Other side of the globe : dystopias and utopias of Balkan identity.

Abstract

The Balkans has always been considered the powder keg of Europe, the center of discontent and conflict, a danger for the rest of the world. In Western history, fiction, and journalism, the Balkan nations are depicted as violent, primitive, or, in the best case, romantically exotic, inhabitants of a space reminiscent of the European Middle Ages and full of Draculas. Few of the Western discourses on the Balkans, however, attempt to understand the complex and subtle set of circumstances that gave birth to the Balkan Other and even fewer acknowledge the role that the West played in the "othering" of the region. An analysis of Balkan travel narratives, such as Lady Wortely Montagu's and Rebecca West's, reveals a marginal Other Balkan world, situated on the other side of the globe, a space unique through its liminal position between Western modernity and Oriental primitivism. This thesis, while insisting on the postcoloniality of the Balkans, endeavors to show how Western ideology created and reinforced unjustly a negative Balkan Other, without giving the Balkan nations the right to speak back and defend themselves.