2 On the Privilege of the Peripheral Point of View: A Beginner’s Guide to the Study and Practice of Balkanism

Abstract

Investigations of intertwining symbolic and political power relations between the West and the Balkans have, over the last twenty years been spearheaded by a group of authors in an area of study that may, in the absence of a fixed syntagm, be called a critique of Balkanism . The collapse of social order after the fall of socialism and the wars which ensued in territory of the former Yugoslavia contributed to the long-term generalized crisis of social identities and some of the most important works critiquing Balkanism were produced at a time when a set of social meanings was being displaced and replaced in rapid succession. One of the intrinsic paradoxes in the critique of Balkanism is that some of its key texts were first published in English and outside the region whose many academic communities were redirected in the 1990s towards international conferences and informal exchanges of their published work. Keywords: academic communities; Balkanism; fixed syntagm; informal exchanges; international conferences; intrinsic paradoxes; political power; Yugoslavia