Maria Todorova Research Articles

Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou, and Stefan Troebst, editors.Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe.

Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou, and Stefan Troebst, editors.<i>Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe</i>.

Orientalism, Balkanism and the Western Viewpoint in the Context of Former Yugoslavia

This research paper examines the role of the Orientalist and Balkanist discourse in the Former Yugoslavia with a particular focus on Albanians. Here, Western Orientalist and Balkanist stereotypes of the Former Yugoslavia are examined arguing that the Orientalism and Balkanism of people living in the Former Yugoslavia is and was viewed differently from the standard by the West and by the people living in the Former Yugoslavia in the way how they perceive each other. The first part of this research paper treats the Orientalism and Balkanism in the context of people living in the Former Yugoslavia, in general.The second part of this research paper analyzes the case study of the application of the Orientalist and Balkanist theoretical lenses on one of the nations living in the Former Yugoslavia, namely Albanians. Here, some explorations and thoughts are provided on how Albanians define themselves and how they were perceived by the South Slavic majority living in the Former Yugoslavia.There are three authors and, subsequently, three seminal works that shall serve as pillars of this theoretical analysis: concepts of Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” Bakic-Hayden’s theories on Orientalist variations and nesting Orientalism, and Maria Todorova’s ground-breaking analysis of the external practices of Balkans representation. These provide a useful theoretical framework through which to explore the distribution of the Orientalist and Balkanist discourses in Former Yugoslavia.

On Balkanism and Orientalism: undifferentiated patterns of perception in literary and critical representations of Eastern Europe

This paper explores the extent to which Eastern Europe has been historically subject to a process of ‘othering’ in the Western literary imagination; and how far the Western practice of ‘Balkanism’ can be considered congruous with the wider practice of ‘Orientalism’ throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first. Drawing on theoretical work by Vesna Goldsworthy and Maria Todorova, it shows that in both fiction and literary scholarship Western writers have been unable fully to conceptualise Eastern Europe, with the result that their fictional portrayals are evasive and indistinct and their literary analysis unable to define a clear object. Malcolm Bradbury's novel Rates of Exchange (1983), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995) and Jim Crace's Six (2003) are explored alongside Edward Said's Beginnings and Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious to show that this under-conceptualisation has continued to dominate literary representations of Eastern Europe during the late- and post-Cold War periods, thereby subjecting Said and Jameson to a rigorous critique of their own methods with regard to the Western practice of ‘Balkanism’ of which they are uncritical.

Balkan Immigrant Workers as Slovenian Victimized Heroes

This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the “Balkan” in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate “other” in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure's characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined as Balkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans.

Balkan Immigrant Workers as Slovenian Victimized Heroes

This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the “Balkan” in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate “other” in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure's characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined asBalkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans.

Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille

Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille

Biondich, Mark. The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878 (review)

