Kategoria BISAC: History >> Eastern Europe - General

"These thought-provoking essays on the Serbian ethno-myth make this book a valuable contribution to the literature on the former Yugoslavia."
The Journal of Slavic Military Studies

"The newspaper articles . . . offer incisive, ironic, and often witty analyses of nationalist discourse found in a wide variety of texts, including political speeches."
Slavic Review

Symbols are central to politics. In this groundbreaking work, Ivan Colevic investigates the symbols of politics and the politics of symbols in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovnia. The...

Since the 1989 fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Romania, arguably the most regimented of states in the Soviet bloc, has struggled with the transition from totalitarian state to democratic nation. In this insightful examination of modern Romania, Tom Gallagher provides an overview of Romania s unique political and social history, focusing on both its national identity as well as the legacy of Soviet rule. Gallagher provides an in-depth look at Romania since 1989, focusing on the government s attempts at economic reform, engagement with democracy, problems with corruption among the...

Balkan Identities brings together historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars all working under the shared conviction that the only way to overcome history is to intimately understand it. The contributors of Balkan Identities focus on historical memory, collective national memory, and the political manipulation of national identities. They refine our understanding of memory and identity in general and explore and assess the significance of particular manifestations of Balkan national identities and national memories in the region.

The essays...

Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car" and the car culture that built up around it was the result of an always unstable compromise between...

The region that is today Macedonia was long the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It was home to a complex mix of peoples and faiths who had for hundreds of years lived together in relative peace. To be sure, these people were no strangers to coercive violence and various forms of depredations visited upon them by bandits and state agents. In the final decades of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, however, the region was periodically racked by a bitter conflict that was qualitatively different from previous outbreaks of violence. In Blood Ties, Ipek K....

Haunting is what happens when the past is disturbed and the victims of previous violence, who are thought to be buried and forgotten, are brought back to the present and made to live again. Serbian fiction writers of the 1980s exhume the ghosts of the past, re-remembering the cruelty of the twentieth century, reinterpreting the heroic role of the Partisans and the extraordinary measures taken to defend Yugoslavia s recently won independence and socialist revolution. Their uncanny and ghostly imagery challenges the assumptions of the master discourse promoted by the country s orthodox...

The post-1989 period has seen artists in Central and Eastern Europe embrace socially engaged practices. Reclaiming public life from the ideologies of both communist regimes and neoliberalism, their projects have harnessed the politically subversive potential of social relations based on trust, reciprocity and solidarity. Drawing on archival material and exclusive interviews, in this book Izabel Galliera traces the development of socially engaged art from the early 1990s to the present in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. She demonstrates that, in the 1990s, projects were primarily created for...