BALKAN CULTURAL CONTROVERSIES: HISTORY AND THEORY
Professor Alexander Kiossev
CLSL O4029
3 points
This course will introduce students to the conflictual cultural plurality in the Balkans, providing both
the necessary historical background and the conceptual tools for its adequate analysis. Students will
learn about the historical development of the region after 1750, from the Greek, Romanian, Serbian,
Bulgarian, Turkish, Albanian, and Macedonian national revivals to the globalization of the region in
the 21st century. Balkan cultures will be regarded not as stable entities with clear frontiers, but as a
dynamic, dialogical and heavily contested field of interactions among institutions, communities,
groups and individuals. Students will become conversant with such concepts as self-colonization,
multiple modernities, Balkanization and stigmatization, cultural trauma, the abject, and the Balkan
uncanny. Special attention will be paid to the multiplicity of identity-constructing narratives—
“grand” and small, fictional and documentary, official and unofficial—that will be approached through
close and contextual reading of important Balkan texts, from poems and essays to short
historiographies, political rhetoric, visual and musical texts and critical theory.
Organization:
This course will be taught in Istanbul, at Boğaziçi University in conjunction with the Columbia Global
Center in Istanbul, as a summer course of seven weeks, in two two-hour seminars per week, and is
open to both Columbia and Boğaziçi students. The instructor will provide all readings for the course in
an electronic form.
Requirements and evaluation:
Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation (20%), midterm test (20%),
participation in the last week discussion (10%) and written final paper (50%).
The topic of the final paper should be discussed with the instructor during the week 2 in personal
consultations. The finalized proposal for the topic of the final paper should be submitted at the end of
week 3. The final paper should be submitted at the end of week 7.
SYLLABUS
Week 1: The Birth of National Cultures in the Balkans
Class 1: Modern Enlightenment projects in the Ottoman context.
Topics for discussion:
 Enlightenment and the French Revolution: ways and channels of reception in the Balkan
context
 Looking forward: utopias and projects for Balkan unity; utopias and projects for union of
the South Slavs
 Looking backward: history and historical myths: National Grand Narratives
 Birth of national public spheres, national imaginations and paradoxes of the Balkan
imaginary communities: Megali idea; Great Serbia, Great Romania, Great Bulgaria, Great
Albania, Great Macedonia
Class 2: Discussing early narratives about national identity
Topics for discussion:
 Early narratives about national identity in the Ottoman context: comparative approach
 Ideological vocabularies, major thematic lines, major tropes
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Readings
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European influences, the shift in French revolutionary rhetoric – from social to ethnic
“slavery”
Early national self-representations and the images of the “Other” (the images of the
Ottoman Empire; the image of Europe, the images of the neighbors, the images of
minorities).
Paisii Hilendasrki, Preface to “The History of the Sloveno-Bulgarians” (1762)
Rigas Feraios Velestinlis, “New political constitution and war hymn” (1797)
Tomo Bassegli, “Patriotic musing” (1798)
Adamantios Korais, “Report on the present state of civilization in Greece” (1803)
Suggested further readings
 Petru Maior, “A history of Romanian beginnings in Dacia” (1812)
 Joakim Vujić, “Characteristics Of The Serbian People” (1828)
 Pashko Vasa, “The truth on Albania and Albanians” (1878)
A. Esroy, M. Gorny, et al, eds., The Identity Reader: Discourses Of Collective Identity In
Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945), 3 vols. (Budapest & New York: CEU Press, 2006).
L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (London: Hurst and Company, [1958] 2000).
T. Aleksic, ed., Mythistory and Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans, Cambridge Scholars
Publishers, UK (2007).
Week 2: National and Regional Cultures: Similarities, Dialogues, Conflicts
Class 1: Is there a split between modern national cultures and the common traditional cultures
of the Balkans?
Topics for discussion:
 Institutionalization of national cultures and canonization of national Grand Narratives;
 Challenges:
o the question of religion
o the question of language
o the question of everyday (anthropological) cultures: housing, clothing,
cuisine, rituals, culture of communication and entertainment
o the historical fate of communities and “minorities”
o nomads and migrants
o the ambiguity in the status of the Neighbor: imaginary foe, everyday friend
Class 2. Discussing Balkan popular music, cuisine, and forms of entertainment
Students will be encouraged to collect and prepare in advance examples of contemporary Balkan
popular musical and dance phenomena (turbo-folk, chalga, manale, “dogs music,” arabesk, belly
dance) and compare them in class.
