Balkan as Metaphor

Author: Dusan I. Bjelic
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262524481
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Pioneering essays on the idea of the Balkan as a body of knowledge and a cultural metaphor. Balkan. Somewhere between a tragedy and a myth, a place and a condition, the term is perhaps best understood as a metaphor. It has been used and abused in academia by proponents of opposing political views. Multiculturalism has appropriated it, as have postmodernism and postcommunism. It is used pejoratively to refer to excessive specialization and nostalgically to refer to Europe's lost people—its wild warriors and passionate geniuses. This book explores the idea of the Balkan as metaphor and the meaning of Balkan identity in the context of contemporary culture. Focusing on Balkanism both as a body of knowledge and as the critical study of that discourse, this book does for the Balkans what Edward Said's Orientalism did for "the Orient."The sixteen authors, most of whom were born and educated in the Balkans, apply the Western academic tools of postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and critical multiculturalism to topics as varied as the rhetoric of Balkanization, the war in Kosovo, Western demonization and erotization of the Serbs, Balkan film, human rights legislation, Byzantinism, the vampire as an image of Balkan violence, envy of the political and moral capital of victimhood, the tendency of the Balkan psyche toward depression, Serbian machismo and homosexuality, and wartime rape. The book both lays the groundwork for a new field of study and serves as an act of resistance against the many forms of representation that break the Balkans into fragments such as NATO army bases and digital maps in order to wire them into the global market.

Beyond Balkanism

Author: Diana Mishkova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351236369
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
In recent years, western discourse about the Balkans, or “balkanism,” has risen in prominence. Characteristically, this strand of research sidelines the academic input in the production of western representations and Balkan self-understanding. Looking at the Balkans from the vantage point of “balkanism” has therefore contributed to its further marginalization as an object of research and the evisceration of its agency. This book reverses the perspective and looks at the Balkans primarily inside-out, from within the Balkans towards its “self” and the outside world, where the west is important but not the sole referent. The book unravels attempts at regional identity-building and construction of regional discourses across various generations and academic subcultures, with the aim of reconstructing the conceptualizations of the Balkans that have emerged from academically embedded discursive practices and political usages. It thus seeks to reinstate the subjectivity of “the Balkans” and the responsibility of the Balkan intellectual elites for the concept and the images it conveys. The book then looks beyond the Balkans, inviting us to rethink the relationship between national and transnational (self-)representation and the communication between local and exogenous – Western, Central and Eastern European – concepts and definitions more generally. It thus contributes to the ongoing debates related to the creation of space and historical regions, which feed into rethinking the premises of the “new area studies.” Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making will interest researchers and students of transnationalism, politics, historical geography, border and area studies.

The Making of a Nation in the Balkans

Author: ????? ????????
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639241831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
"The book contains a presentation and critical consideration of the ideas of historians on the major problems, processes, events, and personalities of the era of the Bulgarian (national) Revival. It is dominated by the effort to understand how the Bulgarian Revival has been conceived of and imagined while keeping a certain distance from the various views presented, whether critical, ironic, or simply that inherent in the presentation of another person's view."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Imagining the Balkans

Author: Maria Todorova
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199889090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
"If the Balkans hadn't existed, they would have been invented" was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication, Europe. Over ten years ago, Maria Todorova traced the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys, journalism, and belles-lettres in many languages, Imagining the Balkans explored the ontology of the Balkans from the sixteenth century to the present day, uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed, became mythologized, and is still being transmitted as discourse. Maria Todorova, who was raised in the Balkans, is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject, and in a new afterword she reflects on recent developments in the study of the Balkans and political developments on the ground since the publication of Imagining the Balkans. The afterword explores the controversy over Todorova's coining of the term Balkanism. With this work, Todorova offers a timely, updated, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history.

