Abstract
This chapter deals with contact-induced change in Italo-Albanian and its effects on the Balkan inheritance of this minority language. The introduction is dedicated to the general ...characteristics of Albanian and its varieties from a historical, dialectological and geographic perspective, followed by a section on the historical and present situation of the Italo-Albanians. While Section 3 discusses the role of Balkanisms in Standard Albanian, Section 4 gives a general overview of the fate of these Sprachbund criteria in Italo-Albanian. In Section 5, contact-induced changes in the verb systems in single Italo-Albanian dialects are investigated, with special regard to the changes in the future tense, in the analytical perfect and verbal aspect, followed by a discussion of the innovative causative construction and other periphrases. Finally, changes in the domains of mood and voice in the Italo-Albanian dialects are described, most of them of recent date and, in part, not accepted by conservative speakers. All contact-induced developments in the minority language, as well as those parts of its grammar that have resisted foreign influence, are contrasted with their Standard-Albanian counterparts. As will be shown, many traditional Balkan features have been weakened or lost, whereas others have even expanded, but always in the direction of Romance models, to which Italo-Albanian functionally has adapted or which it has calqued.
In this article, we adopt a socio-anthropological approach to understand how hegemonic international representations are constructed in the politics and theory of international relations, ...specifically how Southeast Europe is perceived in West European imagination. We focus on various forms of travel writing, media reporting, diplomatic record, policy making, truth claims and expert accounts related to different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars, both old (1912-1913) and new (1991-1999). We show how these perspectives are rooted in different temporalities and historicizations, and how they contribute to international representations that affect international politics, particularly in relation to perpetuating othering and containment of Southeast Europe. We demonstrate through a detailed analysis and problematization how these international representations are culturally and politically constructed. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. As such, how international representations are constructed is itself a form of power and hegemony in both the practice and the theory of international relations.
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This article investigates the British tradition of balkanism, paying particular attention to the forms of power that representation of South-East Europe has supported. Using travel writing as a ...source material, I shall exemplify the tradition through the study of two periods in which balkanist discourse – with its motifs of discord, savagery, backwardness and obfuscation – has been especially powerful. During the nineteenth century, firstly, such discourse legitimised British assistance for the Ottoman Empire against the threat of Russian expansion. In contemporary times, secondly, the denigration of the entire Central and Eastern European region has worked to endorse the systematic interference of the European Union. For the Balkans, this has entailed wide-ranging EU control of economic structures and political frameworks, repeating the nineteenth-century concept of the peninsula as a borderland available for Western intervention and control.
The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no ...historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that "one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race." Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional, and socioeconomic identities around hierarchical notions of Europe and the Balkans in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker's observation is still largely true for Southeast European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on "balkanism" or Milica Bakić-Hayden on "symbolic geographies" and "nesting orientalism" did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that "race" as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimized colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialized link between people and territory that Southeast European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialized hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilization and modernity. Southeast European studies' latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anticolonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this essay suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness, and modernity that remain part of the history of "Europe" as an idea even if, by the end of the twentieth century, they were silenced more often than voiced.
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In this article, I discuss the persistence of Byzantium as a cultural model in the arts, and in music in particular, in the countries of the Balkans after the fall of Constantinople. By examining ...ways in which the idea of Byzantium persisted in Balkan artistic cultures (and especially in music) after the fall of Byzantium, and the way in which this relates to the advent of modernism during the later construction of the Balkan nation-states, I illustrate not only the pervasiveness but also the strength of Byzantinism as a pan-Balkan characteristic.
Abstract
Despite considerable analysis of development policies in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, local-internationals encounters have received less attention. In an attempt to fill this gap, this ...article traces the discursive processes through which development professionals frame their narratives about Bosnian society, and in turn, how its inhabitants experience the internationals staying in the country. Applying Maria Todorova's framework, I show how Western “expatriates” tend to incorporate the Balkans’ liminality into their social constructs to depoliticize development practices. On the other hand, I approach emic understandings of Europeanness and Balkanism as a situationally embedded and contested process that comes into play to (re)draw social and moral boundaries in Bosnian society. I conclude by considering local-international encounters as a privileged site for exploring the postsocialist state but also new political subjectivities in contemporary Bosnia.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Hungarian, Saxon, and Romanian nationalist activists in Transylvania disseminated competing claims to “Westernness” by swaying visiting British travel writers' descriptions through hospitality ...networks that guided what writers saw and heard, assuring that travelers favored the nationalists' classifications of the region's ethnicities. Although the qualities British travelers valued varied depending on individual differences and intellectual currents such as enlightened reform, scientific racism, and the romantic revival, travelers consistently ascribed the qualities they best favored to the nationality on whose hospitality they relied. Wealth and time of travel determined which hospitality networks travelers favored. The Hungarian noble elites hosted most travelers until 1918, when the newly dominant Romanian nobility replaced them. Throughout, peasant voices especially remained marginalized.
This article analyzes the cultural, historical and religious contexts of Milorad Pavić’s postmodernnovel Dictionary of the Khazars. Its aim is to analyze the role of Oriental, Balkanand European ...literary and folkloric motifs as the means of Pavić’s original narrative strategy.Another goal is to discuss whether Pavić’s employment of these motifs could be framed interms of Gingrich’s concept of frontier Orientalism, or should be conceptualized by othercategories. Pavić’s approaches toward the Balkan’s common identity seems to be more likelybased on the idea of a crossroad than the idea of “no man’s land” of liminal frontier area.The author discusses the accuracy of applying already existing theoretical concepts to Pavić’sworks and tries to propose conceptual instruments that would enable to see the work of thispostmodern writer in a more accurate manner.
In this article, I will address issues of race using the “Romani question” in Serbia’s Guča trumpet festival as a case study. I will specifically consider a selection of Guča-related themes pertinent ...to the question of race, while simultaneously discussing the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of this complicated concept vis-à-vis issues of national identity representation in post-Milošević Serbia. Informed by previous critical studies of race and popular music culture in South/Eastern Europe within the larger postcolonial paradigm of Balkanism, this work will seek to illustrate the ambiguous ways in which the racialization of the Serbian Self and the Romani Other is occurring in the Guča Festival alongside the country’s and region’s persistent denial of race. Using the above approaches, I will conduct a critical cultural analysis of selected racial issues in the festival with reference to eclectic sources, including more recent critical debates about race and racism in South/Eastern Europe within the broader context of postsocialist transition, EU integration, and globalization. My final argument will be that, despite strong evidence that a critical cultural analysis of the “Romani question” in Serbia’s Guča Festival calls for a transnational perspective, earlier Balkanist discourse on Serbia’s indeterminate position between West and East seems to remain analytically most helpful in pointing to the uncontested hegemony of Western/European white privilege and supremacy.
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