Trusted Tales: Creating Authenticity in Literary Representations from Ex-Yugoslavia

This research deals with questions of authority and authenticity and how they are expressed, constructed, and appropriated within the Anglophone book market. It considers the body of literature written about ex-Yugoslavia since the 1990s Balkan conflicts by exiled writers from the region which has entered the international literary canon. Books’ routes from original publishers into English translation are discussed through practices of trust, one of the crucial social devices underpinning their exchange. Within these cross-cultural processes, the role of cultural brokers is crucial. Symbolic and cultural resources are specifically mobilised through their powerful author brands. By exploring authenticity in the context of book publishing, I further look at how ideas and practices of community are employed and negotiated by writers and those who promote their books. My field is multi-sited and fluid, reflecting how different individual and national positions are enacted and performed through strategies ranging from unconscious dispositions to deliberate intentions. This research thus brings together ideas of the author as an authentic, representative voice together with exile as a position that grants them a new lease of relevancy in the post-socialist context. Although ex-Yugoslav books occupy a ‘high end’ niche of the UK market, constrained by commercial as well as political, cultural, and institutional forces, in public discourse ideas of the ‘free market’ and ‘free speech’ are mobilised to produce various types of modernisation narratives. The (post)socialist production of literature is perceived as having to ‘evolve’ into a capitalist model: this would allow not only healthy competition and consumer choice but guarantee an individual writer ‘free speech’ as a basic human right. Therefore, the most general question this research raises is what kind of foreign literature gets translated into English, under what socio-cultural conditions and which politics of representation it serves within the project of world literature

Trusted tales : creating authenticity in literary representations from ex-Yugoslavia

This research deals with questions of authority and authenticity and how they are expressed, constructed, and appropriated within the Anglophone book market. It considers the body of literature written about ex-Yugoslavia since the 1990s Balkan conflicts by exiled writers from the region which has entered the international literary canon. Books’ routes from original publishers into English translation are discussed through practices of trust, one of the crucial social devices underpinning their exchange. Within these cross-cultural processes, the role of cultural brokers is crucial. Symbolic and cultural resources are specifically mobilised through their powerful author brands. By exploring authenticity in the context of book publishing, I further look at how ideas and practices of community are employed and negotiated by writers and those who promote their books. My field is multi-sited and fluid, reflecting how different individual and national positions are enacted and performed through strategies ranging from unconscious dispositions to deliberate intentions. This research thus brings together ideas of the author as an authentic, representative voice together with exile as a position that grants them a new lease of relevancy in the post-socialist context. Although ex-Yugoslav books occupy a ‘high end’ niche of the UK market, constrained by commercial as well as political, cultural, and institutional forces, in public discourse ideas of the ‘free market’ and ‘free speech’ are mobilised to produce various types of modernisation narratives. The (post)socialist production of literature is perceived as having to ‘evolve’ into a capitalist model: this would allow not only healthy competition and consumer choice but guarantee an individual writer ‘free speech’ as a basic human right. Therefore, the most general question this research raises is what kind of foreign literature gets translated into English, under what socio-cultural conditions and which politics of representation it serves within the project of world literature.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Big Nations\u27 Literature and Small Nations\u27 Sociology

Ovaj se rad bavi književnicima kao kulturnim posrednicima u kontekstu svjetske književnosti. Vinjete s književnih događaja pokazuju da je ono što se danas podrazumijeva pod svjetskom književnošću fikcija iz zemalja Trećeg svijeta prevedena na engleski jezik, koju uglavnom pišu emigrantski pisci, a konzumiraju metropolski čitatelji koji ih doživljavaju kao etnografije nepoznatih mjesta. Autori se na sceni svjetske književnosti pojavljuju kao predstavnici svoje “kulture kao cjeline”. Jedini je način da dobiju potvrdu u prijevodu na engleski jezik ako napišu sociologiju svoje “kulture”, podržavajući fiksne, nazadne i romantičarske slike te kulture kroz guste opise njezinog etnosa.This paper explores literary authors as cultural brokers in the context of world literature. Vignettes from literary events illustrate that what is today understood as world literature is fiction from Third World countries translated into English, written largely by migrant writers for the consumption of metropolitan readers who sample them as ethnographies of unknown places. Authors feature on the stage of world literature as representatives of their “culture as a whole”. The only way for them to be consecrated through translation into English is to write a sociology of their “culture”, sustaining that culture’s fixed, backward, and romanticised images through thick descriptions of its ethnos

