Imagining the Balkans

288 Pages·2009·1.23 MB·English

by  Maria Todorova

Preface
Imagining the Balkans
TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk
Imagining the Balkans
Updated Edition
Maria Todorova
1
2009
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Todorova, Maria Nikolaeva.
Imagining the Balkans / Maria Todorova.—updated ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978-0-19-538786-5
1. Balkan Peninsula—Historiography. I. title.
DR34.T63 1997 96-7161
949.6—dc20
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my parents,
from whom I learned to love the Balkans
without the need to be proud or ashamed of them.
TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk
Preface
The hope of an intellectual is not that he will have an effect on the world,
but that someday, somewhere, someone will read what he wrote exactly
as he wrote it.
Theodor Adorno
This book, more than any other project I have worked on, has been with me for-
ever. Therefore, it is difficult to arrange in any meaningful way (chronologically
or by importance) all the different individuals, works, and events that have shaped my
thinking on the subject. Since, in the course of this work, I have, of necessity, repeat-
edly trespassed into fields where I have little or no expertise, I might fail to acknowl-
edge important influences. This is by no means the result of intellectual arrogance
but is chiefly the result of the wild and often unsystematic forays into unknown terri-
tory that have, however, always been informed with curiosity and deference for the
achievements of others.
The ambitiousness of what I am trying to address in this book is apparent. It pre-
supposes an immensely elaborate secondary literature as well as the fullest possible
primary source coverage. In its ideal form, this should be the undertaking of an inter-
disciplinary team of scholars and the result of long periods of discussion. That this is
impossible for the practical purposes of the present project is quite clear. I am com-
pelled to begin with one of a great number of proleptic remarks with which this work
is fated to abound, namely that I am clearly and painfully conscious of being unable
to produce what, to me, has for a long time been the ideal scholarly work, a complex
tapestry of captivating and meaningful design executed with full and rich embroi-
dery in all details. Of necessity, I will have to resort to patches, cursory compositions,
and eclectic style. I see my principal task as construing an acceptable framework and
suggesting possible lines of debate. Even if it merely triggers argument, this book will
have fulfilled its purpose: I am convinced that the problem merits a whole genre of
works on “balkanism.”
It is part of the comme il faut manner of many American academic books to begin
with theory, to situate themselves consciously at the outset of their work so as to addi-
tionally frustrate their readers’ efforts: not only will they have to cope with the flow of
the author’s narrative or argument, but they are also bound to be (at least unconsciously)
vigilant as to how much the professed theoretical context is genuinely internalized,
viii Preface
how much is simply an indication of intellectual sympathies and political loyalties,
how much is just lip service, the citation syndrome. Mercifully, readers follow their
own strategies. Some skip the theory claims entirely and look for what they consider
to be the sound substance; others, quite in reverse, read only the theory and treat the
rest as trifling empirical illustration. Only a handful of dedicated and intrepid profes-
sional readers approach the work as is in its professed or manifest intertextuality.
I am only partly conforming to this style tongue in cheek (I am not quite sure
whether the stress should be on conform or on tongue in cheek). This is not because I
am not serious about theory: on the contrary, I hold it in enormous respect. However,
to do an exhaustive and honest self-analysis of one’s eclectic “Hotel Kwilu,” to borrow
Mary Douglas’s metaphor for grand theory, requires a tortuous and possibly futile
investigation. I will confine myself here to simply acknowledging my debt to many
theorists from whom I have absorbed and applied a number of useful notions, or who
have given me solace with their clear articulation and masterful treatment of many
hazy doubts that have befallen me. I hope that how I have used them or how they have
discreetly influenced my own argument does them much more credit than reiterating
their main points, especially insofar as I neither wish to have followed, nor claim to
have mastered, their thought in toto: Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Ander-
son, Tom Nairn, and the whole rich exchange of ideas around nationalism, moder-
nity, and “the invention of tradition”; the work on the phenomenology of otherness
and stereotyping; Erving Goffman on stigma and the wide and fruitful discussion his
work triggered among his followers; Mary Douglas on everything from culture through
objectivity, skepticism, and wager to libel and especially liminality; the growing lit-
erature on marginality; the whole postcolonialist endeavor, with all my due admira-
tion for it but mostly for forcing me to articulate more intelligibly to myself my main
points of skepticism and disagreement with the help of Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmad;
