst the debates, the popularmagazine National Geographic published thirty-one articles devotedto “the Balkans;” the other common name for SoutheasternEurope.2 This study uses the magazine’s Balkan narratives as avehicle to examine American racial ideas of desirable and undesir-able immigrants during the first three decades of the twentiethcentury.

The National Geographic’s discourses on the Balkans contributedto popular American perceptions of ambiguous Southeastern Euro-pean “races” by simultaneously “orientalizing” and “europeanizing”the region and its peoples. Yet the magazine’s writers also articu-lated notions of an expanding American “white race” which haddarker Balkan shades. These notions challenged dominant views of“the nation” consisted exclusively of a “Nordic stock” thus illumi-nating heterogeneous but transforming American racial imagina-tion precipitating the later emergence of a racial formation, whereSouthern and Eastern European immigrants would become the“ethnic wing” of the white race.

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 19 No. 4 December 2006ISSN 0952-1909

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

The Geographic’s racial constructions, however, were not anAmerican phenomenon bound to the particularities of the UnitedStates’ territory and history. Their genealogy shared the roots andpractices of Northern and Western European discourses on theBalkans. There, since the eighteenth century, British, Germans,Austrians, Swedes and Euro-Americans alike had been mappingand classifying the Balkans as “a bridge” and “mixture” of Europeand the Orient. By continuously constructing and repeating thenotion of some Balkan “semi-” essence, Europeans and Euro-Americans labored to reaffirm and to put back in place that bound-ary of racial difference so dangerously crossed by seeing in theBalkan native and immigrant qualities that resembled the whiteAmerican and European “self.”

Common discursive practices and constructions linked Europeanand American racial “balkanist” imaginations to each other but alsoto colonial discourses originated in larger American and Europeanprojects for power and domination spanning over time and space.For it was within such projects that “the white people” beganenvisioning their racial superiority against the Native American, theNegro and the Asiatic to then place the Southeastern Europeanabove the latter but below the white race.

The National Geographic’s descriptions borrowed the racialknowledges and languages of American and European “empire” toteach American readers about Balkan races and their potential forassimilation in the United States. Within the same knowledges andlanguages, nativists and restrictionists imagined these immigrantsas inassimilable racial others who jeopardized the purity of “theAmerican race.” Both advocates and opponents articulated racialideas and ideals which transcended the United States’ cultural andphysical borders. This broader epistemological world of immigrantracial history pushes the boundaries of U.S. immigration andwhiteness studies to contribute to our further understanding ofAmerican racial formations beyond the nation-state.

The National Geographic and the Immigration Debate

Most of the immigrants who came to the United States before 1890originated in Northern and Western Europe. Three-fourths of theeighteen million newcomers arriving between 1890 and 1920 wereSouthern and Eastern Europeans.3 Of them, over half a millionwere from the Balkans: Greeks, Croats, Romanians, Albanians,Bulgarians, Serbs, Macedonians and Montenegrins.4 In the midst ofanxiety and public discussions provoked by the shift, the NationalGeographic’s discourses on the Balkans aided popular notions of“new immigrants” as races “above African and Asian Americans-

398 Imagining “In-between” Peoples across the Atlantic

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. 19 No. 4 December 2006

. . . but also below “white people.”5 The magazine’s contributorsalso saw in Balkan peoples special cultural qualities which bespoketheir potential for assimilation in the United States. These racialconstructions, wrapped in “scientific” accuracy, were far moreinclusive than many of the circulating political and popular mes-sages of the day.

For example, members of nativist and patriotic organizationswarned against “hordes” of “beaten races” from Southern andEastern Europe and led a political drive to restrict their admission.6

The American Federation of Labor favored limited immigration“from the least civilized countries in Europe.”7 Eugenicists whobelieved in a hierarchy of immutable racial types supportedrestricted immigration by providing scientific evidence for the supe-riority of “the Nordic race” over “Slavic” and “Mediterranean races”from Southern and Eastern Europe. Films and cartoons added fuelto the anti-immigration movement by depicting the new immigrantas a caricature of the white man. In everyday vernaculars, “hunky,”“guinea” and “half-nigger” commonly referred to Greeks, Slovaks,Croats and Poles.8 In 1917, the anti-immigration movement wasprevailing with the implementation of a literacy test which mea-sured immigrant “feebleness” at the country’s Atlantic ports. In1924 restrictions toughened as the United States’ Congress passedthe Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, whose principal purpose was tolimit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.9

Fewer were those who countered nativists’ xenophobia by citingChristian and democratic ideals of universal brotherhood and byreminding the public why the Statue of Liberty welcomed theworld’s oppressed and poor.10 Among these voices were contribu-tors to the National Geographic. In 1904 for instance, the journalpublished “latest statistics” on “new immigration” showing thatchildren of foreign born parents had better literacy than nativechildren and that these immigrants “were a most important factor”in states’ increasing wealth.11 In 1917, the magazine devoted anissue on “Our Foreign-Born Citizens.”12 There, the author empha-sized that the United States were “freedom’s shores” and listed theeconomic benefits from unrestricted Southern and Eastern Euro-pean immigration.13 Articles on the Balkans published in the maga-zine between 1900 and 1930 also highlighted these immigrantsability to learn the ways of American civilization to implicitly andsometimes explicitly argue against their restriction. These viewswere bolstered by the Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lanewho, in 1918, stated on the pages of the Geographic that “There isno such thing as an American race . . . We are doing the unprec-edented thing in saying that Slav, Teuton, Celt, and the other racesthat make up the civilized world are capable of being blended here,

Miglena S. Todorova 399


and we say this upon the theory that blood alone does not controlthe destiny of man . . .”14

The magazine’s stance on “new immigration” over the periodmight be attributed to editorial policy and the views of individualcontributors, some of whom presided over the magazine and theSociety that published it. For example, the Secretary of the Interiorquoted above was a member of the Geographic’s Board of Trustees.After sixteen years of service, in 1915 the Geographic’s Director andEditor Gilbert H. Grosvenor stated “the principles” that guided hischoice of publications. These included “absolute accuracy,” “strictlyaccording to fact,” and “only what is of kindly nature is printedabout any country or people.”15 For the Editor hence, narrativescovering Southeastern Europe and promoting liberal admission ofimmigrants from the region were based on factual informationworthy of publication.