Working the Play: How a Card Game Negotiates Perceptions of Work and Productivity

Članak se bavi granicama između onoga što se smatra ozbiljnim radom i igrom. Počivajući na etnografskoj studiji kartaške igre belota, članak preispituje sjecišta i međuprostore između konteksta igre i ne-igre, dovodeći u pitanje postavku da je igranje neproduktivno i materijalno nemotivirano. Smještajući ‘unutrašnjost’ igre (strukturu i pravila) u širi društveno-kulturni kontekst, rad otkriva simbolični prostor zajedničkih priča, emocija i osobnih interesa koji supostoje, mijenjaju i potpomažu sama pravila igre. Iako se taj prostor poklapa s konkretnim mjestom i vremenom kartaške igre, on prodire i mnogo dublje u svakodnevni život. Upravo se zbog toga rad, novac i produktivnost dinamički povezuju s onim što se zbiva za kartaškim stolom. Shvaćajući igru kao način odnosa prema svijetu, a ne kao kategorički definiranu aktivnost, članak istražuje kakve društvene odnose i simbolične vrijednosti proizvode i konteksti igre i ne-igre. Postavlja se pitanje kako su otvorenost i nedefiniranost igre povezani sa širim životnim iskustvima. Drugim riječima, kako te značajke igre utječu na stavove i ideje o radu i produktivnosti.ased on the ethnographic study of the card game Bela, this paper rethinks the intersections and interstices between game and non-game contexts, challenging the presumption that play is unproductive and non-materialistic. By embedding the rules of the game into its socio-cultural context, the paper identifies a symbolic space of shared stories, emotions and personal interests that coexist with, modify and lubricate the rules of the game. By considering play as a way of engaging the world, rather than a categorically identified, bounded and thus inconsequential activity, I explore how the open-endedness of the card game relates to broader life experiences, and particularly how it shapes and influences perceptions of work and productivity

Qualitative Research in Gambling

Gambling is both a multi-billion-dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and ‘agile’. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of ‘problem gambling’ in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including geography, organisational studies, sociology, East Asian studies and anthropology to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technologies, the gambling industry and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including: the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalising technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; and the rise of games, virtual worlds and social media

Fair Game: producing gambling research

In 2011 we began a four-year project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) to investigate new ways to study emerging gambling phenomena across territorial, conceptual and disciplinary boundaries. While we do not attribute any essential moral value to gambling we are interested in the inequalities it generates within and between communities. e work across a number of different scales, from the global and exceptional to the local and everyday. The relationship between financial services, gambling and capitalism is of interest to us, for example, as are apparently mundane encounters between blackjack players in a casino in Nova Gorica. We are equally interested in the production of gambling as its consumption: it is impossible to understand the impact of gambling products without considering the conditions which enable and constrain their production. In order to study these phenomena we have spent several years embedded within different gambling cultures. Claire Loussouarn has worked with Chinese casino customers in London and more recently with spread betting companies and the financial services industry in the City of London. Andrea Pisac is a trained croupier who has worked in Nova Gorica and London. Rebecca Cassidy has worked in the horse racing industries in the United Kingdom and the United States and in betting shops in London

'Giving up on Oneself'

short story Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth Story © copyright Andrea Pisac This translation © copyright Celia Hawkesworth. (From the collection of stories Until Death Do Us Part or I Kill You First, Zagreb: Algoritam, 2007

Until Death Do Us Part or I Kill You First

(collection of short stories

Introduction

Gambling is both a multi-billion-dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and ‘agile’. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of ‘problem gambling’ in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including geography, organisational studies, sociology, East Asian studies and anthropology to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technologies, the gambling industry and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including: the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalising technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; and the rise of games, virtual worlds and social media

Big Nations’ Literature and Small Nations’ Sociology

This paper explores literary authors as cultural brokers in the context of world literature. Vignettes from literary events illustrate that what is today understood as world literature is fiction from Third World countries translated into English, written largely by migrant writers for the consumption of metropolitan readers who sample them as ethnographies of unknown places. Authors feature on the stage of world literature as representatives of their “culture as a whole”. The only way for them to be consecrated through translation into English is to write a sociology of their “culture”, sustaining that culture’s fixed, backward, and romanticised images through thick descriptions of its ethnos