‘A Belt of Large Dumplings’: The Definition of the Balkans

Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Nevena Daković

The aim of this paper is to map manifold notions of migrant cinema and its history, in other words, film narratives about migrations from, across, and to the Balkans. The analysis looks at broader Balkan cinema that features as the context for focusing the changes of the migration pattern from and to Belgrade. The paper takes Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying (Praktičan vodič kroz Beograd sa pevanjem i plakanjem, Bojan Vuletić, 2011) as its case study to show the recent reversal of migrant narratives in which the Balkans are the desired destination, in itself an exception to the rule. The analyses are based on the appropriated definition of migrant cinema and complemented with notions of inner exile and accented cinema.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 133-177
Author(s):  
Safet Bandžović ◽  

At the end of the 20th century, the perception of peoples and states on their own past changed profoundly in the Balkans as well, with major geopolitical changes. Its processing and instrumentalization are encouraged by the complex permeation of the global relationship between national and ideological forces and local ruling interests. Every political and ideological victory, "must find its legitimate stronghold in the past." The disintegration of the ideological paradigm and the Yugoslav state union was accompanied by a balancing of the past from the outside, in accordance with the interests of the time and dominant politics, the accelerated construction of new national identities, the outbreak of a "civil war between different memories", the reversal of consciousness. These processes in the post-Yugoslav countries, in "transitional historiography", along with the new "reduction of totality", led to "retraditionalization", to the problematic waves of historical revisionism especially related to the Second World War, the correction of the so-called historical injustices, normalization of collaborationism, nationalization and relativization of the notion of anti-fascism. National historiographies in these countries have made a turn from the former glorification of the People's Liberation Movement (NOP) to its relativization, as part of the general trend of radical "re-nationalization". None of them carried out such a "thorough confrontation with the anti-fascism" of the NOP as Serbia. Numerous historians, with the participation of parascientific formations, give legitimacy to constructions of devaluing the anti-fascist legacy and rehabilitating Quisling forces. The falsification of history has also led to the relativization of their responsibility at the expense of those who have in part confirmed themselves as anti-fascists. Revanchist historiography imposes alternative truths. There is a real consensus on the definition of "good" nationalism, which for many is "elementary patriotism". Various nationalist currents are portrayed as anti-fascist. The collaborationist forces defeated in 1945 became "misunderstood victims of historical destiny." Their actions are placed in the context of their anti-communism, promoted in reasonable national politics. Derogating from anti-fascism also led to "anti-anti-fascism". He relativizes the crimes of fascists and collaborators, re-evaluates victims and executioners. It is not common practice for "historical truths" to be written in parliaments and promulgated by law, as has happened in Serbia. Courts and parliaments cannot valorize someone’s historical role. Historical science can do that. Revisionism is based on selective forgetting and the construction of a "desirable history", it is "a reworking of the past carried by clear or covert intentions to justify narrower national or political goals." The obvious expression is "political culture in a society, that is, it speaks of the dominant political value orientations in it". Judicial rehabilitation is understood as an ideological and political measure of revision of history. A distinction should be made between the individual rehabilitation of innocent victims of persecution by the authorities after 1945 and a light revision of history. The political and ideological aspects of rehabilitation, with the support of the media and the pseudo-legal mechanism, include manipulating a number of topics to delegitimize the system that changed social, economic, political and national relations after 1945 - characteristic of monarchist Yugoslavia. In revisionist historiography, communists are treated as opponents of Serbian national interests ("red devils"), intruders in national history, and the socialist revolution as an excess. With the adoption of certain laws and the application of a whole arsenal of rhetorical means and concealment of a number of historical facts, the notion of Draža Mihailović's Chetnik movement in Ravna Gora was especially reworked, neglecting and relativizing his criminal practice, to make this "new anti-fascist" side a desirable "pre-communist ancestor". "authorities. This collaborationist movement is also relieved through anti-communism, it is marked as patriotic and anti-totalitarian. His rehabilitation in Serbia has multiple meanings and consequences in its social life, but also in regional relations.


Vojno delo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 189-209
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Gajić

Starting with the definition of the concept of strategic culture and its substantive extension and improvement, the paper examines the links between the geopolitical framework or the geopolitical determination of the state and its strategic culture, in this case - the Serbian state and the Serbian people. By observing the creation of the Serbian identity and the Serbian strategic culture from a historical perspective through the prism of the key geopolitical processes of "long duration" in the Balkans, we further study the specifics of the Serbian identity and the Serbian strategic culture in its contemporary major variants. The second part of the paper then examines the contemporary geopolitical processes in the Balkans and the position in which Serbia and the Serbian people are placed, as well as the perspectives to which they can lead. The final part of the paper, taking all this into account, looks at Serbian possibilities in contemporary geopolitical circumstances to achieve its vital general strategic goals that are in line with the basic features of the historically dominant Serbian strategic culture.


