Contested Racial Imaginings of the Serbian Self and the Romani Other in Serbia’s Guča Trumpet Festival

Jelena Gligorijević

doi:10.3390/arts9020052

Abstract

In this article, I will address issues of race using the “Romani question” in Serbia’s Guča trumpet festival as a case study. I will specifically consider a selection of Guča-related themes pertinent to the question of race, while simultaneously discussing the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of this complicated concept vis-à-vis issues of national identity representation in post-Milošević Serbia. Informed by previous critical studies of race and popular music culture in South/Eastern Europe within the larger postcolonial paradigm of Balkanism, this work will seek to illustrate the ambiguous ways in which the racialization of the Serbian Self and the Romani Other is occurring in the Guča Festival alongside the country’s and region’s persistent denial of race. Using the above approaches, I will conduct a critical cultural analysis of selected racial issues in the festival with reference to eclectic sources, including more recent critical debates about race and racism in South/Eastern Europe within the broader context of postsocialist transition, EU integration, and globalization. My final argument will be that, despite strong evidence that a critical cultural analysis of the “Romani question” in Serbia’s Guča Festival calls for a transnational perspective, earlier Balkanist discourse on Serbia’s indeterminate position between West and East seems to remain analytically most helpful in pointing to the uncontested hegemony of Western/European white privilege and supremacy.

Highlights

In this article, I will explore the racial foundations of Serbian national identity in times of the country’s post-Milošević transition
It is precisely this elusiveness of race that has led critical cultural theorists to think of it as a category whose forms and meanings constantly shift across time and space
The previous analysis showed that the racialization of the Serbian Self and the Romani Other in the Guča Festival is fraught with ambiguities and contradictions

Summary

Introduction

I will explore the racial foundations of Serbian national identity in times of the country’s post-Milošević transition. I will critically consider a selection of Guča-related themes pertinent to the question of race, while simultaneously discussing the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of this complicated concept vis-à-vis issues of Serbia’s national identity representation. It is designed to address and shed light on the historical and geopolitical specificities of the Balkan region, including the post-2000 sociopolitical realities in Serbia It emphasizes the undiminished role of “Europe”, in all variety of its incarnations, as the region’s/Serbia’s most significant Other, in relation to whom members of the Balkan/Serb population variously position in their efforts to deal with what Goffman (1968). In Serbia’s case, the Balkan stigma, which pertains to racialized notions of cultural difference, is clearly constituted in relation to Westerners as “normals”, that is, as “those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue” As will be demonstrated below, the reason for the latter is that Guča-related discourses on cultural heritage preservation cut across conventional ideological divides in that they draw on the same essentialist quest for authenticity, albeit with different aesthetic–ideological motivations and outcomes (cf. Koziol 2008)

The Guča Trumpet Festival in Historical Perspective

The Racialization of Guča’s Kolo–Čoček Debate

The Racial Implications of the Perceived Americanization of Romani Čočeks

The Racial Imaginations of Romani Festival Participants

Concluding Remarks