This article examines British representations of the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does so through focusing on records of political activism and humanitarianism, ...offering a counterpoint to the key studies of this subject in the 1990s that were based primarily on analysis of travel writing and literary texts. The subjectivities of the political culture that inspired engagement with Balkan questions are scrutinized, exposing the complexity of British perspectives on the region and highlighting intersections between international and domestic debates. Attention is drawn in particular to the idealization of Balkan peasant society and the ‘village community’ in British Liberal political discourse. This is related to tensions around land reform at home, and to the perceived impact of industrialization and urbanization on British society and citizenship. Reassessing the complex imaginative geography of the Balkans in this way provides a fresh transnational perspective on aspects of British domestic political history. It also raises broader arguments about the need to integrate historical analysis of the ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ aspects of British encounters with foreign lands and peoples in the era of the First World War.
In this paper, I aim to contribute to the debate about hegemonic relations between the West European “core” and southeast European “margins,” by showing the links between mutually challenged and ...engendered quasi-anthropological traditions in the totalitarian projects of nation-building and empire-building. New aspects of a continuous resonance will be addressed between a politically instrumentalized Albanian tradition of “folk” or people's culture studies (kultura popullore) and a German-speaking tradition of Volks- and Völkerkunde grounded in Herderean Romanticism and the imperial ambitions of the nineteenth century. In the course of discussion the successive German traditions of National-Socialist Volkskunde and Communist East German Ethnographie, until the revised tradition of Europäische Ethnologie in the 1990s, are shown to operate from a historicist tradition rather than from a critical tradition as a reflexive successor to former Volkskunde. In the course of this discussion, I will pay particular attention to contextualizing the historical and current production of knowledge by the German and Austrian “West” on a Balkan and Albanian culture, which is reduced to its archaic or pre-modern “traditions” and its specific or antiquated “mentalities.”
► Slovene speakers’ attitudes to swearwords examined through interviews. ► Strong swearwords believed to be loanwords from other South Slavic languages. ► This ideology allows informal linguistic ...differentiation of related languages. ► Swearwords implicated due to real borrowings and transgressive enjoyment. ► No evidence of essentialist linguistic nationalism or Orientalism.
Slovene speakers believe that swearwords are not indigenous to their language, but borrowed from other South Slavic languages. Interviews with educated Slovene speakers demonstrate that this ‘swearword ideology’ is not a purist or linguistic-nationalist phenomenon, but rather reflects Slovenes’ desire to differentiate Slovene from other South Slavic languages. This is due to mutual intelligibility and a lack of formal and legal distinctions, especially since other Slavic languages are not recognized as minority languages by the Slovene state. The role of swearwords in this ideology is analyzed as a product of both Lacanian symbolic anxieties and specific sociohistorical conditions, rather than an essentializing ‘Balkanist’ belief. This demonstrates the importance of an approach that does not presuppose essentialism on part of speakers.
South-east Europe has inspired a significant amount of British female travel literature, especially during periods of international conflict. Drawing on feminist studies of women's autobiographical ...writings, this article examines the complex discursive formations present in this understudied body of work. Moving from the Eastern Crisis of the mid-Victorian period to the First and Second World Wars, the article analyses such authors as Georgina Muir Mackenzie, Adeline Paulina Irby, Flora Sandes and Rebecca West. Of specific interest is the manner in which female travel writing can simultaneously challenge and endorse the patriarchal and imperialist assumptions of male counterparts. In this way, the article aims to contribute to the burgeoning debate about British balkanism, defined here as that intricate, shifting, contradictory pattern of representational practices found in British commentary on south-east Europe.
This paper aims at investigating the positions of the Balkans in ourcontemporary world in its continuous change – for instance the rapidEuropeanization for the protection of a common inheritance of ...Balkancountries. Moreover, this historical heritage is sometimes presented as a simple burden that should be overcome: the name Balkan has negative connotations, being associated with violence or primitivism. The criticism of this type of derogatory discourse called « Balkanism » is built on the deconstruction of Orientalism as initiated in the 70’s by Edward Said. In this paper, we will analyze the various types of possible objections to this Balkan approach (the absence of a colonial past, the non-existence of a « Balkan » academic tradition, the Balkan preciseness as opposed to the Oriental vagueness, as well as their not purely « oriental », yet undetermined character). Furthermore I will present the arguments in favour of another way of interpreting the Balkans which consists in the understanding of thenarrower relation between European modernity and history.
This article analyzes shifts in the imagining of the eastern Adriatic from a backward periphery to a natural paradise, a process of symbolic definition in which mobile tourists have both played a key ...role. Examining discourses and practices of nature tourism on the island of Lošinj, the analysis focuses on the emergence of the dolphin as a key symbol in the island's contemporary tourist iconography and infrastructure. In what ways does the marketing of dolphins repackage the image of Lošinj as a site of health and nature that helped spread the island's fame as a tourist mecca over a century earlier? How does the interest in dolphins refract the global rise since the 1990s of tourism promising unmediated contact with 'wild nature'? How to explain the paradoxical embrace of dolphins as an island symbol alongside the failure of recent efforts to establish a marine protected area (MPA) that would conserve the dolphin habitat? In answering these questions, the article inquires into the historical erasures and shifting boundaries of center/periphery required to sustain the vision of Lošinj as an isolated and unspoiled place. Simultaneously, political contests over dolphins encode anxieties about the island's future as a periphery within the European Union.
In this article, I examine responses to Balkanism found in Emir Kusturica's critically acclaimed Život je čudo/Life is a Miracle. I identify three rejoinders set at correcting one of the following: ...the attribution of blame for the Bosnian War, western essentialization of the Balkans, and the image of the Balkans as a primitive and untamed backwater. I argue that all of these responses commence as attempts at positive remodelling of the negative Balkan image, but because they hinge on attracting western attention, collapse either into ethnic chauvinism or proliferation of Balkan stereotypes. I then examine the ethnic favouritism epitomized by the image of the sagacious and neutral Serb. Finally, I focus on the reaction to the image of the Balkans construed by the West as exemplified by, what I call, 'remodelling'. While re-modelling aims to change how one is perceived, remodelling perpetuates and intensifies that perception. It is the latter that permeates Life is a Miracle as well as most of Kusturica's work.
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