Balkan Identities PDF Download

Author: Maria Todorova
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814782798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Balkan Identities brings together historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars all working under the shared conviction that the only way to overcome history is to intimately understand it. The contributors of Balkan Identities focus on historical memory, collective national memory, and the political manipulation of national identities. They refine our understanding of memory and identity in general and explore and assess the significance of particular manifestations of Balkan national identities and national memories in the region. The essays in Balkan Identities grapple with three major problems: the construction of historical memory, sites of national memory, and the mobilization of national identities. While most essays focus on a single country (e.g. Croatia, Romania, Turkey, Cyprus, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia), they are in dialogue with each other and share an opposition to rigid isolationist identities. Illuminating and challenging, Balkan Identities demonstrates the ever-changing nature of a troubled and culturally vibrant region.

Author: Marii͡a Nikolaeva Todorova
Publisher: C. HURST & CO. PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9781850657156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Four main themes are concentrated on in this text, the construction of historical memories; the sites of national memory; the transmission of national memory; and the mobilisation of national identities.

Author: Douglass W. Bailey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134607083
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Bailey's volume fills the gap that existed for an archaeology of the Balkans and will be required reading for anyone studying the Neolithic, Copper and early Bronze Ages of Eastern Europe.

Author: Dimitris Tziovas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351932187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Greece and the Balkans explores the cultural relationships between Greece and other Balkan countries in the domains of language, literature, thought, translation, and music, and examines issues of identity and perception among the Balkan peoples themselves. The essays bring together scholars from across a range of disciplines: historians, anthropologists, linguists and musicologists with specialists on literature, translation, the history of ideas and religion. By raising issues of cultural hybridity, and nationalist or pre-nationalist interpretations of culture and history it lays claim to a place in the context of studies on nationalism and post-colonialism. Greece and the Balkans also contributes to a recognition of the Balkans as a site, like some postcolonial ones, where identities have become fused, orientalism and eurocentrism blurred and where religion and modernity clashed and co-existed. By approaching cultural encounters between Greece and the Balkans from a fresh and informed perspective, it makes a substantial contribution to the study of a rather neglected aspect in the history of a region which has suffered in the past from narrow-minded, nationalistic arguments.

Author: Thanos Veremis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786731053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The history of the Balkans has been a distillation of the great and terrible themes of 20th century history-the rise of nationalism, communism, fascism, genocide, identity and war. Written by one of the leading historians of the region, this is a new interpretation of that history, focusing on the uses and legacies of nationalism in the Balkan region. In particular, Professor Veremis analyses the influence of the West-from the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise and collapse of Yugoslavia. Throughout the state-building process of Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria and later, Albania, the West provided legal, administrative and political prototypes to areas bedevilled by competing irredentist claims. At a time when Slovenia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Croatia have become full members of the EU, yet some orphans of the Communist past are facing domestic difficulties, A Modern History of the Balkans seeks to provide an important historical context to the current problems of nationalism and identity in the Balkans.

Author: Ahmet Erdi Ozturk
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474474713
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book examines Turkey’s ethno-religious activism and power-related political strategies in the Balkans between 2002 and 2020, the period under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), to determine the scopes of its activities in the region.
Ahmet Erdi Öztürk illuminates an often-neglected aspect of Turkey’s relations with its Balkan neighbours that emerged as a result of the much discussed ‘authoritarian turn’ – a broader shift in Turkish domestic and foreign policy from a realist-secular to a Sunni Islamic orientation with ethno-nationalist policies.
Öztürk draws on personal testimonies given by both Turkish and non-Turkish, Muslim and non-Muslim interviewees in three country cases: Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Albania. The findings shed light on contemporary issues surrounding the continuous redefinition of Turkish secularism under the AKP rule and the emergence of a new Muslim elite in Turkey.

Author: Maja Gori
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131737746X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Spatial variation and patterning in the distribution of artefacts are topics of fundamental significance in Balkan archaeology. For decades, archaeologists have classified spatial clusters of artefacts into discrete “cultures”, which have been conventionally treated as bound entities and equated with past social or ethnic groups. This timely volume fulfils the need for an up-to-date and theoretically informed dialogue on group identity in Balkan prehistory. Thirteen case studies covering the beginning of the Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age and written by archaeologists conducting fieldwork in the region, as well as by ethnologists with a research focus on material culture and identity, provide a robust foundation for exploring these issues. Bringing together the latest research, with a particular intentional focus on the central and western Balkans, this collection offers original perspectives on Balkan prehistory with relevance to the neighbouring regions of Eastern and Central Europe, the Mediterranean and Anatolia. Balkan Dialogues challenges long-established interpretations in the field and provides a new, contextualised reading of the archaeological record of this region.

Author: D. Norris
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230286534
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book focuses on issues concerning identity in terms of Balkan and non-Balkan cultures, and examines questions of modernity and the ever-present dread of primitivism which is highlighted in certain types of narratives. David A. Norris examines the emergence and development of the term 'Balkan' itself, textual representations of the region, and negative imagery from the perspective of Balkan authors and in Western literature.

Author: Maria Couroucli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134800754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nations have voiced claims about their past by establishing ’proof’ of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders.

Author: Margit Rohringer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527553965
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This book explores historical discourses on the various forms of identity production in film that are based on memory and shows how these narratives get 'mediated' by (documentary) film. Most films about the Balkans produced in the last two decades were in fact made in response to immediate concerns about the economic crises and political conflicts that struck the region during the 1990s. These new forms of communication about history mostly show a rather self-critical approach. The book's case studies give the reader a clear idea of how processes informing identity formations are directly launched and later on maintained in peoples' real and everyday lives. Thus, the case studies' principal objective is to integrate the study of 'private space' with existing macro-debates in politics as well as with dominant discourses within the academic community. The included case studies focus on several topics, i.e. migration, the reproduction and protection of personal as well as collective identities in post-socialist societies, revolutionary processes towards the official end of the Cold War, the (re-)creation of politically constructed narratives, generational conflicts in the post-socialist period, and the fate of women during the war. The multifaceted view of the region under focus in this study shows that common grounds and differences co-exist in the Balkan space, be it on a cultural, economic, social or (geo)-political level. Apart from the field of film studies, this work is a powerful contribution to cultural history as well as to the growing field of visual history.