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 564 Biondich, Mark. The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878. Zones of Violence. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2011. xv + 384 pp. Maps. Tables. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£65.00. Since the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s scholars have dedicated a considerable amount of effort in countering the common perceptions of a certain Balkan exceptionalism and a particular predisposition to violence. Theories and methods from a range of disciplines have been utilized both to deconstruct the othering discourses that inform such myths — Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997) remains the classic text in this field — and to offer alterative explanations as to the causes of violence in the region. It is within this tradition that Mark Biondich’s book falls. It approaches the task with the historian’s tools, producing a serious survey of the most violent chapters of modern Balkan history. In less than three hundred pages the book covers an impressive amount of data, offering quick summaries of long tracts of Balkan history that will be very helpful to the non-specialists, along with focused studies of key violent episodes of Balkan history. It is all informed by an impressive bibliography that is remarkably diverse, relevant and up to date. Biondich has produced the new essential reference work on the history of violence in the Balkans. As with all stereotypes, the image of the violent Balkans relies on vagueness and elusiveness as to the origins, aims and forms of violence, but Biondich does not tackle this methodological challenge head on. ‘Revolution, war and political violence’ could mean many things. Soon, however, it becomes clear that the author is really focused on the link between violence and nationalism, on which he puts all his analytical attention. And in this he is excellent: detailed and balanced, offering long passages of creative synthesis, avoiding any sort of deterministic linearities, looking persistently for explanations that are time and space specific, and always in dialogue with his extensive bibliography. The most original sections of the book are on this nationalist-related theme: on the Macedonian Question at the turn of the twentieth century (pp. 63– 75), the treatment of minorities and the rise of the fascist ‘New Right’ in the interwar (pp. 98–130), the civil war in Yugoslavia during the Second World War (pp. 130–49), the minority policies of the Cold War Communist states (pp. 159–80) and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. It is on the latter that the author offers his most elaborate analysis on the forms and motives of violence (pp. 215–37). Balkan modernities — their roots, adaptations and effects — are an old scholarly preoccupation. At least since John Allcock’s Explaining Yugoslavia (London,2000)modernityhasbeenalsocentralinthemorefocuseddiscussions on the origins and particularities of violence in the region. It is in the same REVIEWS 565 pool where Biondich looks for his overarching argument. His model focuses on the long, and frequently ‘abortive’, modernization process undergone by the region, starting from the early national independence wars of the nineteenth century and going all the way to the recent crises in Yugoslavia. Seen through this overstretched, but not unappealing, explanatory framework, the wars of the 1990s were ‘in actual fact the culmination of a process of state-building that had been initiated in the nineteenth century’ (p. 195). The key link here is the slightly vague concept of the ‘modernizing’, ‘nationalizing state’ (pp. vi) and its elites, which opt for violence always as a calculated choice in order to establish and affirm their authority. The book charts how again and again, in conflict after conflict, local actors made specific choices that led to specific forms and acts of violence. Despite its relativizing tendencies, Biondich’s argument leaves Balkan exceptionalism without any oxygen on which to breathe, political choice being the author’s answer to the stereotype of primordial instincts. Although the nebulous spectre of ‘Europe’ is never far away (see p. 156), nonBalkan players have a secondary role in this story. They are present mainly diplomatically, while the foreign occupation regimes of the two World Wars receiveonlyabriefmention.Butthisisanoddomission.Balkanexceptionalism cannot be understood outside the European comparative framework on which it...

Maria Todorova’s Bones of contention. The living archive of Vasil Levski and the making of Bulgaria’s national hero (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press: 2009). A Comment

Maria Todorova’s Bones of contention. The living archive of Vasil Levski and the making of Bulgaria’s national hero (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press: 2009). A Comment

