Twilight of the Proletariat: Reading Critical Balkanology as Liberal Ideology

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rade Zinaić
Keyword(s):  
Rock Music ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
East European ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
Liberal Ideology ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
Singular Individual

Critical Balkanology is a sub-discipline of Central and East European Studies that deconstructs and renders arbitrary the claims of ethnic nationalisms and Western “colonial” representations of the Balkans. Yet, this critical and nominally anti-racist project is parasitic on a hegemonic Euro-Atlantic liberal ideology in that it cannot see beyond the singular individual as victim and vanguard, thereby obscuring and/or effacing an awareness of class inequality. Tomislav Longinović's Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (2011) is emblematic of this project. I place this text under an immanent critique and a contrapuntal reading as an example of how one can rescue class consciousness from this literature and push the limits of its politics while, in Longinović's case, reading it against the socioeconomic contradictions of post-MiloŠević Serbia. Longinović's tracing of the vampire metaphor as a way of understanding the consumptive nature of both ethnic nationalism and Western imperialism reveals a politics that stigmatizes Serbia's plebeian history in favour of a Westernized and urban middle class youth cult of techno-culture, rock music, and the disembodied voices of (male) intellectuals – a form of epistemic violence that parallels processes of privatization, social cleansing, and class oppression consuming the bodies of (sub)proletarians.

A major study on Ottoman architecture in Hungary

1982 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-73
Author(s):  
Géza Fehérvári
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
East European ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
Ottoman Architecture ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
Art And Architecture

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in Turkish art and architecture, an interest that embraces not only the monuments in Turkey proper but also those which were erected in south-eastern Europe during the Ottoman occupation. Thus a few years ago, when in conjunction with the World of Islam Festival a symposium was held in Edinburgh dedicated to Islam in the Balkans, the participants dealt with Islamic monuments in Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece and Yugoslavia. The Ottoman monuments of Hungary are admittedly not as numerous as those of these south-east European countries; nevertheless,they represent the achievements of a period which is justifiably called the ‘classical’ period in Ottoman art.

scholarly journals Patrilineal traditional family: Examples of Serbia and Bulgaria

2014 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-116
Author(s):  
Ljubica Rajkovic ◽  
Vesna Miletic-Stepanovic
Keyword(s):  
Extended Family ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
East European ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Family Household ◽  
Traditional Family ◽  
European Model ◽  
Family And Household ◽  
Similarities And Differences

The paper aims to investigate from comparative and sociological perspective the similarities between the roles of family and household in social development of Bulgaria and Serbia. The focus of the study is placed on the similarities and differences between the traditional phase of development and the industrial, modern one. Modern society as a whole is defined as untransformed and subject to re-traditionalization. The investigation rests on the assumption that within East European model, the traditional family/household is a phenomenon linked to the 19th and 20th centuries, but not to the 21st one. However, the Balkan extended family/household retains the influence it had in the traditional phase of development. In the traditional phase, the extended family commune (zadruga), characteristic of the Balkans, played an essential role for survival. In modern societies, it regains its importance for survival during social and economic crises; however, it also poses traditionally experienced risks concerning substantial deterioration of the position of women.

scholarly journals Continuity or Discontinuity – the Case of Macedonian Phonetics

2015 ◽  
pp. 97-113
Author(s):  
Irena Sawicka
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
East European ◽  
Small Areas ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Phonetic Convergence ◽  
Phonetic Features

