Balkan Studies Library - Böcker

This book asks how a study of many different musics in South East Europe can help us understand the construction of cultural traditions, East and West. It crosses boundaries of many kinds, political, cultural, repertorial and disciplinary. Above all, it seeks to elucidate the relationship between politics and musical practice in a region whose art music has been all but written out of the European story and whose traditional music has been subject to appropriation by one ideology after another. South East Europe, with its mix of ethnicities and religions, presents an exceptionally rich field of study in this respect. The book will be of value to anyone interested in intersections between pre-modern and modern cultures, between empires and nations and between culture and politics.

Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume take a different approach. They all seek to treat the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings. This goes along with an interest in the way ideas, institutions and techniques were selected, transferred and adapted to Balkan conditions and how they interacted with those conditions. The volume also invites reflection on the interacting entities in the very process of their creation and consecutive transformations rather than taking them as givens. Contributors include: Alexander Vezenkov, Constantin Iordachi, Raymond Detrez, Ronelle Alexander, Roumen Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov.

Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume take a different approach. They view the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled histories. This regards the treatment of shared historical legacies by rival national historiographies. The volume deals with historiograpical disputes that arose in the process of “nationalizing” the past. Contributors include: Diana Mishkova, Alexander Vezenkov, Roumen Daskalov, Tchavdar Marinov and Bernard Lory.

In Identity, Nationalism, and Cultural Heritage under Siege, Fatme Myuhtar-May makes a case for the recognition of Pomak heritage by presenting five stories from the past and present of the Rhodope Muslims in Bulgaria as examples of a distinct Pomak culture. The stories range from the Christianisation during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and the forced communist renaming of the Pomaks in the 1970s, to their fascinating wedding rituals and historic figures. Each of the five narratives contains its own storyline and serves as a prominent example of Pomak heritage, from the author’s perspective. The stories take place in the context of fervent nationalism and the ongoing censorship of Pomakness based on the claim that it is an “ethnic Bulgarian,” not “Pomak” heritage.

Earthly Delights brings together a number of substantial and original scholarly studies by international scholars currently working on the history of food in the Ottoman Empire and East-Central Europe. It offers new empirical research, as well as surveys of the state of scholarship in this discipline, with special emphasis on influences, continuities and discontinuities in the culinary cultures of the Ottoman Porte, the Balkans and East-Central Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries. Some contributions address economic aspects of food provision, the development and trans-national circulation of individual dishes, and the role of merchants, diplomats and travellers in the transmission of culinary trends. Others examine the role of food in the construction of national and regional identities in contact zones where local traditions merged or clashed with imperial (Ottoman, Habsburg) and West-European influences.

The present volume is the last in the Entangled Balkans series and marks the end of several years of research guided by the transnational, “entangled history” and histoire croisée approaches. The essays in this volume address theoretical and methodological issues of Balkan or Southeast European regional studies—not only questions of scholarly concepts, definitions, and approaches but also the extra-scholarly, ideological, political, and geopolitical motivations that underpin them. These issues are treated more systematically and by a presentation of their historical evolution in various national traditions and schools. Some of the essays deal with the articulation of certain forms of “Balkan heritage” in relation to the geographical spread and especially the cultural definition of the “Balkan area.” Concepts and definitions of the Balkans are thus complemented by (self-)representations that reflect on their cultural foundations.

With the Treaty of Versailles, the Western nation-state powers introduced into the East Central European region the principle of national self-determination. This principle was buttressed by frustrated native elites who regarded the establishment of their respective nation-states as a welcome opportunity for their own affirmation. They desired sovereignty but were prevented from accomplishing it by their multiple dispossession. National elites started to blame each other for this humiliating condition. The successor states were dispossessed of power, territories, and glory. The new nation-states were frustrated by their devastating condition. The dispersed Jews were left without the imperial protection. This embarrassing state gave rise to collective (historical) and individual (fictional) narratives of dispossession. This volume investigates their intended and unintended interaction.Contributors are: Davor Beganović, Vladimir Biti, Zrinka Božić-Blanuša, Marko Juvan, Bernarda Katušić, Nataša Kovačević, Petr Kučera, Aleksandar Mijatović, Guido Snel, and Stijn Vervaet.

Women, fashion, consumption, luxury, and education are the main subjects of our researchers. The contributors of this volume accompanied women and objects in their travels across Modern Europe and offered thorough and diverse analyses connecting the circulation of people with the circulation of ideas. Making use of archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors point out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. This will help the public to better know and understand the importance of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

Titoist Yugoslavia is a particularly interesting setting to examine the integrity of the modern nation-state, especially the viability of distinctly multi-ethnic nation-building projects. Scholarly literature on the brutal civil wars that destroyed Yugoslavia during the 1990s emphasizes divisive nationalism and dysfunctional politics to explain why the state disintegrated. But the larger question remains unanswered—just how did Tito’s state function so successfully for the preceding forty-six years. In an attempt to understand better what united the stable, multi-ethnic, and globally important Yugoslavia that existed before 1991 Robert Niebuhr argues that we should pay special attention to the dynamic and robust foreign policy that helped shape the Cold War.

Winner of the 2019 CEU Award for Outstanding ResearchThis book documents the making of Romanian citizenship from 1750 to 1918 as a series of acts of national self-determination by the Romanians, as well as the emancipation of subordinated gender, social, and ethno-religious groups. It focuses on the progression of a sum of transnational “questions” that were at the heart of North-Atlantic, European, and local politics during the long nineteenth century, concerning the status of peasants, women, Greeks, Jews, Roma, Armenians, Muslims, and Dobrudjans. The analysis emphasizes the fusion between nationalism and liberalism, and the emancipatory impact national-liberalism had on the transition from the Old Regime to the modern order of the nation-state. While emphasizing liberalism's many achievements, the study critically scrutinizes the liberal doctrine of legal-political “capacity” and the dark side of nationalism, marked by tendencies toward exclusion. It highlights the challenges nascent liberal democracies face in the process of consolidation and the enduring appeal of illiberalism in periods of upheaval, represented mainly by nativism. The book's innovative interdisciplinary approach to citizenship in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and the richness of the sources employed, appeal to a diverse readership.

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.

In Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918-1945, Mirjam Rajner traces the lives and creativity of seven artists of Jewish origin. The artists - Moša Pijade, Daniel Kabiljo, Adolf Weiller, Bora Baruh, Daniel Ozmo, Ivan Rein and Johanna Lutzer - were characterized by multiple and changeable identities: nationalist and universalist, Zionist and Sephardic, communist and cosmopolitan.These fluctuating identities found expression in their art, as did their wartime fate as refugees, camp inmates, partisans and survivors. A wealth of newly-discovered images, diaries and letters highlight this little-known aspect of Jewish life and art in Yugoslavia, illuminating a turbulent era that included integration into a newly-founded country, the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and renewal in its aftermath.interview with the author