Other editorial principles were “Nothing of a partisan or contro-versial character is printed,” and planning the contents of themagazine to reflect “Whenever any part of the world becomesprominent in public interest . . .”16 The latter also affected themagazine’s coverage of the Balkans and immigration. Within fouryears during World War I (1914–1918), the Geographic publishedsixteen articles on the region, which was a main theater in the warand of much “public interest.” In comparison, twelve piecesappeared prior to the war between 1900 and 1913. Many “newimmigrants” also served in the U.S. armed forces fighting the war.Qualifying these immigrants and soldiers as “un-American,” “alienraces” or “half-niggers,” as the anti-immigration movement did,would have violated the Geographic’s principles of “kind,” non-partisan and non-controversial content. Moreover, such qualifica-tions might have jeopardized the American war effort.

Descriptions of lands and peoples pertaining to immigrationwere coming from a magazine which commanded public respectand influence among the American middle-classes. The NationalGeographic Society and its journal were founded in 1888. By theearly 1900s, monthly magazines, such as the Geographic, hadbecome the major form of cultural activity among white andnative educated, business and professional classes. Lutz andCollins’ (1993) study of the history, content and readership of thejournal demonstrated its “unique” and continuous cultural andeducational popularity with middle-class readers.17 Linda Steet(2000) called the magazine’s longevity and appeal “a phenomenonin print media.”18

The National Geographic’s claims to scientific “accuracy” aidedthe educational legitimacy and popularity of the journal. In 1912,for instance, the magazine reported that its monthly circulation



had reached “. . . 175,000, every copy going into well-to-do cul-tured homes, where it is read by the entire family.”19 The magazinealso went “. . . into hundreds of schools and colleges throughoutthe United States,” while letters from teachers “. . . congratulatedthe Society upon the educational merits of its Magazine.”20 TheSociety itself claimed 337, 446 members in 1914.21 In the sameyear, speakers who addressed and lectured its members included“. . . President Wilson, ex-President Taft, ex-President Roosevelt,Colonel Goethals and many travelers and explorers.”22 In additionto prominent speakers, the Society’s Boards of Trustees regularlyincluded representatives of big business, government and themilitary.23

The National Geographic’s ties to high echelons of power contrib-uted to public respect for both the Society and its publication. Thelatter most likely affected the perceptions of members and sub-scribers who were learning from the magazine about places andpeoples around the world, including the Balkans. The magazine’sclaims to scientific authority legitimized and validated its geo-graphic, cultural, and racial descriptions of Southeastern Europe.In turn, these Balkan narratives influenced the ways in whichAmerican readers from the upper social classes perceived immi-grants from the region in the midst of a public debate over theirrestriction.

The following sections analyze these narratives’ racial construc-tions in detail and clarify their underappreciated genealogy inEuropean and orientalist discourses while continuing the discus-sion of their social effects.

American Version(s) of Balkanism in the National Geographic

In her study titled Imagining the Balkans (1997), historian MariaTodorova analyzed a myriad of Northern and Western Europeandiscourses on the Balkans spanning over a century, which shetermed “balkanism” and “balkanist” narratives.24 Among the impor-tant characteristics of these narratives were their visions of theBalkans as the “other of Europe” as well as their persistent reduc-tion of the region as “the door,” “the bridge” and the “between”civilized West and backward, Asiatic, Oriental East. At this “bridge,”Europeans and Euro Americans viewed peoples in the region asones “between stages of growth.”25 Or after five centuries ofOttoman colonization, those were peoples shaking off their orientalbarbarism at the dawn of the twentieth century to embrace thevalues of enlightened and modern West. But Balkan peoples neveradopted fully the superior values of “civilization.” They remained



“semi-developed,” “semi-civilized” and “semi-oriental,” in otherwords, “incomplete peoples.”26 These definitions exerted ambiguityand uncertainty which constituted the central features of the bal-kanist imagination(s).

Among Todorova’s plenty of European balkanist examples was aBritish author, who in 1911 defined “the Greek” as “. . . Oriental ina hundred ways, but his Orientalism is not Asiatic. He is the bridgebetween the East and West . . .”27 Two Englishmen described Mace-donians in 1921 as a “hybrid race,” while an influential Germanconveyed in 1928 the racial impurity of the Southern Slav bystating two “facts” about the Balkans: “the powder-magazine ofEurope” and “a peculiarly elemental and irreconcilable racialenmity.”28 Likewise, a Swedish author spoke in 1927 of peoples inthe Balkans as being “psychologically and socially . . . a compositeof Easterner and Westerner.”29 Across the Atlantic, American con-tributors to the National Geographic continuously constructed theBalkans and its peoples in similar terms.

In 1903, American journalist and book author William E. Curtisvisited the Turkish Empire’s “lost provinces” of Bosnia, Macedonia,Bulgaria and Serbia. While there, Curtis poetically conveyed hisimpressions of Sarajevo. “In Sarajevo,” he wrote, “. . . the East andWets touch hands; the oriental with eternal composure listens tothe chatter of the Frenchman and regards the gesticulations ofthe Italian with supreme content.”30 In 1908, Ernest L. Harris,the American Council General to Smyrna, described Albania asEuropean yet Oriental. Albania, Harris wrote, “. . . has never beenwholly subdued or civilized” due to Turkish, meaning oriental colo-nial influences. Yet, Harris defined Albanians as a people “. . . ofpure European origin.”31 Both Curtis and Harris constructed andpresented the Balkans as the meeting grounds and a mixture ofEast and West, and of Europe and the Orient.

Writing for the National Geographic in 1912, Kenneth McKenzie“of Yale University” perpetuated this imagination. McKenzie saw inthe capital of Herzegovina Mostar “. . . the usual characteristicsfamiliar in the Orient, and a European quarter, Austrian innature.”32 McKenzie alluded to the contrast between “Europe” and“the Orient” mixed in Mostar while in Sarajevo: “[Sarajevo’s] bazaaraffords a satisfactory view of oriental life, while the well-pavedstreets and substantial buildings of the European quarter suggestcomfort and wealth.”33 The European “comfort and wealth” in McK-enzie’s writing represented “civilization,” while the backwardness“of oriental life” spoke for itself. Similarly in 1913, George HigginsMoses, the U.S. Minister to Greece and Montenegro (1909–1912),described Athens in Greece as a “Modern . . . brilliant capital well-worth its title “The Paris of the Levant.”34 “In the midst of all this



modernity . . . ,” Moses also observed public places that for himwere “. . . more oriental than Hellenic or European.”35

