Zenitism and orientalism Glišić, Iva; Vujošević, Tijana
Zbornik radova Akademije umetnosti (Online),
2021, Volume:
2021, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Reflecting on the centenary of the birth of Zenitism, this essay examines how the movement engaged with stereotypes about the Slavic Orient, and in particular the discourse on Balkanism. The European ...orientalist reading of the Balkans became especially profound in years surrounding the World War I. Seeking to invert derogatory characterisations of the Balkan Peninsula, Zenitists would embark on a mission to "Balkanise Europe" by presenting the artist from the East as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force emerging from a cultural tabula rasa. Zenitism sought to destabilise the dominant Orient-Occident discourse by establishing parallels between existing negative stereotypes of the Balkans and the aesthetic tropes of the European avantgarde. Specifically, Zenitists established the Balkan "Barbarogenius" as the archetypal modernist primitive - precisely the figure conjured by the European intelligentsia as the saviour for its listless modern condition. In addition, the Zenitist movement established an analogy between the hallmark fragmentation of the Balkans and the cultural cacophony of the avant-garde. The political and aesthetic strategies of the movement, the authors assert, bear a striking similarity with those of the Black Atlantic, and its 'in-betweenness'-its ambition to straddle two opposing worlds. Organised around its eponymous journal Zenit, which was conceptualised as "the first Balkan journal in Europe and the first European journal in the Balkans," Zenitism employed European avant-garde aesthetic strategies while simultaneously rejecting European claims to cultural supremacy. For Yugoslav, Soviet, and Western European audiences, the journal had two parallel goals: the creative "Balkanisation" of Europe, and a commitment to dismantling Yugoslav "nesting orientalisms" by fighting against the reproduction of negative stereotypes among the region's own inhabitants. Against a backdrop of European crisis and a global demand for a renewed emancipatory struggle, the ambition of Zenitism holds strong appeal today.
Talking about Balkanism in Romanian contemporary poetry means to betray, to a certain extent required by degradation or alteration, some literary themes and motifs. Finding ourselves in a ...geographical area of cultural contaminations, the influence of other peoples in Balkans comes naturally: the nostalgia of Byzantium perfection, continuous reporting at an ideal time, abstraction of the chronology. Balkan themes and motives in poetry are identifiable from the early writings of Romanian literature, including the folklore, with Anton Pann, the Vacarescu and Conachi poets – and their ludic descriptivism – , to Ion Barbu, who strikes a metaphysical note in the Balkan motifs, and later, in the second part of twentieth century, with the species of parody. The Romanian native receptivity allowed continuous assimilations without creating an unpleasant heterogeneous feeling. This openness has contributed decisively in a formative way to bring Byzantium on a new soil in a perfect and saturated array; the perfectibility is not possible anymore, so the failure was natural, in a degraded status – Constantinople. Oriental-Byzantine gravity becomes in Oriental-Balkan tragedy or comedy, balance slid to one extreme, sometime becoming ridiculous. Contemporary poetry does not express any more a true lament, but a kind of parody (in ludic poetry) or sheer contempt (in the solemn poetry). The Balkan intelligence is not critical, but creative, with the risk of perpetuating monstrous forms, beyond good and evil. Byzantium established itself through a double filter – for the East and for the West – influencing and being influenced, in turn. Romanian poetry has the full sequence of themes and aesthetic formulae, from tragic to comic, often switching rapidly from one edge to the other, taking into account the old Thracian solemn part, then the proud Byzantium and its absorption in Constantinople – all rolling in a series of formal expressions reflected in themes and vocabulary.
Byzantinism, a not sufficiently explored field, is still today a fundament of the pejorative explanation of the terms "Balkanization" and "Balkanism". Byzantinism, the Hellenic one, actually ...represents the whole idea for the Balkans ; the idea of how, due to the hegemonization of an ethnic identity, an empire chat persisted for about a millennium could collapse. The idea of this text is to show the connection between Byzantinism and Balkanism and by using synthesis and comparative analysis to prove the thesis chat : The hegemonization of the Byzantine-Greek identity in the past contributed to the birth of today's Balkan nationalism -Balkanism. In this text, the author analyses the appearance of Byzantium as a par excellence addition to ancient Hellenism, especially its conversion into hegemonic Hellenism, which was intended to submerge and assimilate all the other non-Greek identities in Byzantium. In fact, the author will prove chat Byzantinism, which is a product of Hellenism, is the source ofBalkanism, which icselfleads to the idea chat the fundament of today's Balkan nationalism, chat is, Balkanism, is nothing but the hegemonic Hellenism during the Byzantine Empire.
