1st Edition
Beyond Balkanism The Scholarly Politics of Region Making
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. A Concept with Many Names
2. The Emergence of the Balkans as a Cultural-Historical Space
3. The Balkans as Autospace
4. The Balkans on the European Map
5. Nationalism in Transnational Guise
6. In the orbit of Eastern Europe
7. A Sonderweg or a Metaphor?
Conclusion
References
Index
Biography
Diana Mishkova is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia, Bulgaria.
"This long-awaited book is a ground-breaking contribution to Balkan studies and to imagology in general. It constitutes a milestone in the debate on the construction of historical regions and opens a new horizon of interpretation by radically changing the perspective: it focusses on intraregional scholarly concepts of the Balkans, a region constructed by Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Greek researchers and research institutions. It elucidates Central and Eastern European scholarship on the region that has achieved, since the second half of the 19th century, important results in fields such as history, philology, linguistics, archaeology and anthropology, and that differs considerably from more politicised and prejudice-ridden discourses in the Anglo-American world… Far from being just a negative prejudice of Western travelogues and journalists, the Balkans emerge [here] as a highly complex cultural construction. Diana Mishkova´s book will thus change our understanding of a crucial debate in cultural studies." -- Oliver Jens Schmitt, Professor of Southeast European History, University of Vienna, and Head of the Department of Balkan Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
"The Balkans are crucial for an understanding of Europe’s 20th century: at the beginning and at the end, the Balkans loom large in European history and provide key caesuras. Anyone wanting to understand ‘Balkanism’ and its manifold meanings over time, and anyone wishing to obtain a deeper understanding of how this region of Europe has been ‘ticking’, will have to read Diana Mishkova’s entirely thrilling and path-breaking new book." -- Stefan Berger, Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
"…The book is aimed at researchers but can, by its method, be of interest to all those working on the implication of the sciences in the production of regions and "areas" or on the relations between the academic world and the political one. It [is] useful to all those who share the conviction that reflection on the boundaries of objects in the social sciences is a scientific, educational and ethical imperative." -- An excerpt from Svetlana Dimitrova in Lectures: An International Journal of Reviews in Social Sciences