A popular author and journalist Harry Griswold Dwight too envi-sioned the Balkans as “a door.” His 1915 contribution to theNational Geographic presented readers with vivid mental maps ofWorld War I allied forces’ movement in the Balkans. Dwight definedthe region as “. . . at once a barrier and a highway between Eastand West.”36 Also during the war in 1917, journalist Herbert Coreyreported from Macedonia and offered his insights into the psychicof Bulgarian and Serbian soldiers. Corey traveled the Monastir roadwhich, the author explained, “For centuries it has carried itsox-carts with their solid wooden wheels, and long trains of donkeysand peasant women lowed under packs.”37 But the road now wasreally “kaleidoscopic,” Corey exclaimed, because the donkeys,ox-carts and peasants speaking for Balkan backwardness literarymet and mixed with civilization embodied by what Corey describedas “. . . Natty Frenchmen in horizon blue, [and] Englishmen inkhaki . . .”38 For Corey, the Monastir road was “the link” betweenthe Adriatic Sea to the West and the Aegean Sea to the East.39 Butthis imagination of the Balkans as the gate, the bridge, and thehighway between East and West found its most articulate wordingin the writing of George Higgins Moses.

In 1921, Moses, the former U.S. Minister to Greece now Senatorfrom New Hampshire, spilled balkanism on the pages of the NationalGeographic by expertly explaining the Balkans in the language of“writers, cartographers and diplomats” as “the Near East.”40 “East isEast and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” Mosesquoted Kipling, “but in the Near East,” he continued, “meet they do,though they never mingle. Life there is a curious and enticingkaleidoscope of Europe and the Orient . . .”41 Moses had explainedearlier that “typical” of the region were “. . . conquest and revolution,savagery and progress, fanaticism and faith, chivalry and cowardice,bravery and butchery, honor and craft . . .”42 For Moses, suchqualities spoke for “. . . shadowy and elusive elements of racialquality and preponderance of mental development and applica-tion . . .”43 Despite such “shadowy” racial qualities, for journalistFrederick Moore writing for the National Geographic in 1913, theBalkan races were “European blood” that was racially superior todark and Oriental “Semitic Turks.” Or, as Moore put it: “The Turksadded to their Semitic blood some of the finest manhood of the racesof Southeastern Europe.” Therefore, Moore explained, there wereTurks with “fair hair and straight noses,” as well as “Europeanbrains.”44 Although superior when compared to the “Semitic,”writers for the National Geographic’s also constructed Balkan “races”as inferior to white “civilized” people in Europe and the United States.



In “Europe” but Not that “White:” Racial Geography and theU.S. Immigration Law

Although American writers for the National Geographic persistentlyimagined the Balkans as a “bridge,” there was no doubt in thesewriters’ minds that the Balkans and its peoples were “Europe” inthe geographical sense. For instance, in 1903, William E. Curtisdefined “the Balkan Peninsula” as “. . . a group of petty states lyingin the southern corner of Europe.”45 Another contributor to themagazine, Frederick Moore also spoke in 1913 of peoples in theBalkans as “the peoples of Southeastern Europe.”46 Likewise,William Joseph Showalter described the Balkans in 1915 as “thepowder-box of Europe.”47 Showalter alluded to the commonWestern stereotype of the Balkans as “violent,” yet in “Europe.” Andin 1921, Ralph Graves presented the magazine’s readers with “TheNew Map of Europe” after the Paris Peace Conference resolvedWorld War I territorial disputes. Graves’ map also showed Greece,Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia within the borders of “Europe.”48

The National Geographic’s assertion that the Balkans were“Europe” was important because, for over a century prior to the1924 Johnson-Reed Act, the United States’ immigration lawsfavored a “white race” signified by European origins. Or, fashionedin the racist logic of colonialism, slavery and eugenics, the lawlimited naturalized citizenship to “free white persons” like thoseEuropean “white persons” who had colonized “the new world” andhad established there a free American republic. In the dominantAmerican political and legal imagination, Europeaness meant racialwhiteness and racial whiteness signified capacity and fitness forself-government. Because of such intimate legal entanglement of“Europe” and “white,” prior to the 1924 immigration “quota-system,” American courts often granted U.S. citizenship to immi-grants from Southeastern Europe based on their European originsand despite popular perceptions of their non- or semi-whiteness.49

The National Geographic and the prominent Society that pub-lished it affirmed and even further legitimized courts’ decisionsregarding these immigrants by firmly establishing for over twodecades that these new-comers were from “Europe.” Since themagazine offered “expertise” in geography, was proud of the scien-tific “accuracy” of the information it published, and was a well-respected educational source, it most likely had an effect on theviews of its middle and upper-class readers, as well students inschools and colleges, who studied from the magazine in geographyclasses. Hence, it was not only the courts that naturalized theseimmigrants as “European.” The National Geographic was yetanother source affiliated with seats of political and economic power



that legitimized Southern Slavs’ and Greeks’ claim to U.S. citizen-ship at least in the eyes of the magazine’s readers from the businessand intellectual classes.

The magazine’s contributors, however, did not assert that immi-grants from the region were culturally and racially completely“European,” therefore “white.” Rather, their balkanist discoursesadvanced the notion that these immigrants were a mixture ofEuropean and Oriental cultural and corporeal traits. The maga-zine’s experts on the Balkans also saw in peoples there specialcultural and mental qualities associated with the “white race,” suchas love for freedom, industriousness and ability to learn. Americanwriters marveled at cultural and architectural achievements50 andthe resilience of Christianity in the region,51 while qualifying itsinhabitants as a “morally clean race,”52 “invariably clean and per-fectly polite,”53 and people who “show enterprise and ambition andare conducting their affairs with intelligence and order.”54 Balkanpeoples also possessed “patience, perseverance, and endurance,with the capacity for laborious effort.”55 According to one author,their strife for liberty and bravery “has enriched the legends ofmankind.”56

Such qualities marked Balkan peoples’ superiority over “true”Orientals, Africans and African Americans. For, in the earliertwentieth century American racial conventions, the latter races’“essence” embodied opposite qualities of laziness, servility, and lowmental capacity. Read together, the National Geographic’s discur-sive images of the Balkans continuously suggested that, althoughnot really “white,” because of the above special qualities immigrantsfrom the Balkans in the United States could be elevated, civilizedand emancipated from their own backwardness under the guidanceof enlightened American reformers and within the positive atmos-phere of civility, lawfulness, and democratic nature of American lifeand society. The great possibilities for such guided emancipationfurther suggested to the magazine’s readers these immigrants’fitness for American citizenship.

