Bøger i Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe serien

This book presents gendered readings of cultural manifestations that relate to the Ottoman era as a preferred past and a model for the future. By means of claims of authenticity and the distribution of imaginaries of a homogenous desirable alternative to everyday concerns, as well as invoking an imperial past at the national level. In this mode of thinking, shaped around a polarised worldview, Republican ideals serve as a counter-image to the promoted splendour and harmony of the Ottomans. Yet, the stereotypical gender roles inextricably linked with this neo-Ottoman imaginary remain largely unacknowledged, dissimulated in the construction of the desire of an idealised past. Our adaption of a cultural studies perspective in this volume puts special emphasis on agency, gender, and authority. It provides a shared ground for the interrogation, through the contributions comprising this project of knowledge production about the past in light of what constitutes acceptable legitimacy in interpreting not only the canonical literature, but history at large.

This book analyzes two Romanian villages ¿ 2 Mai and Vama Veche ¿ as spaces of relative freedom during the last decades of socialist rule. This microhistorical study refutes simplistic views of the communist past which focus on political figures and events, and instead explores ordinary people and everyday life. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, it considers a broad range of sources, including official Communist Party documents, secret police files, personal memoirs, oral history interviews, ethnographic films, songs, and artistic performances. This book intertwines three narrative threads: that of the visitors (mainly members of the Romanian intelligentsia, young people, and hippies); that of the local inhabitants; and that of 'authority' (local and central state agents actively engaged in surveillance and supervision). In doing so, it interrogates the spectrum of consent/dissent and resistance/collaboration hitherto neglected in scholarship.

This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market.

This book introduces the reader to the past and present of Jewish life in Turkey and to Turkish Jewish diaspora communities in Israel, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

This book is the first historical work to examine the notion of national territories in Yugoslavia - a concept fundamental for the understanding of Yugoslav history.

This book explores the Romanian Orthodox Church's arguments on national identity to legitimize its own place in a post-communist Romania. After clarifying and surveying the Church's claims on institutional and national identity, the book then also explores the secular ideas on the subject.

This book examines the role of imperial narratives of multinationalism as alternative ideologies to nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East from the revolutions of 1848 up to the defeat and subsequent downfall of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires in 1918.

Reviewing different cultural representations of Sarajevo in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the book explores how the promotion of the city as a future global tourist centre resulted in an increased awareness among its populace of the city's cultural particularities.

In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country's most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association.

It focuses on how narratives about cultural co-existence under Ottoman rule are used as a prism of national self-awareness and argues that the interpretations of Greece's Ottoman legacy are part of the cultural battles over national identity and belonging.

Where nostalgia was once dismissed a wistful dream of a never-never land, the academic focus has shifted to how pieces of the past are assembled as the elements in alternative political thinking as well as in artistic expression.

It focuses on how narratives about cultural co-existence under Ottoman rule are used as a prism of national self-awareness and argues that the interpretations of Greece's Ottoman legacy are part of the cultural battles over national identity and belonging.

Looking at various phases of Soviet attitudes towards Kemalism and its manifestations through the lenses of Communist leaders, party functionaries, diplomats and scholars, the book illuminates the underlying dynamics of Soviet interpretations.

Where nostalgia was once dismissed a wistful dream of a never-never land, the academic focus has shifted to how pieces of the past are assembled as the elements in alternative political thinking as well as in artistic expression.