Open Borders: “Border Studies: Past and Present Challenges in the Development of the Field.”” Eurasia Border Review 4(2) (2013): 119. 16. <...> Wilson, Thomas M. and Donnan, Hastings. “Borders and Border Studies” in A Companion to Border Studies, edited by Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, 125. <...> Поступила в редакцию 13.05.2014 UDC 304.9 MADINA TLOSTANOVA КАК «КАВКАЗЦЫ» СТАЛИ «ЧЕРНЫМИ»: ИМПЕРСКОЕ РАЗЛИЧИЕ И СИМВОЛИЗАЦИЯ РАСЫ Аннотация: В статье прослеживается виртуализация и сим волизация расовых дискурсов и расизма в модерности, их перевод в этнокультурные, религиозные, гендерные и социальные сферы в условиях, отмеченных имперским и вто ричным колониальным различием. <...> Abstract: The article traces the virtualization and symbolization of racial discourses and racism in modernity, and their translation into ethniccultural, religious, gender and social spheres in the conditions, marked by imperial and secondary colonial difference. <...> Thus the author dem onstrates a manipulative nature of racial taxonomies, also drawing attention to the danger of continuing insensitivity of the Russian scholars to this category. <...> The case study demonstrating these problems is the changing interpretation of Caucasians and, particularly, the Diasporic na tion of “Circassians” in the Russian, Western European, American, and Ottoman imaginary, related to the fluctuating geopolitical interests and conflicts between various actors. <...> The author also accentuates the external and internal reasons for the syndrome of coloniality of the Cauca sian consciousness leading to stagnation and failure of the majority of efforts and programs aimed at the unification and revival on the basis of the Caucasus indigenous cosmology, culture, ethics, and knowledge system. <...> Ключевые слова: Кавказ, черкесы, модерность, освобождение, раса, исламофобия, колониальность, диаспорная нация, черкесский геноцид, субалтерная империя, осман ский султанат, этничность, экзотизация, товарный расизм, виртуализация расизма. <...> Keywords: the Caucasus, Circassians, modernity, emancipation, race, islamophobia, colo niality, diasporic nation, Circassian genocide, subaltern empire, Ottoman Sultanate, ethnicity, exotization, commodity racism, virtualization of racism. <...> In the first Christian modernity it acted as a theopolitics of knowledge, in the second (secular) modernity it changed its face to an egopolitics of knowl edge that masked the geo <...>