Conev Blagoj. Byzantinism as a Fundament of the Balkanirni. In: Hiperboreea. Journal of History, vol. 5, N°1, 2018. pp. 17-32.
This study critically discusses the entanglements between World Heritage and geo-politics. It deconstructs the geo-political gaze which, it is argued, characterises the articulation of the UNESCO ...World Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) programme in the Republic of Croatia. The study of ICH specific to the case of Croatia is significant in political geography because it entails how cultural heritage is instrumentally used to promote nation-building while seeking to overcome past suppression of its culture. The article takes the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and Todorova's notion of Balkanism as epistemological frameworks. The aim is to understand what discourses are in play for Croatia as an independent nation to self-reflexively represent itself in the UNESCO international community and establish its geo-political positioning among other European nations through the transactional device of ICH. We argue that UNESCO acts as a supranational body which interacts with Croatia in the matter of ICH safeguarding. It therefore contributes to an emphasis on a governmentality discourse; at the same time, Balkanism can be regarded as a backdrop against which Croatia has constructed its own identity and legitimised its European aspirations.
The South Slavic languages belong to the wider Slavic language family and as far as we know, the similarities among them are very extensive. On the other hand, there are many differences between the ...South Slavic languages and other Slavic branches (the East and the West Slavic languages). To mention just one of them, it is the influence of the Turkish or Ottoman Turkish language. The influence of the Turkish language is very extensive among the South Slavic languages, but not so among the East and West Slavic languages. Nevertheless, the influence of the Turkish language is not consistent even among particular South Slavic languages. The purpose of this paper is to present the differences between the South Slavic languages which are based on the different usage of exclamations ‘ajde’ and ‘hajde’ among particular South Slavic languages, as from our experience this seems to be significant. The aim of this paper is to explore the contexts of these two exclamations in the three South Slavic languages, to compare the contexts, and to highlight the different usage of these two words not just among particular South Slavic languages, but also within individual language systems. We have found that the dictionaries of the researched languages do not contain the differences we found out by our comparison. For precise use of these words in identical contexts, we decided to use a comparative analysis of interlingual translations. We have chosen three translations of the children’s book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling, the Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian ones. We have compared the contexts in which these words occur, and we found fundamental differences, whose explanation we offer in this article.
‘Orientalism’ has been used as a lens to understand consumption of heritage sites in non-Western contexts. Through the supplementary lens of ‘Balkanism’, we examine a European region with a ...significant heritage reflecting the c.500 year rule of the Ottoman Empire. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republic of North Macedonia and Albania are selected for study given their concentration of Ottoman heritage sites. We note first that these countries' heritage tourism sectors anticipate and modify interpretation to accommodate ‘Western’ tourists' affectation of ‘surprise’ and ‘delight’ at a ‘remarkable’ crossroads between ‘West/East’ or ‘Christendom/Islam’. To understand why Ottoman heritage is often understood to be in but not of Europe, our analysis draws on scholarship interrogating ‘Europe's’ longstanding discursive erasure of its Ottoman-Islamic-Oriental ‘self’ and Tourism's role in this.
•Interrogates Said's notion of ‘Orientalism’ within a European context.•Contextualises the above in Heritage Tourism in the Balkans.•Raises the profile of critical question on Ottoman heritage and European identity.
Historiography about external representations of southeastern Europe places significance on the Balkan Wars (1912-3) in cementing negative stereotypes of the region. Despite this, there have been few ...studies dealing specifically with British representations of these conflicts. This article scrutinises British journalistic correspondence from the wars, sources neglected by previous scholarship in favour of overtly literary depictions of the region and tangible forms of Anglo-Balkan political contact. Foregrounding domestic political culture which shaped representations, notably the publicity of the liberal Balkan Committee, and the practicalities of war correspondence, this article argues British perceptions of the wars were more sympathetic than typically assumed. Representations of the conflicts were based around patterns of perception originating in orientalist assumptions about the Ottoman Empire. Reporters welcomed allied victories as the triumph of Western 'progress' over Eastern 'stagnation' and instrumentalised violent stereotypes about the Ottomans to highlight the just cause of the allied offensive via atrocity propaganda. While recognising growing dissent in Britain over pro-Balkan reporting from organisations such as the Ottoman Association, this article concludes by emphasising how the 'fratricidal' Second Balkan War had less of an impact on patterns of perception due to its short duration.
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