9 research outputs found
Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and south-east European cultural studies
The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that āone can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing raceā (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of āEuropeā and āthe Balkansā in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekkerās observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on ābalkanismā or Milica BakiÄ-Hayden on āsymbolic geographiesā and ānesting orientalismā did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that āraceā as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studiesā latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of āEuropeā as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced
The politics of performance: transnationalism and its limits in former Yugoslav popular music, 1999ā2004
This paper examines transnational relations between the Yugoslav successor states from the point of view of popular music, and demonstrates how transnational musical figures (such as Djordje BalaŔevi?, Mom?ilo Bajagi?-Bajaga and Ceca Ražnatovi?) are interpreted as symbolic reference points in national ethnopolitical discourse in the process of identity construction. Another symbolic function is served by Serbian turbofolk artists, who in Croatia serve as a cultural resource to distance oneself from a musical genre associated by many urban Croats with the ruralization (and Herzegovinization) of Croatian city space. In addition, value judgements associated with both Serbian and Croatian newly composed folk music provide an insight into the transnational negotiation of conflicting identities in the ex-Yugoslav context. Ultimately the paper shows how the ethnonational boundaries established by nationalizing ideologies created separate cultural spaces which themselves have been transnationalized after Yugoslavia's disintegration
Constructing Roma Students as Ethnic āOthersā through Orientalist Discourses in Bulgarian Schools
This article uses the case of Bulgarian, predominantly Roma, schools to illustrate the long history of stereotypes about Roma people dating back to modernityās discursive binary oppositions of ācivilizedā vs. ābarbarians.ā The data from a longitudinal study with 12 Bulgarian educators showed the modes by which Roma as the Other is created in the school context as a universal cognitive category, internalized in social and individual identities that divide the world into āusā and āthem.ā The paper argues that Bulgarian teachersā perceptions of attitudes, behavior, and values of Roma communities are, in fact, a projection of the discursive representations with which western European modernity has constructed the Balkan region. This research contributes to further explicating how the ideological paradigm of neoliberalism intersects with the old Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment dichotomy of civilizedābarbarians and how it is reconfigured to construct those incapable of fitting within the entrepreneurial spirit of the free market efficiency as unwilling to democratize. The case of Bulgarian, predominantly Roma, schools serves to illustrate how peoples who are Othered in the western European discourse designate their own Other, and thus provides a fruitful approach to understanding how Romaās social exclusion is constructed and situated