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This book considers the position and historiography of the western Balkans in modern Europe. It challenges the linear narrative that the region was 'Europeanised' in the twentieth century - that is, brought into a wider fold of European countries through political, social and cultural exchanges. Instead, it develops the concept of a 'European Orient' to highlight how the position of the western Balkans shifted in the European imagination during this period. It investigates specific examples of cultural encounters involving travellers and migrants between South-east Europe and the West, and situates these developments in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century geopolitics. In doing so, it shows how European scholars as well as US-migrants from South-east Europe constructed a historiography of the region, and will be of interest to historians interested in the Balkans in particular and south-eastern Europe in general.
List of contents
Chapter 1. The "European Orient": Forerunner of the Balkans.- Chapter 2. The Gateway to Another World: Oriental Studies in the Nineteenth Century.- Chapter 3. "Illuminating the Darkness": Surveying the European Orient and Localizing the Balkans.- Chapter 4. Painted by Numbers: Ethnographic Maps.- Chapter 5. Oriental or Enchanted? The Serbian Culture Experienced and Transmitted by Felix Philipp Kanitz.- Chapter 6. The "Stepchild" of the European Family: Emancipation and Democratization Processes in Serbia.- Chapter 7. Blackguardism and Underground Organization: The Topic of War Guilt From the First World War.- Chapter 8. New York, 1918: Kossovo Day.- Chapter 9. Conclusions: Transnational and Transatlantic Perspectives of the "Balkans".
About the author
Dr. Eva Tamara Asboth is a historian and a communication scientist. She works as a postdoc researcher at the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies (CMC) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. She is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Klagenfurt and teaches Historical Anthropology at Sigmund Freud University Vienna. Her research areas are historical communication and memory studies as well as transnational and digital history.
Summary
This book considers the position and historiography of the western Balkans in modern Europe. It challenges the linear narrative that the region was 'Europeanised' in the twentieth century - that is, brought into a wider fold of European countries through political, social and cultural exchanges. Instead, it develops the concept of a 'European Orient' to highlight how the position of the western Balkans shifted in the European imagination during this period. It investigates specific examples of cultural encounters involving travellers and migrants between South-east Europe and the West, and situates these developments in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century geopolitics. In doing so, it shows how European scholars as well as US-migrants from South-east Europe constructed a historiography of the region, and will be of interest to historians interested in the Balkans in particular and south-eastern Europe in general.
