We, the People
Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe
Edited by Diana Mishkova, Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia, Bulgaria
Analyzes the processes of nation-building in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Southeastern Europe. A product of transnational comparative teamwork, this collection represents a coordinated interpretation based on ten varied academic cultures and traditions.
The originality of the approach lies in a combination of three factors: [a] seeing nation-building as a process that is to a large extent driven by intellectuals and writers, rather than just a side effect of infrastructural modernization processes; [b] looking at the regional, cross-border ramifications of these processes (rather than in a rigid single-country-by-country perspective) and [c] looking at the autonomous role of intellectuals in these areas, rather than just seeing Southeastern Europe as an appendix to Europe-at-large, passively undergoing European influences.
The essays explore the political instrumentalization of the concepts of folk , people and ethnos in Southeastern Europe in the “long 19 th century” by mapping the discursive and institutional itineraries through which this set of notions became a focal point of cultural and political thought in various national contexts; a process that coincided with the emergence of political modernity.
Contents
Introduction; Part I. Ethnos and Citizens: Versions of Cultural-Political Construction of Identity Alexander Vezenkov, Reconciliation of the Spirits and Fusion of the Interests: “Ottomanism” as an Identity Politics; Kinga-Koretta Sata, The People Incorporated: Constructions of the Nation in Transylvanian Romanian Liberalism, 1838-1848; Tchavdar Marinov, “We, the Macedonians”: The Paths of Macedonian Supra-Nationalism (1878-1912); Balázs Trencsényi , History and Character: Visions of National Peculiarity in the Romanian Political Discourse of the Nineteenth Century; Part II. Nationalization of Sciences and the Definitions of the Folk Dessislava Lilova, Barbarians, Civilized People and Bulgarians: Definition of Identity in Textbooks and the Press (1830-1878); Levente Szabó, Narrating ’the People’ and ’Disciplining’ the Folk: the Constitution of the Hungarian Ethnographic Discipline and the Touristic Movements (1870-1900); Stefan Detchev , Who are the Bulgarians? “Race”, Science and Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Bulgaria ; Călin Cotoi, Imagining of National Spaces in Interwar Romania. The Emergence of Geopolitics; Part III. The Canon-Builders Bojan Aleksov, Jovan Jovanović Zmaj and the Serbian Identity between Poetry and History; Artan Puto, “Ottoman” or “Western”: Two Version of Albanianness at the turn of the 19th century; Bülent Bilmez, A Contested Nation-Builder: Þemseddin Sami Frashëri (1850-1904) and the Construction of Albanian and Turkish Nations; Bibliography Index
forthcoming,
2008
380 pages
ISBN
978-963-9776-28-9
cloth $50.00 / €42.95 / £29.95
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