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National literary histories based on internally homogeneous native traditions have significantly contributed to the construction of national identities, especially in multicultural East-Central Europe, the region between the German and Russian hegemonic cultural powers stretching from the Baltic states to the Balkans. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, which covers the last two hundred years, reconceptualizes these literary traditions by de-emphasizing the national myths and by highlighting analogies and points of contact, as well as hybrid and marginal phenomena that tra
Yugoslavia's breakup in 1991, and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo that followed in its wake, have been widely blamed on Serbian nationalism. Most analyses have not examined this nationalism in the years before Slobodan Miloševićs' rise to power, when its principal articulators were dissident intellectuals. This book traces the trajectory of intellectual opposition to Serbian nationalism from its origins in the 1950s to its consolidation in the 1980s, arguing that the acceptance of Milošević's undemocratic approach to the national question undermined the intellectual opposition's ability to present a convincing political alternative and was crucial in allowing the regime to continue. -- book cover.
Haunting is what happens when the past is disturbed and the victims of previous violence, who are thought to be buried and forgotten, are brought back to the present and made to live again. Serbian fiction writers of the 1980s exhume the ghosts of the past, re-remembering the cruelty of the twentieth century, reinterpreting the heroic role of the Partisans and the extraordinary measures taken to defend Yugoslavia’s recently won independence and socialist revolution. Their uncanny and ghostly imagery challenges the assumptions of the master discourse promoted by the country’s orthodox communist authorities and questions the historical roots of social and cultural identities. The instability of this period of transition is deepened during the wars of the 1990s, when authors turn from the memory of past violence to face the ferocious brutality of new conflicts. The haunting evocations in their work continue to articulate fresh uncertainties as the trappings of modern civilization are stripped away and replaced by the destructive logic of civil war. The past returns once more with renewed energy in the struggle to make sense of a vastly changed world.
This volume focuses on Serbia’s need to manage change while preserving community identities, a narrative that avoids the common depiction of Serbian culture as a hostile struggle between modernizers supporting foreign models and traditionalists advocating forms of national cultural patrimony. Traditions only function if they are allowed to bend to the necessary modifications demanded by a community’s changing historical circumstances. Tradition and change are two sides of the same coin which Serbia, in its many different incarnations, has experienced over the centuries, protecting its national heritage while borrowing and adapting intellectual and other trends from Byzantine, Ottoman and...
Serbia's national movement of the 1980s and 1990s, the author suggests, was not the product of an ancient, immutable, and aggressive Serbian national identity; nor was it an artificial creation of powerful political actors looking to capitalize on its mobilizing power. Miller argues that cultural processes are too often ignored in favor of political ones; that Serbian intellectuals did work within a historical context, but that they were not slaves to the past. His subjects are Dobrica Ćosić (a novelist), Mića Popović (a painter) and Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz (a literary critic). These three influential Serbian intellectuals concluded by the late 1960s that communism had failed the Serbian people; together, they helped forge a new Serbian identity that fused older cultural imagery with modern conditions.
This collection contains seven chapters that focus on relevant sources introducing the field of intercultural and transcultural studies in the Balkan region, specifically Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as contributions by Bosnian and Herzegovinian scholars from different epochs and nations including medieval, modern and postmodern trends in BH philosophy. Through the entire study of BiH contributions to transcultural philosophy, the author attempts to strengthen the already-existing transcultural processes and centuries-long transcultural exchanges. In these chapters, the author also attempts to further develop and improve efforts in the field of transcultural philosophy and by eo ipso, the navigation of Bosnian and Herzegovinian cultural differences in today’s world.
The volume offers the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe.
Discussing the complex weave of cultural links and the different religious and linguistic groups that have been living side by side in the Balkans for centuries, this anthropological study is the result of a project initiated to create a network of scholars from Scandinavia and the Yugoslav successor states devoted to the study of post-Yugoslav cultural and political developments. Nine papers on problems of cultural boundaries are presented with the idea of countering the picture of the Balkans as a huge borderland where irresolvable age-old ethnic and religious rivalries will inevitably cause conflict as informed by stereotypes and oversimplifications. Topics include the historical crossing of religious borderlines, the legitimizing efforts of elites to create national identities, struggles to declare "ownership" over the origins of a particular musical instrument, and similar topics.
Revealing a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene in the Balkans On the Very Edge brings together fourteen empirical and comparative essays about the production, perception, and reception of modernity and modernism in the visual arts, architecture, and literature of interwar Serbia (1918–1941). The contributions highlight some idiosyncratic features of modernist processes in this complex period in Serbian arts and society, which emerged ‘on the very edge’ between territorial and cultural, new and old, modern and traditional identities. With an open methodological framework this book reveals a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene, which, albeit prematurely, announced interests in plu...