Burek

Author: Jernej Mlekuz
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 963386089X
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
?As simple as burek? is a popular phrase used by many young people in Slovenia. In this book Jernej Mleku? maintains that the truth is just the opposite. The burek is a pie made of pastry dough filled with various fillings that is well-known in the Balkans, and also in Turkey and the Near East by other names. Whether on the plate or as a cultural artifact, it is in fact, not that simple. After a brief stroll through its innocent history, Mleku? focuses on the present state of the burek, after parasitical ideologies had attached themselves to it and poisoned its discourses. In Slovenia, the burek has become a loaded metaphor for the Balkans and immigrants from the republics of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Without the burek it would be equally difficult to consider the jargon of Slovenian youth, the imagined world of Slovenian chauvinism and the rhetorical arsenal of advertising agents when promoting healthy foods. In this analysis, Mleku? refers to the burek as the ?metaburek.? All at the same time it is greasy, Balkan, Slovene, not-Slovene, Yugoslavian, familiar, foreign, the greatest, the worst, disturbingly unhealthy, plebeian, junk food, and finally, a cherub (burek spelled backwards is kerub, the Slovene word for cherub). And this metaburek, the protagonist of this book, is never a completely pure, innocent, unconditioned burek. It is much more. ÿ

The Balkans in the Cold War

Author: Svetozar Rajak
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137439033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Book Description
Positioned on the fault line between two competing Cold War ideological and military alliances, and entangled in ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, the Balkan region offers a particularly interesting case for the study of the global Cold War system. This book explores the origins, unfolding and impact of the Cold War on the Balkans on the one hand, and the importance of regional realities and pressures on the other. Fifteen contributors from history, international relations, and political science address a series of complex issues rarely covered in one volume, namely the Balkans and the creation of the Cold War order; Military alliances and the Balkans; uneasy relations with the Superpowers; Balkan dilemmas in the 1970s and 1980s and the ‘significant other’ – the EEC; and identity, culture and ideology. The book’s particular contribution to the scholarship of the Cold War is that it draws on extensive multi-archival research of both regional and American, ex-Soviet and Western European archives.

Imagining the Balkans

Author: Marii͡a Nikolaeva Todorova
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195087512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Starting in the 18th and 19th centuries and continuing up to the present, Imagining the Balkans covers the Balkan's most formative years.

Balkan as a Metaphor

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

The Balkans Beyond Nationalism and Identity

Author: Pavlos Hatzopoulos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857710702
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
For decades, we have come to accept that nationalism formed the basis of the modern history of the Balkans. In this bold and controversial study, Pavlos Hatzopoulos turns this assumption on its head. Through a ground-breaking examination of the non-nationalist ideologies in the Balkans during the interwar period, Hatzopoulos calls into question the supposedly inherent connection between the Balkans and nationalism and argues that nationalism does not form the sole ordering principle of the modern history of the Balkan region. Focusing on the ideologies of communism, liberal internationalism and agrarianism, Hatzopoulos examines how these interact with nationalist ideology. He demonstrates how non-nationalist theories challenge the nationalist view of the Balkans as the sum of several national spaces. He even questions the nationalist understanding of the very term 'the Balkans'. "The Balkans Beyond Nationalism and Identity" revisits contemporary debates on a region that is still a European crisis point and challenges the nation-centric understanding that permeates it. In proposing a description of 'the Balkans' as a contested political concept, the book argues for a completely fresh interpretation of the region's composition.

Balkans and Islam

Author: Hamit Er
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443842834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
In the growing body of literature about the evolution and the role of Islam in Europe as a whole and the Balkans in particular, this volume holds a special place as it offers a multidisciplinary approach to the encounter-transformation-discontinuity-continuity of Islam in the region. Thus, it provides excellent material for students of social and political studies, history and even architecture, at the bachelor and master level. At the same time, it aspires to attract the attention of researchers and academics who are interested in the evolution of Islam in the Balkans. It should be noted that the style and the language of the articles in this volume would also make it easily accessible to the general interested reader who is not detached from the latest social and political developments in the Balkans. In this regard, the volume would also be useful for a number of think tank members and even politicians in the Balkans, providing them with knowledge of the region’s past and present, with hope for an integrated future.