Hester Donaldson Jenkins’ 1915 overview of “Bulgaria and ItsWomen” for the National Geographic powerfully illustrated the pos-sibilities for uplifting Southeastern European immigrants, whilegesturing toward their inclusion into an American white race.57

Jenkins began her article with a physical description of “Bulgariangirls.” These girls, she wrote, were among “. . . the Oriental girlswith whom [she] lived in [her] nine years’ residence in the NearEast” as a Professor at the Constantinople College.58 Jenkins spokewith the authority of someone with long experience and observationover these students. The Bulgarian girls, Jenkins stated, “. . . arethe least Oriental of the eight or nine nationalities to be found in



Constantinople College . . . They are fairer and brighter in coloringthan the Armenians, Greeks or Persians, rather taller and larger onan average, and have more energy and less languor than theTurk.”59 After establishing their racial type in contrast to darkerothers, Jenkins gave an example of “most beautiful” Bulgarian girl.For the author, the beauty of this Bulgarian “creature” was in her“. . . glorious mass of copper-colored waves, a clear pale skin,handsomely set gray eyes [and] delicate mouth . . .”60 Through thisportrait, the American educator suggested to her readers that,among the girls, there were examples which resembled very muchconventional at the time images of “true” white woman of “glory”and “delicacy.” Yet, even this Bulgarian beauty was not really thesame as the white woman because, in Jenkins’ mind, this Bulgar-ian was “least” but “Oriental.”

Thus, in Jenkins’ writing, “pale” Bulgarian girls appearedin-between darker Persians and white women. What linked thesegirls to the Orient was not only their “fairer” but not “fair” skincoloring but also their connections to Oriental culture. Jenkinsassociated the latter with Turkish rule and influences in the regionthat had caused “isolation” and “ignorance and barbarism” which,Jenkins explained, Bulgarians and their neighbors in the Balkanswere now fighting.61

Furthermore, Hester Jenkins cracked open the doors to Ameri-can whiteness for immigrants from the Balkans by specifying Bul-garian qualities that made them susceptible to learning the ways ofWestern civilization, while glorifying the profound and transforma-tive influences of American educators in the region. Bulgarians had“certain sturdiness, an out-of-doors quality, a sanity . . .” and “per-sistence and solidity,” Jenkins observed.62 They were “healthy,”“industrious” and “of abounding spirits and good fellowship.”63

Above all they were Christians. And these qualities, in the Americanbourgeois mind, were associated with “good immigrants,” whosesanity, American frontier-like “out-of-doors quality” and hard-workimplied that they could and would function like the rational, self-reliant and independent subjects upon which white America wasbuilt. Moreover, Jenkins wrote, “Bulgarians have shown themselveseager for education and for civilization, and their women acquireculture with the easiness of the traditional American woman.”64 Inother words, Jenkins suggested that Bulgarian and “traditional”American women (meaning white women because black or Asianwomen were not perceived as “American”) had the same mentalcapacity. And “mental capacity” presented a basic criterion forwhite/non-white racial distinctions in the dominant Americanimagination of the time. Jenkins’ statements regarding Bulgarians’learning ability thus gestured toward an “American white race”



inclusive of not really “white” but mentally capable SoutheasternEuropean immigrant subjects.

In 1918, Edwin Grosvenor’s monograph “The Races of Europe”would convey further, and powerfully so, such expanding Americanwhiteness.65 An advertisement for the monograph in a precedingnumber of the National Geographic called it “. . . one of the mostimportant monographs ever to be issued by the National Geo-graphic Society . . .”66 Grosvenor was an authority on the subject ofrace because, the editor explained, he “ha[d] devoted fifty years tothe study of the racial conditions of Europe” and had spent twentyyears “to observe intensively the subject” as an educator at theRobert College in Constantinople.67 Grosvenor’s experience in theBalkans made him an expert because, according to the editor,“. . . nowhere else in the world has the racial tide ebbed and flowedin such remarkable fashion as in the Balkans.”68 The magazine’spronouncements on the great racial significance of the regionclearly used “race” and “nationality” as meaning one and the samething, while referring to territorial disputes associated with theBalkan wars and World War I. This usage reflected the ambiguity ofthe American racial vocabulary during the period, where termssuch as “color-races,” referring to corporeality, and “nation-races,”alluding to linguistic and cultural specificities plus biology, com-peted for meaningful representation of “race.” Ambiguity permeatedEdwin Grosvenor’s imagination as well but did not obscure hisvision of Balkan “races” as a biological strain of non-whiteness yeta sub-category of white “Caucasian.”

Despite his expertise, Edwin Grosvenor found that “. . . everyattempt at [racial] classification has shown it to be a most difficultand perplexing task . . .” because of debates among those “oflearned opinion.”69 Grosvenor believed, however, that “The [racial]estimate in 1781 by Dr. Blumenbach, the father of anthropology,has best withstood the attacks of time.”70 Drawing upon Blumen-bach’s work distinguishing between five major races, Grosvenorestablished that the racial stock of Europe was “Caucasian” withsome traces of “the Mongolian races.”71 The other three races:“Ethiopian, American and Malay,” Grosvenor stated, “do notconcern us, as they have in no way affected the history of Europeor contributed to its life.”72 The racial expert then explained that theraces of “Greeks, Latins, Celts, Teutons, or Germans and Slavs”made up the group of the “Indo-Europeans,” which was a sub-group of the category “Caucasian.”73 Grosvenor further sorted outthe European races by describing Slavs and Greeks in Southeast-ern Europe as a “cosmopolitan” and “absorbing” mixture of racesand “the dark whites” in-between two ends of a European racialspectrum.74



At the lowest end of this European racial scale were non-Christian, Asiatic “ruthless,” “merciless” and “cruel” Turks presentin the Balkans who, according to Grosvenor, were “members of theUral-Altic branch of the Mongolian family.”75 Members of the “Mon-golian family,” Grosvenor had explained, had skin color of “yellowand sometimes brown.”76 Compared to the Mongolian race, Gros-venor had added, the Caucasian had “intellectual superiority.”77 InGrosvenor’s racial map, “the English” occupied the highest andwhite end of the European racial spectrum because of their “unpar-alleled achievements,” “the greatness of the modern Englishman,”and because “more than any other race in all the past, it has carriedwith it civilization and equal opportunity and liberty.”78 Grosvenorthen leaped to connect “the American race” to the English by endingseparate discussions of Hungarians, Slovaks, Greeks, Germans,and Fins among others, with a definition of “The English-SpeakingPeoples” as an independent entity on the racial ladder. For Gros-venor, “. . . as a body [they] are the most enterprising, mostwealthy, most intelligent in the world.”79 Of course, this superiorgroup included white Americans, whom Grosvenor saw as thedescendents of the English for the author ended his racial mono-graph with the following statement: “. . . the ties of language andblood bring the British and ourselves [white Americans] togethercompletely and inseparably.”80

