SUMMARY:

This is a conversation between Marius Turda, the general editor of the six-volume series A Cultural History of Race to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021, and Marina Mogilner, the editor of volume 5 of the series, A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and Nation State (1760–1920). Turda and Mogilner discuss the challenges of addressing the problem of diversity by means of the very ambivalent category of “race.” They also consider reasons that cause historians of East-Central Europe and Northern Eurasia to question the applicability of “race” to their fields and area studies, and the implications of this “racial indifference” for the perpetuation of uncritical racializing and even blunt racism in popular cultures and ideological perceptions of groupness in the region, past and present. By drawing on the emerging field of race studies, this conversation provides a possible angle from which to problematize the notion of norm both as a lived experience and a scholarly concept.