Continuity or Discontinuity – the Case of Macedonian PhoneticsThe article presents its principal topic of the continuity of linguistic phenomena based on the material of Macedonian phonetics, treated as a constituent of south-east European phonetics, and not as an element of the Slavic world. It provides, firstly, a static perspective, produced by enumerating typologically relevant features. Seen from this perspective, Macedonian phonetics is a component of the Central Balkanic area. Secondly, emphasis has been put on processes of phonetic convergence and their differences from those of grammatical convergence. These difference account for the instability of phonetic features, or in any case their generally lesser stability compared to morphosyntactic features, but on the other hand also for the possibility for some phenomena to survive in small areas, in a few dialects, and the possibility for linguistic features to reappear, which stems from alternating cross-dialectal interference. The Macedonian language territory abounds in such situations due to its multi-ethnicity, which is greater here than anywhere else in the Balkans. Particular in this respect is the area of Aegean Macedonia, where Slavic dialects are “protected” from the influence of the literary norm – albeit in the case of Macedonian even the realisation of the literary norm is not entirely stable in terms of phonetics.Ciągłość czy jej brak – casus macedońskiej fonetykiNadrzędny temat dotyczący ciągłości zjawisk przedstawiony został na materiale macedońskiej fonetyki. Fonetyka macedońska została rozpatrzona jako składnik fonetyki Europy południowo-wschodniej, a nie jako element świata słowiańskiego. Przedstawiono, po pierwsze, obraz statyczny, wynikający z wyliczania relewantnych typologicznie cech. Ten obraz klasyfikuje fonetykę macedońską jako składnik centralnego obszaru bałkańskiego. Po drugie, położono akcent na przebieg procesów konwergencyjnych w zakresie fonetyki i na różnice w stosunku do takich procesów w zakresie gramatyki. Wynika z nich: nietrwałość cech fonetycznych, a w każdym razie ogólnie mniejsza trwałość cech fonetycznych niż cech morfo-składniowych, ale też możliwość przetrwania pewnych zjawisk na małych obszarach, w paru gwarach, możliwość powracania cech fonetycznych, co wynika z naprzemiennej interferencji międzydialektalnej. Terytorium języka macedońskiego obfituje w takie sytuacje ze względu na większą multietniczność niż gdziekolwiek indziej na Bałkanach. Szczególny pod tym względem jest obszar Macedonii Egejskiej, gdzie dialekty słowiańskie są „zabezpieczone” przed działaniem normy literackiej. Chociaż w wypadku języka macedońskiego nawet realizacja normy literackiej pod względem fonetycznym nie jest całkiem stabilna.

Restoring the Memory

2019 ◽  
pp. 30-49
Author(s):  
Goran Ilik
Keyword(s):  
The European Union ◽  
Main Research ◽  
East European ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
European Cooperation ◽  
Balkan Region ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Balkan States ◽  
The Eu

This chapter explores the key features of the concept of postnationalism, its modes, and theoretical implications regarding the European Union. The main research intention is to explore the EU as a model and an agent for reconciliation of the Balkan region. For that purpose, the main operative elements of both the South East European Cooperation Process and “Yugosphere” are examined. At the end, it is concluded that the emulation of EU postnational model by the Balkan countries enables the process of reconciliation. Hence, the Balkan states seems to be “forced” to cooperate with each other, in order to achieve their common objective – their full integration into the EU, which strongly confirms the role of the EU as an agent for reconciliation of the Balkans.

Denuclearization on NATO's Southern Front: Allied Reactions to Soviet Proposals, 1957–1963

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 197-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lykourgos Kourkouvelas
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
East European ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union and its East European allies sought to prevent the installation of U.S. nuclear missiles in Western Europe by embarking on a diplomatic “peace offensive” that included proposals for the creation of denuclearized zones in various geographical areas of Europe. This article considers how the NATO countries responded to these proposals. In the end, the Western allies rejected proposals for the denuclearization of the Balkans and other areas in Europe, but discussions within NATO's councils often proved complicated, especially regarding southern Europe. In the case of the 1957 Stoica proposal for the denuclearization of the Balkans, the leading NATO countries stepped back and let Turkey and Greece reject the proposal, but by 1963, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and other key allied countries as well as the NATO bureaucracy assumed a more active role in evaluating and ultimately rejecting the notion of denuclearization in the Mediterranean.

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