In Edwin Grosvenor’s map, racially “cosmopolitan” SouthernSlavs and Greek “dark whites” in the Balkans stood betweenEnglish and American flowers of the white race and “yellow tobrown” Mongoloids of the non-white races. Simultaneously,Grosvenor was constructing the “dark whites” as a sub-groupof the category “Caucasian,” which the author had marked withthe following characteristics: “Head oval; . . . lips thin; . . . colorwhite; . . . intellectual superiority.”81 The American racial expertwas treating the “races” in Southeastern Europe as a differencewithin one type; in this case one “European”/ “Caucasian”/ “white”type. There, Grosvenor included white English and American civi-lizers along with dark whites in and from the Balkans. To this racialportrait, Grosvenor added cultural characteristics which furtherassociated Balkan peoples with Euro-centered whiteness and civi-lization. Grosvenor qualified the Greek as “active, demonstrative,vivacious” type, “. . . in politics and administration, in philosophyand the arts, the teacher of mankind.”82 His descriptions of theother “races of the Balkan Peninsula” included the following quali-ties: “passionate love for freedom, faithful, generous,” “trustworthy,steadfast, self-reliant,” “incarnation of heroism and freedom,”“sturdy, sober, practical people” who “appreciate education.”83

Grosvenor’s mapping of European “Caucasians” pointed his



predominantly white readers to understanding immigrants fromSoutheastern Europe in the United States as still inferior but aracial and cultural version of themselves. Three years earlier, HesterDonaldson Jenkins invited readers of the National Geographic tosimilar imaginations by suggesting that Bulgarian women and whiteAmerican women share mental capacity and cultural values. Suchallusions to Balkan peoples as darker shades of Euro-Americanwhiteness reached white middle class audiences and helped pavethe way to their gradual acceptance in the second part of thetwentieth century as “the ethnic wing” of the American “white race.”

David Roediger’s latest work on the subject illustrated that thisacceptance “. . . did not reflect a breakthrough in pure knowledge[embodied by newly coined terms “ethnic” and “ethnicity”] so muchas an evolution in immigration patterns and social structure.”84 Thepresence of Southern and Eastern European immigrants compli-cated this social structure by presenting “difference” which defied a“black”/”white” binary opposition that had long organized Ameri-can society. Members of the learned classes also writers for theNational Geographic resolved this issues of racial ambiguity on thebasis of cultural and religious traits. Their racial constructionswere early precursors of “ethnicity” as the category which wouldlater organize an American white race of color-shades. “Ethnicity”in its modern meaning and usage, however, did not emerge untilthe 1940s when American social scientists began inventing thecategory to explain away difference between white natives, “oldimmigrants” and “new immigrants” from Europe.85 Two decadesearlier, contributors to the Geographic were already employing thelanguage of “ethnicity” to imagine an American white race consist-ing of corporeal and cultural variety.

Discursive gestures toward Balkan peoples’ admission into “thewhite race” in the Geographic echoed the ideas of Western andNorthern Europeans who were also defining and classifying theBalkans. Or, as Maria Todorova argued, in Euro-American andEuropean balkanist discourses alike, despite the persisting notionof racial ambiguity, “. . . in the final analysis, the Balkans are stilltreated as positioned on this side of the fundamental opposition:white versus colored, Indo-Europeans versus the rest.”86

But what explains common balkanist imaginations along andacross the Atlantic?

The Shared Grammar of Balkanism, the Colonial Discourseand Racial Modernity

Due to different geographic proximity and cultural and politicalspecificities, Western Balkanist discourses still varied in their



earlier depictions and qualifications of the region and in theirtreatment of separate Balkan peoples.87 By the 1920s, MariaTodorova observed “. . . the gradual formation of a commonWestern attitude . . . [and] the internationalization of the stereotype[of backward and violent Balkans]” as the main mode of represent-ing the region.88 Todorova attributed common Western notions tothe Balkan Wars and World War I, for which the Balkans took theblame. Besides these events, Europeans and Americans gazing atthe Balkans shared ideas about the region because they alsoshared the values of a bourgeois culture stemming from a modernWestern conceptual world fixed on order and value. German,American, or British, those measuring and classifying the Balkansand its peoples did so against a concept of their own “self.” In theminds of these balkanist narrators, their white race and culturesrepresented the peak of human civilization marked by rationality,self-control, discipline, democracy, law and order, efficient govern-ment, artistic refinement and technological progress. “Irrational,”“barbaric,” “backward” peoples in (and from) Africa, Asia or theBalkans lacked “civilization” because of their non-white race, andin the case of the Balkans, because of impure racial origins.

Europeans and Euro-Americans further shared a belief that theracial hierarchy through which they measured “others” rested uponscientific, therefore objective observation, classification, identifica-tion and differentiation. In turn, the above scientific methodsbrought order and value to an otherwise heterogeneous humanworld of variety and complexity. But order and value, social theoristDavid Theo Goldberg (1993) argued, constituted the primary objec-tive of Western modernity itself. Or, as Goldberg put it, “. . . at theheart of modernity lies the concern with order,” which dovetailedimagined mastery and control over the natural, the social, thepolitical and the economic.89 Hence, classification, identificationand attaching values to bring about order made up what Goldbergcalled “the preconceptual elements” that unite racialized discoursesacross geographical, national, political and cultural borders.90

Those were also the preconceptual elements that connected alongand across the Atlantic European and American notions of Balkanpeoples as ones defying an otherwise clear and final scientific“white/non-white” racial hierarchy through which Europeans andAmericans had perceived themselves and others. Therefore, onboth sides of the Atlantic, balkanist narrators persistently assertedracial and cultural “semi-” and “in-between” essence to definepeoples in Southeastern Europe. In the United States, nativists,eugenicists, politicians and lay persons who marshaled the anti-immigration movement that led to the Johnson-Reed Act perceivedthat very same racial “essence” not only to define Southern and



Southeastern European immigrants but also to threaten the purityof “the American nation.”

In addition to common preconceptual elements, European andAmerican balkanist discourses shared some of the “grammar” ofthe colonial discourse developed throughout European and Ameri-can colonial projects beyond the Balkans. Central to the NationalGeographic’s narratives was their reliance on stereotyping theBalkans as between and a mixture of “Europe” and “the Orient.” Inaddition, contributors, such as Hester D. Jenkins and Edwin Gros-venor, articulately constructed “races” in the Balkans as mimicry oftrue whites.