Maria Todorova’s Bones of contention. The living archive of Vasil Levski and the making of Bulgaria’s national hero (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press: 2009). A Comment

Maria Todorova’s Bones of contention. The living archive of Vasil Levski and the making of Bulgaria’s national hero (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press: 2009). A Comment

Boundaries and Crossings: Bridging the Gap of Fragmented Identity in Ivo Andrić’s Prose

Boundaries and Crossings:Bridging the Gap of Fragmented Identity in Ivo Andrić’s Prose Radmila J. Gorup Dictionaries give several definitions for the words “boundary” and “border,” all suggesting a division or margin, the other side of something: a limit. Throughout history, crucial boundaries were often created not only on geo graphical maps, but also in the minds of people. These constructed boundaries shift with time, but their symbolic significance is often hard to erase. In his 1924 dissertation, Ivo Andrić invokes such a division caused by the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans: So it came about that down the middle of the South Slavic lands a line was etched. … This dividing wall split in two the Serbo-Croatian ra cial and linguistic complex, and its shadow, where four centuries of ghastly history were played out, was to lie heavy on the landscape to either side into the far distant future.1 Complex divisions run deep within the Balkans and Andrić’s native Bosnia, but also in the relationship between the East and the West, all results of legacies of empires that dominated the region in the past. This fascinating area has been an enduring inspiration for the writer and served as a setting for most of his narratives, whose underlying theme was to reveal these lines of separa tion and seek to bridge the trauma caused by them. The famed East-West opposition invoked by Andrić refers to societies that co-exist side by side but are juxtaposed in the political, religious, and cultural senses. Bosnia, which can be seen as a microcosm of the former Yu goslavia and perhaps the whole of the Balkans, is a place where citizens are divided by religion: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Islamic, and Jewish; cultural traditions: [End Page 1] Byzantine, Ottoman, and central East European; as well as other minor attributes. Several frameworks have been advanced for understanding the East-West division, the most famous being the theory of Orientalism advanced by Ed ward Said, according to which the West constructed the Orient in order to de fine itself against it with the intention of dominating and conquering it, both materially and spiritually.2 Milica Bakić-Hayden introduced the concept of “nestling Orientalisms” as a structural variant of Orientalism according to which each Balkan imagined community identified itself with the West and located its boundaries beyond its actual physical borders.3 In her seminal work Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova modifies Said’s model to fit the Balkans’ historical and geographical realities. Not only the Orient, but also the Balkans were constructed as Europe’s “other,” even though they were a geographical part of it. For Todorova, the Balkan alterity, which she calls “Balkanisms,” is similar, but not identical, to that of Said’s Orientalisms.4 Several past colonial legacies have produced deep fissures in the territory of the Balkans, but, according to Todorova, the 500-year Ottoman legacy is proving to be the most enduring. This legacy can be said to have the strongest influence on the Western perception of the region, and it has been invoked in the creation of the most recent stereotypes about the Balkans as a region of primitivism and barbarity in the 1990s. Seemingly different, all these approaches treat the West as the standard according to which the others are defined. The West invented not only the Orient, but also the other others, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, which are seen as part of a broader Oriental other. Tomislav Z. Longinović adds to this discussion by questioning whether the above models could account for the culture created by Ottoman-Balkan juxtaposition. He points out that Said’s concept of Orientalism was based on the premise of European domination of the East, while the Balkan types of Orientalisms were the result of a reversed situation in which an Eastern power colonized European territory in order to dominate and restructure it.5 [End Page 2] This idea of the borderline has been built into the creation of Andrić’s Orientalisms first elaborated in his Ph.D. dissertation, in which he blames the Ottoman legacy for the divisions and conflicts in Bosnia as well as the re gion’s...

Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero. By Maria Todorova. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. Pp. xxii+600. $55.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero. By Maria Todorova. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. Pp. xxii+600. $55.00.R. J. CramptonR. J. CramptonOxford University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 83, Number 2June 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659194 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Stefan Troebst Maria Todorova’s Bones of contention. The living archive of Vasil Levski and the making of Bulgaria’s national hero (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press: 2009). A Comment, Southeastern Europe 36, no.22 (Jan 2012): 256–263.https://doi.org/10.1163/187633312X642149Maria Todorova A Response to Ivaylo Ditchev’s and Stefan Troebst’s Comments on Bones of contention. The living archive of Vasil Levski and the making of Bulgaria’s national hero (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press: 2009), Southeastern Europe 36, no.22 (Jan 2012): 264–272.https://doi.org/10.1163/187633312X642158

The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring. By Paulina Bren. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 264p. $19.75. - Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation. Edited by Maria Todorova. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2010. 450p. $25.00.

The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring. By Paulina Bren. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 264p. $19.75. - Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation. Edited by Maria Todorova. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2010. 450p. $25.00.

Postcolonial Empire? Russian Orientologists and the Politics of Knowledge in Late Imperial Russia

385 Ab Imperio, 3/2011 Sergei GLEBOV POSTCOLONIAL EMPIRE? RUSSIAN ORIENTOLOGISTS AND THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA In January 1923, with less than a year of his life left, Vladimir Lenin felt compelled to revisit the most crucial question of the history of the Russian Revolution. As most Social Democrats outside of the Bolshevik circle (and some within it) pointed out Russia’s unpreparedness for the socialist transformation , Lenin lashed out at his critics for their “utter inability” to grasp variations and mutations in the “general laws of history.” These critics, Lenin charged, were dismally pedantic, for “it has not even occurred to them that because Russia stands on the borderline between civilized countries and the countries which this war has for the first time definitely brought into the orbit of civilization – all the Oriental, non-European countries – she could and was, indeed, bound to reveal certain distinguishing features; although these, of course, are in keeping with the general line of world development, they distinguish her revolution from those which took place in the West European countries and introduce certain partial innovations as the revolution moves on to the countries of the East.”1 Although it is tempting to see Lenin’s take as a sign of his extraordinary flexibility in Marxist theory alone, the Communist state founder – who grew up in the startling ethnic and cultural mix 1 V. I. Lenin. Our Revolution (A Propos N. Sukhanov’s Notes) // Collected Works. Vol. 33. Moscow, 1965. Pp. 478-479. 386 Sergei Glebov, Postcolonial Empire? of the Volga region – revealed a certain lasting ambivalence about Russia’s place on the mental map of civilizations. Lenin’s lashing out at “pedantry” might also turn out helpful in the current discussions of Russian “Orientalism.” Scholars of the Russian Empire and the USSR began exploring the issue in the 1990s in the context of expanding studies of the imperial, multiethnic, and multiconfessional past of the Russian Empire. Much of the discussion, following the structural definitions and understanding of “empire” as a range of national groups dominated by a “metropole” on the one hand, and the very well-established mode of thinking about Russia vis-à-vis “the West” on the other, focused on how Russian representations of “Eastern” peoples compared to largely abstract “European” ones.2 The changing frame of the discussion and the emergence of new imperial history with its more nuanced and dynamic understanding of “empire” problematized the dichotomies of both the “Orientalism” itself and its Russian variations. Innovative studies of the production of knowledge in the Russian imperial context demonstrated how crucial categories of Western “cultural domination,” such as race, functioned as rally points for liberal and progressive scholars generally opposed to the current political regime yet committed to a project of inventing the imperial racial “mixed type.”3 Francine Hirsch showed still another instance of the imperial situation : Russian imperial ethnographers enthusiastically participated in the project of national construction among the many peoples of the USSR as the Russian Empire was reinvented as the first socialist “federation” of nations.4 2 Daniel Brower, Edward Lazzerini (Eds.). Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917. Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1997; Catherine B. Clay. Russian Ethnographers in the Service of Empire, 1856–1862 // Slavic Review. 1995. No. 1. Pp. 45-61; Nathaniel Knight. Grigor’ev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire? // Slavic Review. 2000. No. 59. N. 1. Pp. 74-100; Adib Khalid. Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism; N. Knight. On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid; Maria Todorova. Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution on the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid // Kritika. 2000. Vol. 1. No. 4. Pp. 691-728; David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. A Subtle Matter – Orientalism; Alexander Etkind. The Saved Man’s Burden, or the Inner Colonization of Russia; Nathaniel Knight. Was Russia Its Own Orient? Reflections on the Contributions of Etkind and Schimmelpenninck on the Debate on Orientalism; Elena Campbell. On the Question of Orientalism in Russia (in the second half of the 19th–early 20th centuries) //Ab Imperio. 2002. No. 1. Pp. 239-311. See also Etkind. Inner Colonization : Russia’s...

L'Europa sudorientale e la storia comparata europea

South-eastern Europe and comparative European history suggests new research perspectives on Southeast European history, envisaging it as a comprehensive part of European history. The debate about mental map of the as negative alter ego of West (Maria Todorova), on one hand, and construction of Balkans as a historical space sui generis (Holm Sundhaussen), on other, provide framework for reflections presented here. The article proposes following methodological lines for inclusion of Balkans in European history writing: 1) research in social history, based on solid empirical evidence, informed by cultural history, and embedded in European history by including comparison, transfer, and entanglement; 2) research that focuses on perspectives of actors, as opposed to hitherto dominant research on structures and collectives; 3) research that enquires into life worlds, i.e. milieu, networks, and other micro-situations, that make possible a more thorough examination of how, in given social contexts, meaning was conferred and constructed.

“Yugoslavia in 1989 and after”: a comment

V.P. (Chip) Gagnon, Jr. (2004, 2010) has provided a useful corrective to what he has called the “Myth of Ethnic War,” the notion that what was Yugoslavia was torn apart by primeval communal hatreds. He is not alone in this. Maria Todorova's variation on Edward Said's “Orientalism” take on the same question, and edited volumes put together by Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić and by Raymond Detrez and Pieter Plas have also attacked the problem posed when public intellectuals and politicians paint a crude caricature of Balkan history. The readers of this journal no doubt have their own favorites when it comes to the sport of bashing this particular myth.

Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero. By Maria Todorova. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. xxi, 600 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Plates. Photographs. $55.00, hard bound.

Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria's National Hero. By Maria Todorova. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. xxi, 600 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Plates. Photographs. $55.00, hard bound. - Volume 69 Issue 4

