BB: Balkanism after the Balkans: Anti-Balkan Prejudices at the time of PC Culture
Aleksandar Pavlović, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade – Balkanism after the Balkans: Anti-Balkan Prejudices at the time of PC Culture
Arguably, the Balkans is constantly becoming more and more European by losing its distinctive features such as the Byzantine and Ottoman heritage, tribal organization and joint family households. Therefore, the Balkan people live nowadays in the proper European-like homogeneous nation-states and the bourgeois nuclear family. At the same time, contemporary identity politics and Western-grown PC culture brought certain sensitivity about racism, anti-gender and anti-LGBT+ sentiments, but prejudices and stereotypes about the Balkan peoples are still widespread in the Western media and public discourse. Thus, in effect, Western perception of the Balkans is still deeply characterized by Balkanism, understood as a “a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian”, i.e. as discourse that creates a stereotype of the Balkans, and politics significantly and organically intertwined with it (Todorova).
To illustrate this point, I will offer several contemporary examples, from the current anti-Albanian frenzy in the British media, over Western depictions of Novak Djokovic, to the North Macedonia dispute with Greece and Bulgaria. In conclusion, I will ponder on how it is possible that the age of political correctness did not affect the Balkan people and that we still fail to properly perceive and condemn obvious examples of prejudiced, insulting and even racist anti-Balkan sentiments and statements?
Aleksandar Pavlović is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) of the University of Belgrade with PhD in Southeast European Studies from the University of Nottingham. His main research interests include cultural history of the Balkans, Serbian and Balkan oral and written tradition, Serbian-Albanian relations and traditional Balkan society. He published Imaginarni Albanac (IFDT: Belgrade, 2019; Albanian edition Qendra Multimedia, 2022) and Epika i politika (Beograd: XX vek, 2014), and co-edited Rethinking Serbian-Albanian Relations: Figuring out the Enemy (New York: Routledge 2019) and Politics of Enmity (Belgrade: IFDT/Donat Graf, 2018).
19.03.2024 13:00 – 14:00
Organizer
Zentrum für Südosteuropastudien & SOEGA & Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft
Venue:
Location: SR 111.42 BEETHOVENSTRASSE 8 4. OG 8010 GRAZ