New Book: Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands

Cornell University Press

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=9922

Between Two Motherlands
Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1949
Theodora Dragostinova
978-0-8014-4945-1
45.00

In 1900, some 100,000 people living in Bulgaria—2 percent of the
country’s population—could be described as Greek, whether by
nationality, language, or religion. The complex identities of the
population—proud heirs of ancient Hellenic colonists, loyal citizens
of their Bulgarian homeland, members of a wider Greek diasporic
community, devout followers of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul,
and reluctant supporters of the Greek government in Athens—became
entangled in the growing national tensions between Bulgaria and Greece
during the first half of the twentieth century.

In Between Two Motherlands, Theodora Dragostinova explores the
shifting allegiances of this Greek minority in Bulgaria. Diverse
social groups contested the meaning of the nation, shaping and
reshaping what it meant to be Greek and Bulgarian during the slow and
painful transition from empire to nation-states in the Balkans. In
these decades, the region was racked by a series of upheavals (the
Balkan Wars, World War I, interwar population exchanges, World War II,
and Communist revolutions). The Bulgarian Greeks were caught between
the competing agendas of two states increasingly bent on establishing
national homogeneity.

Based on extensive research in the archives of Bulgaria and Greece, as
well as fieldwork in the two countries, Dragostinova shows that the
Greek population did not blindly follow Greek nationalist leaders but
was torn between identification with the land of their birth and
loyalty to the Greek cause. Many emigrated to Greece in response to
nationalist pressures; others sought to maintain their Greek identity
and traditions within Bulgaria; some even switched sides when it
suited their personal interests. National loyalties remained fluid
despite state efforts to fix ethnic and political borders by such
means as population movements, minority treaties, and stringent
citizenship rules. The lessons of a case such as this continue to
reverberate wherever and whenever states try to adjust national
borders in regions long inhabited by mixed populations.

Theodora Dragostinova is Assistant Professor of History at The Ohio
State University.

Dobrogea, Добруджа

The new (76th) volume of the series SÜDOSTEUROPA-STUDIEN edited by Gernot Erler is devoted to the multifaceted discussion of this region on the Black Sea coast divided between Romania and Bulgaria and currently united within the European Union.

HELLER, Wilfried; SALLANZ, Josef (Hrsg.): Die Dobrudscha. Ein neuer Grenzraum der Europäischen Union: Sozioökonomische, ethnische, politisch-geographische und ökologische Probleme. München - Berlin, Verlag Otto Sagner, 2009. ISBN 978-3-86688-068-9.

The Balkans in an European Context: New Challenges for Multilingualism in Europe

Conference date: 11-Apr-2010 - 15-Apr-2010
Conference venue: Dubrovnik, Croatia
Call Deadline: 31-Oct-2009
Organizing Institution: Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb, Croatia

Organized jointly by Languages in a Network of European Excellence (LINEE) and the integrated project DYLAN of the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme for Research and Development. With an increased awareness of international globalisation and European integration, the existing mainstream conceptualizations of multilingualism and linguistic diversity have been increasingly questioned, in particular within the humanities and the social sciences. In a EU context of socio-political transition it is therefore a challenge to take stock of the existing disciplinary knowledge, and to reassess it against the background of the ongoing integration process which goes along with the transformation of traditional linguistic and cultural patterns. Read more at http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-3290.html.

The Balkans: Radical Conservatism and Desire

By Dušan I. Bjelić
South Atlantic Quarterly.2009; 108: 285-304
Full text available at http://saq.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/108/2/285

This essay focuses on Balkan discourse geography as a hidden contingency of the intellectual work of Slavoj Žižek and Julia Kristeva. It takes into account the extent to which their self-proclaimed cosmopolitanism and universalism reflect disidentification with their Balkan origins. This disidentification alerts one to the unacknowledged centrality of Kristeva's and Žižek's Balkan origins to their writing about the region, and it also points to the Balkanist character of their intellectual production. I emphasize the discourse geography of the Balkans—particularly Maria Todorova's articulation of "Balkanism"—as a dissonant infrastructure to the transcendent, ahistorical quality of Kristeva's and Žižek's work. Antonio Gramsci's incorporation of his origins in Sardinia into his intellectual and political praxis provides a contrapuntal reading of Kristeva's and Žižek's own psychoanalytically mediated decoupling of themselves from their Balkan origins and their own split subject positions. The empirical history of human solidarity formalized in the Marxist philosophy of class struggle and actualized in Gramsci's philosophy of praxis challenged not only Cartesian subjectivity as pure cogito but also the Cartesian elevation of abstraction over the senses. In contrast, Kristeva's and Žižek's local histories are expressed through disidentification and self-Orientalization as a constitutive gesture of subaltern intellectual labor. Instead of exploring geopolitical ambiguity for the sake of the intellectuality of human solidarity, they paradoxically reproduce in their discourse the very conditions they seek to escape.

Source of the abstract: http://saq.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/108/2/285