The stereotype and mimicry, cultural theorist Homi Bhabha(1994) argued, were discursive strategies among the most impor-tant features of the discourse of colonialism embodied by “orien-talism.”91 Edward Said (1979) had defined “orientalism” as theWest’s hegemonic and colonial “. . . tradition of thought, imageryand vocabulary that have given [Asian, Middle Eastern and African‘Orient’] reality and presence in and for the West.”92 Bhabha con-structed a theory of the colonial discourse arising out of the British-Indian context. But Bhabha was also interested in the colonialdiscourse as a discourse on race which underlined relationsbetween Western powers and non-Western subjects. Bhabha quali-fied the former as “. . . discriminatory power- whether racist, orsexist, peripheral or metropolitan . . . ,” whose discourse “. . . is anapparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences . . .” to create a space for “subjectpeoples.”93 Bhabha’s work is useful here because Balkanist dis-courses also arose from the relationship between Western powersand non-Western Balkan subjects, whose faith was often decidedby the “great powers” in Europe and beyond.94 Moreover, balkanistand orientlaist narratives intersected within time and space and,like orientalism, balkanism employed the stereotype and mimicryto define racial and cultural difference.

The stereotype in colonial imagery and vocabulary, Bhabhawrote, “. . . is a form of knowledge and edification that facilitatesbetween what is always “in place,” already known, and somethingthat must be anxiously repeated . . . as if the essential duplicity ofthe Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African [and the“semi-” nature of the Balkans, I would add] that need no proof, cannever really, in discourse, be proved.”95 In other words, the stereo-type in the colonizer’s discourse functioned to establish, on the onehand, a firm and recognizable difference between the colonizer andthe colonized “other” by uttering the stereotype as “the truth” aboutthis other. On the other hand, the colonizer needed to repeat thestereotype in order to alleviate his anxiety and to reassure himself



when seeing in the “other” behaviors and thinking which disturbedand blurred this difference. The stereotype in the colonial discoursethus simultaneously marked and disavowed difference between amaster and his subject.96

Much like in orientalism, the stereotype of being “between” inbalkanism established and marked difference between the “semi-oriental” and racially mixed Balkan “East” and a civilized, modern,and racially white European and American “West.” The stereotypeof “between” enfolded the notion of Balkan barbarism and“shadowy” racial elements in contrast to a fixed European andEuro-American “West” of absolutely clear and pure racial and cul-tural nature and origins. Such continuous representation of theBalkans established the difference, or the firm border separatingthe Balkans from the West. Yet to simultaneously imagine inBalkan peoples qualities, such as Hester D. Jenkins’ “easiness inacquiring culture,” George H. Moses’ “bravery” and “chivalry,” orEdwin Grosvenor’s remark of the Greek as the cultural “teacher ofmankind,” disavowed the above difference because those werequalities of the white Euro-American civilization to which thesewriters believed to belong. Repeating the stereotype of “mixed”Balkans re-established the boundary that separated the Balkan“other” from the white Euro-centered “self.” This simultaneousmarking and blurring of difference also explained the ambiguity,even contradictions of the balkanist discourse.

Such ambiguity further leaked from American notions of South-eastern European immigrants as “dark whites,” “our temporaryNegroes” and “alien white races.”97 To qualify one as “dark” but“white” is to imagine him as mimicry of whiteness. In the colonialdiscourse, British imagination of what Bhabha called “the Angli-cized Indian” exemplified such mimicry. In the National Geograph-ic’s balkanist narratives, “Europeanized” or “Americanized” Balkansubjects too appeared as mimicry of true whites. And the objectiveof mimicry as a discursive strategy, much like that of the stereo-type, was to re-affirm difference by seeing and repeating the “Angli-cized” or the “Europeanized” other as an imitation of the self, or inBhabha’s words, as something that “is almost the same but notquite.”98 In the American view of peoples in Southeastern Europe,the latter were something “white” but not quite.

The British believed to reform and uplift the colonized Indian byteaching him the English language, manners and values so that hecould serve as “the interpreter” between the master and the colo-nized mass.99 But this elevated subject remained in the master’sdiscourse “Indian” though “Anglicized,” or something incompletethat was English but not really. He was an imitation of “trueEnglishness.” In the American imagination, Balkan subjects edu-



cated by Euro-Americans in the traditions of the modern Westremained similarly incomplete as they were westernized and Ameri-canized but not really “western” or “American.” For Hester D.Jenkins, the Bulgarian girls whom she taught at the Constanti-nople College remained “least” but “Oriental” despite years ofAmerican-style education. For Edwin Grosvenor, they were “Cau-casian” but not quite because the Southern Slav had “absorbed”other races. Indeed, the British colonizer still represented the“Anglicized Indian” as incomplete but “authorized version of other-ness”100 while the American writers represented “westernized”Balkan subjects as incomplete “self.” However, a desire for recog-nizable other stood behind both British and American representa-tions of difference. The presence of such recognizable other, in bothorientalist and balkanist discourses in general, stemmed from thestruggles of American and European students of modernity tomaintain their long-standing “truth” of pure racial and culturalhistorical origins while encountering hybridity and mixing in“Anglicized Indians” and “dark whites” in the Balkans.

Common discursive practices and constructions linking Euro-pean and American balkanist imaginations to each other and to thecolonial discourse had roots in larger American and Europeanprojects for power, domination and exploitation. Within suchprojects, while British colonizers were producing discoursesconstructing the “essence” of Indians, they were simultaneouslyconstructing “the essence” of the Balkans. And, while Americantravelers, educators, state officials and laypersons were construct-ing and envisioning racially “semi” and “in-between” peoples in theBalkans, including immigrants from the region in the UnitedStates, white Americans of learned opinion were simultaneouslygazing at, classifying and describing “non-whites” and “true” Ori-entals in Asia and Africa along with internally subjugated peoplessuch as Native Americans, African Americans and Asian Ameri-cans. Meanwhile, American racial experts like Edwin Grosvenorwere imagining a “self” embodying a white race and civilization of“English Speaking Peoples” stretched across seas.

