Defining the Racial Self Russian Imperial Contexts of Jabotinsky's Racialized Jewishness

This paper presents Prof. Mogilner's research on Vladimir Jabotinsky's racialized language of nationalism and Jewishness in particular. I argue against the interpretation of his Zionism as a cosmopolitan fin-de-siècle discourse, where race was used rather metaphorically. In this paper, I focus on Jabotinsky's early writings on Jewishness, empire, imperial politics, and Russian and Jewish nationalism; on his early postcolonial criticism of cultural colonization and his fixation on the physical body as the only "natural" limit for such a colonization. Ultimately, I am interested in tracing Jabotinsky's racialized social imagination to specific Russian contexts and debates about empire and the post-imperial condition. Marina Mogilner, an associate professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, holds Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European Intellectual History. She moved to Chicago from Kazan, Russia, in 2013. Prior to her arrival at UIC she taught at Kazan University, the European University in St. Petersburg, and a number of European academic institutions. Her last book discusses the development of race science and racialized discourses in the Russian empire: Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) [Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology series], 2013. Her current research project is focused on Russian-Jewish engagements with "race".