Imagining the Balkans

Imagining the Balkans PDF Author: Maria Todorova
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199728380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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.

Beyond Balkanism

Beyond Balkanism PDF 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.

Scaling the Balkans

Scaling the Balkans PDF Author: Maria N. Todorova
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004382305
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 683

Book Description
Scaling the Balkans puts in conversation several fields that have been traditionally treated as discrete: Balkan studies, Ottoman studies, East European studies, and Habsburg and Russian studies. By looking at the complex interrelationship between countries and regions, demonstrating how different perspectives and different methodological approaches inflect interpretations and conclusions, it insists on the heuristic value of scales. The volume is a collection of published and unpublished essays, dealing with issues of modernism, backwardness, historical legacy, balkanism, post-colonialism and orientalism, nationalism, identity and alterity, society-and nation-building, historical demography and social structure, socialism and communism in memory, and historiography.

Imagining the Balkans

Imagining the Balkans PDF Author: Maria Todorova
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195387864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
'Imagining the Balkans' examines how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into a powerful and widespread pejorative designation. In a new afterword, Maria Todorova discusses the reaction to her dubbing of the term Balkanism and recent events in the Balkans.

Inventing Ruritania

Inventing Ruritania PDF Author: Vesna Goldsworthy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231704236
Category : Balkan Peninsula
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Published more than a decade ago, Inventing Ruritania has become a standard study of the West's attitude toward the Balkans -- the "Wild East" of Europe. With its Western and Oriental influences, the Balkans have both attracted and repelled outsiders, offering a tantalizing alternative to familiar society. Completely different from "us" yet exactly what "we" used to be, the Balkans have particularly provided Western European and American writers and filmmakers with a wealth of images, characters, and ideas. In her prodigiously researched volume, Vesna Goldsworthy explores the entertainment industry's lucrative exploitation of Balkan history and geography and its affect on Western conceptions of the region. She traces the national, religious, and sexual fears foreign observers project onto Balkan lands and the use of Balkan archetypes. The work of an Anglo-Serbian writer and former BBC journalist turned academic, Inventing Ruritania maps an imaginary geography that has had palpable consequences in the practical world.

Imagined Empires

Imagined Empires PDF Author: Dimitris Stamatopoulos
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789633861776
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Balkans offer classic examples of how empires imagine they can transform themselves into national states (Ottomanism) and how nation-states project themselves into future empires (as with the Greek "Great Idea" and the Serbian "Načertaniye"). By examining the interaction between these two aspirations this volume sheds light on the ideological prerequisites for the emergence of Balkan nationalisms. With a balance between historical and literary contributions, the focus is on the ideological hybridity of the new national identities and on the effects of "imperial nationalisms" on the emerging Balkan nationalisms. The authors of the twelve essays reveal the relation between empire and nation-state, proceeding from the observation that many of the new nation-states acquired some imperial features and behaved as empires. This original and stimulating approach reveals the imperialistic nature of so-called ethnic or cultural nationalism.

Post-communist Nostalgia

Post-communist Nostalgia PDF Author: Maria Todorova
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857456431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.

From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans

From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans PDF Author: Robert Hayden
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004241906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
Reflecting more than two decades of research on Yugoslavia’s collapse and based primarily on sources from the region itself, this book consistently challenges commonly-held beliefs about the Balkans wars, and about European integration, international law, human rights, and politics in multi-national societies.

The Rise of Eurocentrism

The Rise of Eurocentrism PDF Author: Vassilis Lambropoulos
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691201811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 486

Book Description
In the controversy over political correctness, the canon, and the curriculum, the role of Western tradition in a post-modern world is often debated. To clarify what is at stake, Vassilis Lambropoulos traces the ideology of European culture from the Reformation, focusing on a key element of Western tradition: the act of interpretation as a distinct practice of understanding and a civil right. Championed by Protestants insisting on independent interpretation of scripture, this ideal of autonomy ushered in the era of modernity with its essentialist philosophy of universal man and his aesthetic understanding of the world. After explaining the dominance of European culture through the combined archetypes of Hebraism (reason and morality) and Hellenism (spirit and art), Lambropoulos shows how the rule of autonomy has been transformed into the aesthetic, disinterested contemplation of things in themselves. Arguing that it is time to restore the socio-political dimension to the movement of autonomy, he proposes that a genealogy of the Hebraic-Hellenic archetypes can help us evaluate more recent models--like the Afrocentric one--and redefine the controversy surrounding education, Eurocentrism, and cultural politics.

Imagining the Balkans

Imagining the Balkans PDF 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.
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