This broader history of European and American quests for powerand domination through racial classification across nationalborders along with domestic realities pertaining to race shapedAmerican ideas of desirable and undesirable immigrants fromEurope in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Whitenativists and patriots guarded the racial purity of the nationagainst “hunky” and “half-niggers” from “savage Europe” and suc-ceeded in restricting their admission through new immigration lawsin 1917 and 1924. While the National Geographic’s Balkan narra-tives contributed to the racialization and orientalization of these



immigrants, these narratives also presented alternative imagina-tions of a white nation inclusive of these new comers. The maga-zine’s discourses precipitated and aided the emergence in thesecond part of the twentieth century of a new racial formationwhere Southern and Eastern European immigrants and their chil-dren, including those from the Balkans, would be accepted as theethnic versions of American whiteness. As David Roediger writes,no one in the United States today thinks that American tennis starPete Sampras of Greek heritage embodies “. . . ‘[a] dark white’ (andpossibly not white) immigration ‘problem . . . ’ ”101 Indeed, manyAmericans today would be surprised to learn that famous anddistinguished Americans, such as the son of Albanian immigrantparents actor/comedian James Belushi, the Bulgarian Americanstar of the popular TV show Medium Sofia Vassileva, the formergovernor of the state of Minnesota Croatian American RudyPeprich, or the founder of the franchise Little Caesar Pizza alsosport clubs owner and U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame inductee MikeIlitch of Macedonian dissent were viewed a century ago as non- orsemi-white threats to the racial foundations of the nation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jennifer Pierce, Karla Erickson, David Roedi-ger and the anonymous reviewers for the JHS for their invaluablecomments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes1 David Roediger and James Barrett, “Inbetween Peoples: Race,

Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” in David Roediger,Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Barkley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 2002); David Roediger, Working towardWhiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: BasicBooks, 2005).

2 In addition to the articles on the Balkans cited in this paper, pub-lications on the region over the period also include: Marian Gruger Coffin,“Where East Meets West: Visit to Picturesque Dalmatia, Montenegro andBosnia,” National Geographic, vol. XIX (5), May 1908, pp. 309–344; Eliza-beth Perkins, “With the Monks at Mateora: The Monasteries of Thessaly,”National Geographic, vol. XX (9), September 1909, pp. 799–807; TheronDamon, “The Albanians;” James D. Bourchier, “The Rise of Bulgaria;”Luigi Villar, “The Races and Religions of Macedonia;” Edwin Pears, “GrassNever Grows Where the Turkish Hoof Has Trod;” James Bryce, “TwoPossible Solutions for the Eastern Problem,” National Geographic, vol.XXIII (11), November 1912, pp. 1090–1156; Frederick Moore, “Rumaniaand Its Ambitions,” National Geographic, vol. XXIV (10), October 1913,pp. 1057–1086; James Howard Gore, “Roumania, the Pivotal State,”National Geographic, vol. XXVIII (4), October 1915, pp. 360–390; John



Oliver LaGorce, “Roumania and its Rubicon;” H.G. Dwight, “Saloniki;”H.G. Dwight, “The Hoary Monasteries of Mt. Athos,” National Geographic,vol. XXX (3), September 1916, pp. 185–272; George P. Scriven, “RecentObservations in Albania,” National Geographic, vol. XXXIV (2), August1918, pp. 90–114; Alexander Wilbourne Weddell, “The Glory that WasGreece,” National Geographic, vol. XLII (6), December 1922, pp. 571–630;Melville Chater, “History’s Greatest Trek: Tragedy Stalks Through the NearEast as Greece and Turkey Exchange Two Million of Their People,”National Geographic, vol. XLVIII (5), November 1925, pp. 533–590; J.Theodore Mariner, “Transylvania and Its Seven Castles: A Motor CircuitThrough Rumania’s New Province of Racial Complexity and ArchitecturalCharm,” National Geographic, vol. XLIX (3), March 1926, pp. 319–352;Melville Chater, “Dalmatian Days: Coasting Along Debatable Shores WhereLatin and Slav Meet,” National Geographic, vol. LIII (1), January 1928, pp.47–90; Melville Chater, “The Danube, Highway of Races: From the BlackForest to the Black Sea, Europe’s Most Important River Has Borne theTraffic of Centuries,” National Geographic, vol. LVI (6), December 1929, pp.643–698; Melville Chater, “Jugoslavia-Ten Years After,” National Geo-graphic, vol. LVIII (3), September 1930, pp. 257–310; Maynard OwenWilliams, “New Greece, the Centenarian, Forges Ahead,” National Geo-graphic, vol. LVIII (6), December 1930, pp. 649–732.

3 The wave included Italians, Poles, Jews, and Hungarians amongothers. Ewa Morawska, “The Sociology and Historiography of Immigration,”in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Ed. Immigration Reconsidered: History, Soci-ology and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 188.

4 Campbell Gibson and Emily Lennon, Region and Country or Area ofBirth of the Foreign-Born Population, with Geographic Detail Shown inDecennial Census Publications of 1930 or earlier: 1850 to 1930 and 1960 to1990 (U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division: Internet Release dateMarch 9, 1999), available at http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tavb04.html

5 David Roediger and James Barrett, “Inbetween Peoples” in ColoredWhite, p. 139. See also Matthew Frey Jacobson, Whiteness of a DifferentColor: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1998); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became WhiteFolks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 1998); Robert Orsi, “The Religious Boundaries ofan Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-SkinnedOther In Italian Harlem, 1920–1990,” American Quarterly 44, No 3, 1992,pp. 313–347.

6 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making ofModern America (New Jersey and Oxford: Princeton University Press,2004), pp. 17–25; Rudolph Vecoli, “Immigration” in Paul S. Boyer, Ed., TheOxford Companion to United States History (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001), p. 363.

7 David Roediger and James Barrett, “Inbetween Peoples” in ColoredWhite, p. 157.

8 Ibid., pp. 142–144.9 The act established a “national-origins quota” system which pre-

sented a hierarchy of immigrant desirability and reflected dominant racialperceptions. The law granted eighty-four percent of the total number ofquotas to countries in Northern and Western Europe, sixteen percent wentto “nationalities” in Eastern and Southern Europe, while minimum quotas



http://www.census.gov/population/www

of one hundred each went to “nations” in Asia and Africa. See Mae N. Ngai,Impossible Subjects, p. 22; 27.

10 Rudolph Vecoli, “Immigration,” p. 363.11 “Geographic Notes,” National Geographic, vol. XV (5), May 1904,

p. 232.12 “Our Foreign-Born Citizens,” National Geographic, vol. XXXI (2),

February 1917, pp. 95–119.13 Ibid., p. 111.14 Franklin K. Lane, “What is to be an American?” National Geographic,

vol. XXXIII (4), April 1918, p. 352.15 Gilbert H. Grosvenor, “Report of the Director and Editor of the

National Geographic Society for the Year 1914,” National Geographic, vol.XXVII (3), March 1915, p. 319.

