4 research outputs found
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
'It's all the same, only he's not here'?: popular music and political change in post-TuÄman Croatia
While Franjo TuÄman was the president of Croatia (1990ā99), popular music and other forms of entertainment were heavily structured around the key presidential narratives: Croatiaās political and cultural independence from Yugoslavia, and the idea that Croatiaās war effort had been purely defensive. After TuÄman, the Croatian music industry had to cope with media pluralism and the transnational challenges of the digital era. Patriotic popular music expressed an oppositional narrative of Euroscepticism and resistance to the Hague Tribunal, yet Croatia retained and expanded its position in the transnational post-Yugoslav entertainment framework, undermining a key element of TuÄmanās ideology
Wild dances and dying wolves: simulation, essentialization, and national identity at the Eurovision Song Contest
This paper examines Eurovision as a site for the public representation of the nation and explores the tendency towards simulation in such representations. The contestās transnational audience and implication in commercial practices create pressures towards representing the nation through simplified, well-known images. A critique of globalization from south-east Europe argues that cultural production from marginalized countries which emphasizes local distinctiveness is a sign of structural inequality. This critique is tested against representational strategies from Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia. Eurovision is then related to tourism through an analysis of the representation of the Mediterranean in Eurovision performances, which reflect symbolic hierarchies constructed by travel writing since the Enlightenment. Finally, the paper considers the overarching representational power exerted by host states