Fredric Jameson about his overall orientation in what he calls the “era of multina-
tional capital” and “the global American culture of postmodernism”; the latest litera-
ture on empire and imperialism from Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt to
Wolfgang J. Mommsen; Pierre Bourdieu on describing, prescribing, representation in
general, and particularly the political power of “naming”; the new writings on tax-
onomy (categories, naming, labeling, similarity, projection); notions like “discourse”
and “knowledge as power,” which by now have become so powerfully entrenched
that it would be superfluous to invoke the larger framework of Michel Foucault; and,
above all, David Lodge whose Changing Places,Small World, and especially Nice
Work have been the best introduction to the world of critical theory, semiotics, meta-
phor, metonymy, synecdoche, aporia, and the perpetual sliding of the signified under
the signifier.
Because I am situating myself within the rich and growing genre of “the invention
of tradition” and because of the obvious analogies between my endeavor and
“orientalism,” early on in my work I was advised to avoid direct intellectual alignment
with Edward Said so as not to carry the baggage of the increasing criticism against his
ideas. Not least because of an inborn anarchist streak, I wish at this point to acknowl-
edge my intellectual indebtedness to Said. I would certainly not declare that his has
been the single most stimulating or most fruitful influence but it has been undeniably
important. I think I have distanced myself enough and have shown the basic distinc-
Preface ix
tions (but also correspondences) in the treatment of my own concept of “balkanism”
from Said’s “orientalism.” It would be, however, a sublime intellectual dishonesty not
to acknowledge the stimulating and, indeed, inspirational force of Said’s thought or
emotion. His impassioned critique has produced followers as well as challengers, which
in the end is supposed to be the effect of any genuine intellectual effort. There has ap-
peared, in the past few years, a whole body of important studies on the region informed
by the same or similar concerns as my own. Some of these studies have been written by
friends, and I have profited from the fruitful dialogue with them; others are the work of
colleagues I have not met but whose scholarship I admire. I have duly recognized their
influence in the text. It goes without saying that, in the end, I am solely responsible for
all the errors of commission and omission.
To acknowledge means also to confess. My motives in writing this book have
been complex and diverse but, first and foremost, this is not supposed to be a moral-
ity tale, simply exposing Western bias in a framework either of imperialism or
orientalism (although something could be said in favor of each perspective). By
reacting against a stereotype produced in the West, I do not wish to create a
counterstereotypeof the West, to commit the fallacy of “occidentalism.” First, I do
not believe in a homogeneous West, and there are substantial differences within
and between the different “western” discussions of the Balkans. Second, I am con-
vinced that a major part of Western scholarship has made significant, even crucial
contributions to Balkan studies. Biases and preconceived ideas, even among those
who attempt to shed them, are almost unavoidable, and this applies to outsiders as
well as to insiders. Indeed, the outsider’s view is not necessarily inferior to the insider’s,
and the insider is not anointed with truth because of existential intimacy with the
object of study. What counts in the last resort is the very process of the conscious
effort to shed biases and look for ways to express the reality of otherness, even in the
face of a paralyzing epistemological skepticism. Without the important body of
scholarship produced in the West and in the East, I would not have been able to
take on the topics in this book. It will not do justice to all those scholars who have
been valuable in shaping my views to mention but a few and it is impossible even
to begin to enumerate them.
Nor is this an attempt to depict the Balkan people as innocent victims, to encour-
age “a sense of aggrieved primal innocence.”1 I am perfectly aware of my ambiguous
position, of sharing the privilege and responsibility to be simultaneously outside and
inside both the object of inquiry and the process of attaining knowledge about it. In
The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr uses the example of Jacques Derrida and Julia
Kristeva who come from “places that define the outer limits of Western European
culture: Derrida in colonial Africa, where the French empire fades into the great open
space of Africa; Kristeva in Bulgaria, crossing-ground of the Crusades and the histori-
cal territory of contention between Christianized Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
In such places it is possible to live both in and beyond the West, knowing the bound-
aries of its language, and looking southward or eastward as if toward regions of the
unthought.”2
I invoke this example not in order to claim authority by analogy (especially
as I have not profoundly studied the work of these authors, nor do I share some of
their central postulates) but to partake in the awareness of “the danger and the