16 Ibid.17 Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic

(Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1993), p. 17.18 Linda Steet, Veils and Daggers: A Century of National Geographic’s

Representations of the Arab World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,2000), p. 2.

19 Advertising Department, “Why Do Schools and Colleges ShouldAdvertise?” National Geographic, vol. XXIII (10), October, 1912.

20 Ibid.21 Gilbert H. Grosvenor, “Report of the Director and Editor,” p. 320.22 Ibid.23 The National Geographic Society Boards of Managers included:

(1917–1919) Alexander Bell – inventor of the telephone, A.W. Greely –Major General U.S. Army, Henry White – U.S. Ambassador to Italy andFrance, George Otis Smith – Director of U.S. Geographical Survey; (1918–1920) Charles J. Bell – President American Security and Trust Company,John Joy Edson – Chairman of the Board, Washington Loan& TrustCompany, George Shiras – Former Member of U.S. Congress, GrantSquires – Military Intelligence Division, General Staff, New York; (1919–1921) William Howard Taft – Former President of the U.S., Franklin K. Lane– Secretary of the Interior, C.M. Chester- Rear Admiral U.S. Navy.

24 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997). See also Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map ofCivilization on the Mind of Enlightenment (California: Stanford UniversityPress, 1994).

25 Ibid., p. 16.26 Ibid.27 Quoted in Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 16.28 Ibid., p. 123; 124.29 Ibid., p. 125.30 William E. Curtis, “The Great Turk and His Lost Provinces,” National

Geographic, vol. XIV (2), February 1903, p. 48.31 Ernest L. Harris, “The Ruined Cities of Asia Minor,” National Geo-

graphic, vol. XIX (11), November 1908, p. 802.32 Kenneth McKenzie, “East of the Adriatic; Notes on Dalmatia, Mon-

tenegro, Bosnia, and Herzegovina,” National Geographic, vol. XXIII (12),December 1912, p. 1185.

33 Ibid.34 George Higgins Moses, “Greece and Montenegro,” National Geo-

graphic, vol. XXIV (3) March 1913, p. 299.



35 Ibid., p. 299; 301.36 Harry Griswold Dwight, “The Gates to the Black Sea: The Dar-

danelles, the Bosporus, and Sea of Marmora,” National Geographic, vol.XXVII (5) May 1915, p. 435.

37 Herbert Corey, “On the Monastir Road,” National Geographic, vol.XXXI (5) May 1917, p. 383.

38 Ibid.39 Ibid.40 George Higgins Moses, “The Whirlpool of the Balkans,” National

Geographic, vol. XXXIX (2) February 1921, p. 179.41 Ibid.42 Ibid.43 Ibid.44 Frederick Moore, “The Changing Map of the Balkans,” National Geo-

graphic, vol. XXIV (2) February 1913, p. 199.45 William E. Curtis, “The Great Turk and His Lost Provinces,” p. 45.46 Frederick Moore, “The Whirlpool of the Balkans,” p. 199.47 William Joseph Showalter, “The Kingdom of Servia,” National Geo-

graphic, vol. XXVII (4) April 1915, p. 417.48 Ralph A. Graves, “The New Map of Europe,” National Geographic, vol.

XXXIX (2) February 1921, pp. 157–177.49 Matthew Frye Jacobson, chapter 7 “Naturalization and the Courts”

in Whiteness of a Different Color, esp. p. 241.50 Edwin A. Grosvenor, “Constantinople and Sancta Sophia,” National

Geographic, vol. XXVII (5), May 1915, pp. 459- 482.51 Carroll Storrs Alden, “Megaspeleon, the Oldest Monastery in Greece,”

National Geographic, vol. XXIV (2), February 1913, pp. 312–323.52 William Joseph Showalter, “The Kingdom of Servia,” p. 422.53 Kenneth McKenzie, “East of the Adriatic: Notes on Dalmatia, Mon-

tenegro, Bosnia, and Herzegovina,” p. 1185.54 William E. Curtis, “The Great Turk and His Lost Provinces,” p. 46.55 Ernest L. Harris, “The Ruined Cities of Asia Minor,” p. 763.56 Frederick Moore, “The Whirlpool of the Balkans,” p. 182.57 Hester Donaldson Jenkins, “Bulgaria and Its Women,” National Geo-

graphic, vol. XXVII (4) April 1915, pp. 377–400.58 Ibid., p. 377.59 Ibid.60 Ibid.61 Ibid., p. 400.62 Ibid., p. 383.63 Ibid., p. 387; 390.64 Ibid., p. 398.65 Edwin A. Grosvenor, “The Races of Europe,” National Geographic, vol.

XXXIV (6) December 1918, pp. 441–536.66 “The Races of Europe Number,” National Geographic, vol. XXXIV (5)

November 1918, p. 440.67 Edwin A. Grosvenor, “The Races of Europe,” editorial introduction,

p. 441.68 Ibid.69 Ibid., p. 447.70 Ibid.71 Ibid., pp. 447–8.72 Ibid., p. 448.



73 Ibid.74 Ibid., p. 450.75 Ibid., p. 448; 472; 476–7.76 Ibid., p. 447–8.77 Ibid., p. 447.78 Ibid., p. 531; 533.79 Ibid., p. 533.80 Ibid.81 Ibid., p. 447.82 Ibid., p. 450.83 Ibid., p. 477; 483; 484.84 David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, p. 26.85 Ibid., pp. 21–27.86 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 19.87 Maria Todorova, “From Discovery to Invention, from Invention to

Classification” in Imagining the Balkans, pp. 117–139.88 Ibid., p. 123.89 David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of

Meaning (Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 3–4.90 Ibid., pp. 48–52.91 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).92 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 132.93 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 66; 70.94 See Tom Gallagher, Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789–1989, from

the Ottomans to Milosevic (London, New York: Routledge, 2001); MichaelGlenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804–1999(New York: Viking Press, 2000).

95 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination andthe Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture, p. 66.

96 Ibid., pp. 70–5.97 David Roediger with James Barrett, “Inbetween Peoples” in Colored

White, p. 143; 152.98 Homi Bhabha, “On Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial

Discourse,” in The Location of Culture, p. 89.99 Ibid., p. 87.

100 Ibid., p. 88.101 David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, p. 4.



Imagining "In-between" Peoples across the Atlantic

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