The Balkans: Radical Conservatism and Desire

This essay focuses on Balkan discourse geography as a hidden contingency of the intellectual work of Slavoj Žižek and Julia Kristeva. It takes into account the extent to which their self-proclaimed cosmopolitanism and universalism reflect disidentification with their Balkan origins. This disidentification alerts one to the unacknowledged centrality of Kristeva's and Žižek's Balkan origins to their writing about the region, and it also points to the Balkanist character of their intellectual production. I emphasize the discourse geography of the Balkans—particularly Maria Todorova's articulation of “Balkanism”—as a dissonant infrastructure to the transcendent, ahistorical quality of Kristeva's and Žižek's work. Antonio Gramsci's incorporation of his origins in Sardinia into his intellectual and political praxis provides a contrapuntal reading of Kristeva's and Žižek's own psychoanalytically mediated decoupling of themselves from their Balkan origins and their own split subject positions. The empirical history of human solidarity formalized in the Marxist philosophy of class struggle and actualized in Gramsci's philosophy of praxis challenged not only Cartesian subjectivity as pure cogito but also the Cartesian elevation of abstraction over the senses. In contrast, Kristeva's and Žižek's local histories are expressed through disidentification and self-Orientalization as a constitutive gesture of subaltern intellectual labor. Instead of exploring geopolitical ambiguity for the sake of the intellectuality of human solidarity, they paradoxically reproduce in their discourse the very conditions they seek to escape.

Imagining the Balkans, Imagining Germany: Intellectual Journeys to Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s

Mitten in Europa, in Hor- und Sichtweite von Italien, Osterreich und Griechenland findet ein Krieg statt [...] -Peter Schneider, Bosnien 57 The question of exact location of Yugoslavia was hotly debated in Germany during 1990s. If, for example, Sarajevo was in as writer Peter Schneider insisted in citation above, then this was a war demanding intervention. More often than not, however, one or all warring parties were described as being Balkan, reducing conflict to yet another war driven by region's supposedly characteristic, deeply rooted hatred between various ethnic groups which would render intervention fruitless. Often, two toponyms were used interchangeably allowing for more complex positionings of self and other. This article concerns itself with of such imaginary cartographies in accounts of four journeys to region published in German media. It explores ways in which authors draw borders between a European self, more often than not defined as civilized, democratic, and tolerant, and a Balkan other, generally defined as primitive, violent, and racist. At same time, this debate never truly concerned itself with identities, Western or otherwise, but rather constituted a way of exploring complex renegotiation of identities in contemporary Germany. Germany itself was undergoing a dramatic transformation process coping with integration of eastern Germany, revival of neo-Nazi politics, and increased racism against migrants. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Germans preferred to turn their attentions to former Yugoslavia, where transformation process had sparked extreme nationalism and racism leading to disintegration of region. This study examines ways in which in/exclusion in Europe is established through representation of various Yugoslav regions via mapping of its boundaries and description (or lack thereof) of its inhabitants and their culture. At same time, such descriptions of cultural affinities shared between region in question and traveler's country of origin, usually generalized as West or Europe, is an important device in situating traveler within his own intellectual culture, while at same time reinforcing superiority of certain values over others. Eastern Europe's role in affirming true Europeanness of Western Europe has been clearly shown by Larry Wolff who argued that notion of Eastern Europe as shadowed lands of backwardness, even barbarism was invented in Enlightenment as a complement to Europe's civilization, a term appropriated by Europe to describe itself (4). While this construct survived into 20th century, it received its strongest possible reinforcement through Iron Curtain which followed contours of Enlightenment division. Ultimately, success of Cold War disguised the fact that division of Europe was also an ongoing work of intellectual artifice and cultural construction (Wolff 370). In recent years, scholarly attention has been directed at study of Balkans and discourses at work both within and outside region. In her path-breaking study Imagining Balkans, Maria Todorova makes a convincing case for existence of a distinct discourse of balkanism which clearly delineates between former Ottoman territories and rest of Europe. While she insists on existence of a concrete entity, historically shaped by Ottoman rule, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has observed that the Balkans are always somewhere else (3). This idea has been developed more fully by Bakic-Hayden who coined expression nesting orientalisms to express gradation of Orients', between Europe and Balkans, but also between states themselves. The discourse is therefore appropriated both inside and outside of Balkans to construct difference and sameness. …

Hyperrealizing “Borat” with the Map of the European “Other”

Sacha Baron Cohen maps a cultural background for his “Borat” character by creating a hyperreal Kazakhstan that is based, nonetheless, on gradations of a “real,” yet Orientalized, eastern Europe and Balkan region. Having no cultural connections to its actual Central Asian namesake, “Borat's Kazakhstan” is a Baudrillardian simulacrum because, for a western filmgoer, it essentially replaces the original. Scratching beneath the surface, however, we see that Baron Cohen composes his clown-journalist using exotic, yet familiar, “realities” from the “Other” in Europe's backyard. Using Edward Said's Orientalism (along with Milica Bakić-Hayden's and Maria Todorova's modifications of the idea), Dickie Wallace describes how this discursive bricolage of eastern European and Balkan music, language, folkloristic rituals, and archetypes, as well as continual tabu violations and commonsensical acceptance of violence, gives the character the sharp parodic elements that have had western audiences laughing even while wincing as they recognize themselves in this “Other.“