Readings
Gordy, Eric, (1999). The Culture of Power in Serbia. Nationalism and the Destruction of
Alternatives, Pennsylvania State University. Esp. The chapter “The Destruction of Musical
Alternatives” pp. 103 – 165.
A. Kiossev, “Heroes against Sweets: The Split of National and “Anthropological” Cultures in
South-East Europe”. Proceedings of the conference Understanding the Balkans October 13 - October
16, 2000, Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia. (2005).
Mihailescu, Vintila, “The Quest for Sarma: Essay on Social Expectations,” Revue du MAUSS,
1 (2005) 25.
Suggested further readings
Dusan Bjelic and Obrad Savic, eds., Balkan as a Metaphor: Between Globalization and
Fragmentation (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2002).
Rüdiger Rossig, “Punk den Balkan,” Taz.De, 11 June 2006
http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/?dig=2005/06/11/a0251
Week 3: The Balkans in the Context of the Global Capitalist and Colonial Processes in the
Nineteenth Century
Class 1: Ottoman imperial rule, modern national cultures, imaginary Europe: conflicting
realities and contesting projects for modernization.
Topics for discussion:
 Modernization process, new Empires, old Empires and the “scramble” for colonies: nation
building process of the “small nations” in this contested context.
 Tanzimat reforms and the project of the Ottoman Empire for modernization: reaction of
national Enlightenment and revolutionary elites;
 “Multiple modernities”: the Balkan case.
Class 2: What is self-colonization? Discussing the metaphor.
Topics for discussion:
 What is Europeanization (Westernization)?
 What is Colonization? What are its historical variants?
 What is Self-Colonization? Possibilities and limits of the “self-colonization” metaphor as
a tool for understanding the region
Readings
Sh. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, Winter 2000: 1-29
Al. Kiossev, “The Self-Colonizing Cultures,” in Cultural Aspects of the Modernisation
Process (Oslo, 1995).
Al. Kiossev, “The Self-Colonization Metaphor: Atlas of Transformation” (2008).
http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/s/self-colonization/the-selfcolonizing-metaphor-alexander-kiossev.html
Suggested further readings
M. Bakic-Hayden, M., (1995), “Nesting Orientalism: The Case of Former Yugoslavia”, Slavic
Review 54 (1995) 4.
Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in Question (University of California Press, 2005).
R. Detrez, Colonialism in the Balkans: Historic Realities and Contemporary Perceptions
http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/theorie
A. Esroy, M. Gorny, et al., eds. The Identity Reader, Discourses Of Collective Identity In
Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945), 4 vols. (Budapest New York: CEU Press, 2006).
Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2000).
Week 4: Balkan Space
Class 1: The territorial question: shifting real borders and imaginary geographies
Topics for discussion:
 Are the Balkans a clear territorial unit?
 Political unions, geographical realities
 Imaginary homelands, historical myths, shifting borders, Grand narratives
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The role of visionary poems; the role of maps
Where is the West? The multiplication of centers
The political reality of the imagination
“Homogeneous” and “pure” national territories vs. multicultural cities
Teaching national geography, teaching national history – textbooks, educational
institutions and habitualization of the mass imaginary.
Minority “niches”; the transnational roots of nomads, migrants, and fugitives
Class 2: Discussing old maps, discussing new maps
Students will be encouraged to find old and new Balkan maps on the Internet and prepare to
discuss them.
Readings
Todorova, M. “Spacing Europe: What is a historical region?” In: East Central Europe/ECE, 2006,
vol.32, N. 1-2.
Koulouri, Christina, ed., Teaching History of Southeastern Europe (Thessaloniki, 2001);
Suggested further readings
Christina Koulouri, ed., Clio in the Balkans: The Politics of History Education (Thessaloniki,
2002).
Pal Kolsto, ed., Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe (London: Hurst and
Company, 2005).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination (Chicago, Seagull Books,
2010).
