Imagining the Balkans: Reading between the academic fluff

Imagining the Balkans is truly an iconic book, and one that should be read by anyone interested in the Balkans. However, I must say right away that this book is an academic piece of work, making it hard to understand by those who are unfamiliar with the theories discussed and the terminology used, and by those who simply do not like reading densely packed theoretical writing. It is intended to be a scholarly piece and, as such, is truly a great one! Since the intention behind this blog is not to read academic writing and add to the academic discourse, I will "analyze" this book and use my analysis as an opportunity to actually tell you more about it, pull some of most important quotes, and do my best to avoid jargon and academic fluff.

In order to understand this book, one must understand at least the basics of postcolonial theory and Edward Said's Orientalism. For the sake of this analysis here is a very basic explanation: Postcolonial theory deals with literature produced in countries that were once, or are now, colonies of other countries. This theory also deals with literature written in or by citizens of colonizing countries that takes colonies or their peoples as its subject matter. Now, Edward Said (Palestinian American public intellectual and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies) wrote a book in 1978 titled Orientalism, which discusses the West's patronizing approach to representations of the East (or as he calls it the Orient) - the people of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The scope of Said's work established Orientalism as a foundation text in the field of post-colonial culture studies, which examines the implications of Orientalism, and the history of a country's post-colonial period. Imagining the Balkans is to balkanism exactly what Said's work is to orientalism - Influenced by Said, Todorova uses Orientalism to discuss the way in which the West defines the Balkans and how that in turn affects the way that the Balkan people define themselves. This is not to mean that she simply makes a new category of orientalism for the Balkans - she actually aims to position herself vis-à-vis the orientalist discourse and elaborate on a seemingly identical, but actually only similar, phenomenon which she calls balkanism (the main difference between orientalism and balkanism is that unlike the Orient, Balkans have a concrete geographical and historical existence and that they seem to be in perpetual state of transition).

Balkans were an opéra bouffe written in blood. What practically all descriptions of the Balkans offered as a central characteristic was their transitionary status. The West and the Orient are usually presented as incompatible entities, antiworlds, but completed antiworlds. Said has described his own work as "based on the rethinking of what had for centuries been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East from West." The Balkans, on the other hand, have always evoked the image of a bridge or a crossroads.

This book is not an introduction to the Balkan history or culture, but rather an interrogation of how Westerners (particularly historians, travelers, and representatives of intellectual and political elites) see the Balkans and themselves by using "otherness" as a mirror. The first chapter provides an exploration of the origins and the meaning of the very word "Balkan" and the geographic area it was meant to, and continues to, designate. The following chapters provide a historical survey and critical analysis of how the Balkans were defined and perceived, mainly by outsiders.

"Balkanization" not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian. In its latest hypostasis, particularly in American academe, it has been completely decontextualized and paradigmatically related to a variety of problems. That the Balkans have been described as the "other" of Europe does not need special proof. What has been emphasized about the Balkans is that its inhabitants do not care to conform to the standards of behavior devised as normative by and for the civilized world.

In these chapters, Todorova provided critique not just of these perceptions, but also of the East-West divide, placing it in a historical context:

Only after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the eclipse of the Orthodox church, but especially with the unique economic takeoff of Western Europe, was East internalized also by the Orthodox world as the less privileged of the opposition pair. As Larry Wolff has convincingly shown, the conventional division of Europe into East and West is a comparatively late invention of eighteenth-century philosophes responsible for the conceptual reorientation of Europe along an East-West axis from the heretofore dominant division into North versus South. This new division, although also spatial, began gradually to acquire different overtones, borrowed and adapted from the belief in evolution and progress flourishing during the Enlightenment. Because the geographic east of Europe and the world situated to the east was lagging behind Europe primarily in economic performance, East came to be identified more often, and often exclusively, with industrial backwardness, lack of advanced social relations and institutions typical for the developed capitalist West, irrational and superstitious cultures unmarked by Western Enlightenment.

All this analysis Todorova did in order to interrogate the ways in which we study historical regions and the possibilities for reconceptualizing the Balkans that go beyond already existing narratives. While some of the reviewers of this book suggested that a solution to this is simply framing the narrative in terms of post-colonialism, Todorova strongly disagrees with the idea, arguing that this would just replace one meta narrative with another, and that instead we need to find another way to frame the discussion about the region. She suggests that perhaps if East Europeanists have a strong grasp of the Western European fields and issues, and challenge Western Europeanists' ignorance about the developments in the eastern parts of the continent, there might be a way to find a solution somewhere between postcolonial theory and anti-balkanism.

Todorova's book is incredibly important for those thinking about and struggling with questions of the study of historical regions and definitions and consequences of social and historical legacies. While the amount of material she referenced and analyzed in this work is truly impressive, there is a little too much emphasis on Bulgaria, and lack of analysis and attention paid to other Yugoslav states. If I am to be a little more critical, I would also say that there could be more analysis of the practical consequences that the negative external and internal perceptions have had on the Balkan countries. She does not investigate and analyze Rebeka West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, perhaps one of the central texts of the 20th century, which is very surprising. She mentions Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts only briefly, but does not explain very well the impact this book has had on the region, particularly on Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. (But we will do it soon as it is one of the books on our reading list!)

So here are some questions that this book will make you think about: - How do we study historical regions?

- How do we define regions and what do they represent?

- What is legacy and how do we carry it?

- What are the implications of external perceptions for internal social and political dynamics?

- How can perceptions be shifted and narratives redefined and rewritten?

- Why is Balkanist discourse singularly male?