Author(s):  
Dragan Todorović

A multicultural society should possess the characteristics of a society in which different ethnic groups live together but with no interaction. The minority groups living therein are passively tolerated without being accepted by the majority group. An intercultural society should be defined as a society in which different groups live together and exchange their life experiences with mutual respect for their different styles of life and values. That is why a correct starting definition of interculturalism would be that interculturalism is a critique and an alternative to multiculturalism. It is possible for the members of different cultures to live close to each other and that is the most crucial characteristic of multicultural societies. An intercultural society represents a society in which we live and create not close to each other but with each other and for each other.Accordingly, the contemporary Balkan society is facing the process of its transition from the multicultural into the intercultural one, that is, the process of spreading and adopting the idea and practice of interculturalism in a multicultural community. More precisely, this implies the development of the concept of a cultural and educational policy that would foster appreciation of cultural diversity and lead to the creation of a society in which different cultures interpenetrate.At the end of the paper the measures of the public cultural politics of the Balkan countries aiming at improvement and advancement of the existing intercultural dialogue are summed up.


Author(s):  
José C. Carvajal López ◽  
Jelena Živković ◽  
Alkindi Aljawabra ◽  
Rim Lababidi

This text is a reflection about the development of Islamic heritage in three different peninsulas where Islam has played an important role in the past: Qatar, Iberia, and the Balkans. The selection of these three spaces responds to the experience and academic specialization of the authors. There is a necessary simplification of the themes discussed due to the wide amount of information that has been used in the text, which includes a wide variety of approaches from different regions, languages, and traditions of scholarship. The aim of this exercise is to offer a comparative perspective that shows the complications and chances inherent to the definition of Islamic heritage beyond the limits of given communities and territories.


Muzikologija ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 91-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Dumnic-Vilotijevic

Starting with Maria Todorova?s landmark study Imagining the Balkans (Todorova 1997), numerous authors have raised their voices against stereotypical images of the Balkans. Over twenty years after the publication of this book, the term ?the Balkans? seems to have lost some of its negative connotations related to wars in favour of characteristics with positive overtones, such as the Balkan peoples? joie-de-vivre and entertainment strongly related to music. The areal ethnomusicology drawing from fieldwork throughout the Balkan peninsula has been a fruitful topic for numerous local and foreign ethnomusicologists and the very term ?the Balkans? has raised a special interest in the ethnomusicological research of ?outsiders?, as well as in the music industry. This paper is written from the perspective of an ?insider? ethnomusicologist from the Balkans. I raise the question of the definition of the ?Balkan? popular music label and discuss its main structural characteristics. I offer a new possibility of (re)considering a specific musical genre of the region based on the research of urban folk music practices. I present characteristics of urban folk music practices from the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century in the countries of the Balkans, with special attention paid to their common aspects. Also, contemporary urban folk music, which is often criticized as a specific popular music form, is considered.


1966 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
W. W. Morgan

1. The definition of “normal” stars in spectral classification changes with time; at the time of the publication of theYerkes Spectral Atlasthe term “normal” was applied to stars whose spectra could be fitted smoothly into a two-dimensional array. Thus, at that time, weak-lined spectra (RR Lyrae and HD 140283) would have been considered peculiar. At the present time we would tend to classify such spectra as “normal”—in a more complicated classification scheme which would have a parameter varying with metallic-line intensity within a specific spectral subdivision.


1975 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 21-26

An ideal definition of a reference coordinate system should meet the following general requirements:1. It should be as conceptually simple as possible, so its philosophy is well understood by the users.2. It should imply as few physical assumptions as possible. Wherever they are necessary, such assumptions should be of a very general character and, in particular, they should not be dependent upon astronomical and geophysical detailed theories.3. It should suggest a materialization that is dynamically stable and is accessible to observations with the required accuracy.


1979 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 125-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Allen

No paper of this nature should begin without a definition of symbiotic stars. It was Paul Merrill who, borrowing on his botanical background, coined the termsymbioticto describe apparently single stellar systems which combine the TiO absorption of M giants (temperature regime ≲ 3500 K) with He II emission (temperature regime ≳ 100,000 K). He and Milton Humason had in 1932 first drawn attention to three such stars: AX Per, CI Cyg and RW Hya. At the conclusion of the Mount Wilson Ha emission survey nearly a dozen had been identified, and Z And had become their type star. The numbers slowly grew, as much because the definition widened to include lower-excitation specimens as because new examples of the original type were found. In 1970 Wackerling listed 30; this was the last compendium of symbiotic stars published.


Author(s):  
K. T. Tokuyasu

During the past investigations of immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in ultrathin frozen sections, we found that the degree of negative staining required to delineate u1trastructural details was often too dense for the recognition of ferritin particles. The quality of positive staining of ultrathin frozen sections, on the other hand, has generally been far inferior to that attainable in conventional plastic embedded sections, particularly in the definition of membranes. As we discussed before, a main cause of this difficulty seemed to be the vulnerability of frozen sections to the damaging effects of air-water surface tension at the time of drying of the sections.Indeed, we found that the quality of positive staining is greatly improved when positively stained frozen sections are protected against the effects of surface tension by embedding them in thin layers of mechanically stable materials at the time of drying (unpublished).


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