Week 5: The Problem of Balkanization
Class 1: The Ex-centric Gaze from the Centre and the image of the “Dark Balkans”
Topics for discussion:
 The historical constructions of imaginary splits in Europe: Civilization vs. Barbarians, the
North-South and the West-East splits
 The Dark Balkans, “Die Kluften des Balkans“
 The metaphor „Balkanization“ and it historical destiny; media practices of stigmatization;
 Maria Todorova: the Balkan as internal Other;
 What is “cultural trauma”? What is “abject’? Balkan shame and self-repulsion.
Class: Reading the city: visual Balkan urban culture (“Balkan space” topic cont’d)
The Instructor will present the visual and theoretical legacy of the international research and
artistic project “The Visual seminar” (2003 - 2006), based in Sofia. Students will be
encouraged to photograph Istanbul’s visual urban culture, to assemble their own portfolios and
prepare to discuss their photo collections in class.
Readings
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982).
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
The Visual Seminar: Proceedings of the Institute for Contemporary Arts, 4 vols. (Sofia, 20062008).
Al. Kiossev, Al. “Plovdiv: The Text of the City vs. the Texts of Literature”, In History of the
Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centurie,
vol. 2, ed. by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam, John Benjamins Bookpublishing,
2006).
Suggested further readings
Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1998).
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
G. Bridge and S. Watson, City Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002): 1 – 60; 333 – 451.
Al. Gelley, “City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism,” in Mark Poster, ed., Politics,
Theory and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 237 – 260.
M. Miles, T. Hall, I. Borden, City Cultures Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000):
26 – 48; 195 – 221; 320 330.
Week 6: Flexible Belonging, Fluid Identities
Class 1: Is there a “Balkan identity”?
Topics for discussion:
 The problematic concept of identity and its critique
 Identities and the flexible processes of identification in the contested Balkan space
 Groups and individuals with unstable and problematic “identity”; migrants, minorities and
hybrids. How are their images constructed? What are their narratives and strategies for
building “identity”?
 Grand narratives vs. group and individual counter-narratives: how identity is negotiated
and challenged by a variety of incompatible narrative tools. The role of fiction and literary
narratives
 Ambiguous Ottoman legacies and the ambiguous cultural strategies for coping with them.
Legacy vs. multidimensional memories
 Balkan “cultural intimacy”;
 Identity and agency. Is there a “Balkan agency”?
Class 2. Discussing new nationalisms and late narratives about identity in the region
Topics for discussion:
• Heroic, victimizing and traumatic models of Balkan and national belonging
• New nationalisms in the “tension field” between multicultural public norms, EU policies,
national state politics, civic resistance, and global market hybridization.
Readings for discussion
Pohoaţă, Gabriela, Emil Cioran or The Drama of a Romanian Conscience.
Nikos Dimou, On the Unhappiness of Being Greek (English translation, 2013)
Recent Internet Examples of Bulgarian “negative nationalism”
Students will be encouraged to collect further examples of “negative nationalism” and “hybrid
identities” for the seminar.
Readings
Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New
Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond "Identity," Theory and Society 29, (Feb.,
2000) 1: 1-47.
Suggested further readings
Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (London: Hurst and Company,
2004).
Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York, London:
Routledge, 2006).
Al. Kiossev, A., “The Dark Intimacy: Maps, Identities, Acts of Identification,” in D. Bjelic,
and O. Savic, eds., Balkan as a Metaphor (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2002).
Andrew Hammond, еd., The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 19452003 (Ashgate, 2004).
Week 7 (Class 1-2): Contemporary Balkans in Global Context – discussion with the student
Topics for discussion:
 Ex-Jugoslav wars: are they “new Balkan wars”?
 Accession of Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania to EU
 Accession of Croatia to EU
 The special place of Turkey with respect to EU
 What is the cultural status of EU accession in the separate national contexts?
 The new realities of the “Western Balkans”
 The recent Greek crisis and its public image in the other Balkan countries
 Desecularization, terrorism, wars, fugitives as challenges
 New nationalisms, new xenophobia, new religious identifications, new fundamentalisms,
new Ottomanism
Readings
Andrew Hammond, еd., The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 19452003 (Ashgate, 2004).
Further suggested readings
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989).
Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New
Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-2011(Penguin
Books, 2012).
Theodore von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization (Oxford University Press, 1987).
NOTE – The extracts from the list of readings are still to be determined (the mandatory text extracts
for each lecture/seminar will not exceed 50 standard pages).