Whose Bosnia?: Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840-1914

ISBN-13: 9780801453717 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 288 str.

Edin Hajdarpasic

Opis

As the site of the assassination that triggered World War I and the place where the term -ethnic cleansing- was invented during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Bosnia has become a global symbol of nationalist conflict and ethnic division. But as Edin Hajdarpasic shows, formative contestations over the region began well before 1914, emerging with the rise of new nineteenth-century forces--Serbian and Croatian nationalisms as well as Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim, and Yugoslav political movements--that claimed this province as their own. Whose Bosnia? reveals the political pressures and moral arguments that made this land a prime target of escalating nationalist activity.To explain the remarkable proliferation of national movements since the nineteenth century, Hajdarpasic draws on a vast range of sources--records of secret societies, imperial surveillance files, poetry, paintings, personal correspondences--spanning Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, and Austria. Challenging conventional readings of Balkan histories, Whose Bosnia? provides new insight into central themes of modern politics, illuminating core subjects like -the people, - state-building, and national suffering. Hajdarpasic uses South Slavic debates over Bosnian Muslim identity to propose a new figure in the history of nationalism: the (br)other, a character signifying at the same time the potential of being both -brother- and -Other, - containing the fantasy of both complete assimilation and insurmountable difference. By bringing such figures into focus, Whose Bosnia? shows nationalism to be an immensely dynamic and open-ended force, one that eludes any clear sense of historical closure.