Russia in a Box: Art and Identity in an Age of Revolution by Andrew L. Jenks (review)

576 SEER, 85, 3, JULY 2OO7 rapidly and unevenly across the central and eastern Balkans, Norris goes on to interpret the identity anxieties provoked by this rapid transformation. His original and convincing reading of B. Stankovic's novel Tainted Blood goes against the current of previous interpretations which had frozen an image of Stankovic as nostalgic defender of 'the old ways'. Indeed, Norris shows that Stankovic's novel can be read as a storyofmodernization which is always under the threat of barbarity and the 'gap'. The chapter on the representations of city lifeand modern identityends with an interpretation of Borisav Pekic's Pilgrimageof Arsenije Njegovan, (recendy published as TheHouses of Belgrade by Northwestern University Press). Haunted by wars and an almost regular, periodic cycle of destruction, in addition to a revolution at the end ofWorld War Two, Belgrade was never permitted to develop fully,and the rural has remained a threat. That iswhy the same issues of identity and modernity lie at the core ofmost recent literature and films, such as Vladimir Arsenije vie's novel In the Hold, Slobodan Selenic's Premeditated Murder, or Kusturica's Underground. War always means a return to barbarism. David Norris's book In the Wake of the BalkanMyth: Questions ofIdentityand Modernitywould fitneady on a bookshelf between Maria Todorova's Inventing the Balkans and Vesna Goldsworthy's Inventing Ruritania. It is a valuable con tribution to the same set of issues, all themore so for reversing widely-held perspectives and shedding light on the Balkan's 'writing back' with much original interpretation, careful and convincing analyses and a sensitivity for textual details. School ofSlavonic andEast European Studies Zoran Milutinovic University CollegeLondon Jenks, Andrew L. Russia ina Box: Art and IdentityinanAge of Revolution. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2005. ix + 264 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $38.00. This study charts the transformation of the peasant artists of the village of Palekh from icon painters inTsarist Russia to secular folk artists in the Soviet era, in the context of 'a comprehensive exploration of Russian national identity across several historical epochs' (p. 5). Palekh art as a source of Russian tradition was 'discovered' by none other thanGoethe in 1814. Produced by serfs, many ofwhom made fortunes (notably, the Safonovs), it satisfied an elite demand for Russian motifs in Orthodox culture promoted by Nicholas I's Official Nationality and a bur geoning interest in Russian history and collecting old icons. In the later nineteenth century, idealization of Palekh rested on notions of sacred labour, natural materials, national religion and living folk tradition (p. 15),akin to the precepts underpinning arts and crafts movements in the West. Intellectuals such as V. P. Bezobrazov, G. D. Filimonov, V. T. Georgievskii and N. Kondakov discovered and sponsored the 'village academy' and sought to 'save' icon painting from mechanization, rooted in romantic beliefs about the artists' 'real, genuine, national' way of life (p. 31). (Others denigrated them REVIEWS 577 as 'god-daubers' or worse.) Palekh art was encouraged by such bodies as Nicholas IF sCommittee for theTutelage ofRussian Icon Painting (1901) and its associated (unsuccessful) school. The state sought to control production under the idealized notion of collective endeavour, but clashed with market forces, reflecting the regime's own dilemma over modernization and preser vation. Banning machine-made icons, for example, would have ruined artists elsewhere. By the 1917Revolution the workshops were on the verge of collapse. However, the lack of a clear Bolshevik party line on the nature of Socialist culture and the role of ethnic identityallowed all manner of forms to emerge, including Palekh 'folksiness' (skazochnost). A romanticized vision of pre industrial ruralRussia integratedwith Soviet motifs, national in form, socialist in content ? and secular. From 1922, under the inspiration of the artists A. Glazunov and I. Golikov, Palekh switched itsproduction from icons to the familiar black-backgrounded lacquer boxes that foreigners snapped up. Golikov's most successful subjectwas The Battle,which was 'inspired by hatred of the tsaristorder' (p. 85), while utilizing pre-revolutionary style and motifs. The clich? is that saintswere transformed intoRed Army fighters,but Soviet ization was not dominant: stylized creatures, plants and rocks transferred direcdy from sacred to secular ground, as did highlighting...