The Balkans in the Cold War
The Balkans in the Cold War

Author: Svetozar Rajak

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-02

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1137439033

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Positioned on the fault line between two competing Cold War ideological and military alliances, and entangled in ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, the Balkan region offers a particularly interesting case for the study of the global Cold War system. This book explores the origins, unfolding and impact of the Cold War on the Balkans on the one hand, and the importance of regional realities and pressures on the other. Fifteen contributors from history, international relations, and political science address a series of complex issues rarely covered in one volume, namely the Balkans and the creation of the Cold War order; Military alliances and the Balkans; uneasy relations with the Superpowers; Balkan dilemmas in the 1970s and 1980s and the ‘significant other’ – the EEC; and identity, culture and ideology. The book’s particular contribution to the scholarship of the Cold War is that it draws on extensive multi-archival research of both regional and American, ex-Soviet and Western European archives.

Turbo-folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia
Turbo-folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia

Author: Uroš Čvoro

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1317006062

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Turbo-folk music is the most controversial form of popular culture in the new states of former Yugoslavia. Theoretically ambitious and innovative, this book is a new account of popular music that has been at the centre of national, political and cultural debates for over two decades. Beginning with 1970s Socialist Yugoslavia, Uroš Čvoro explores the cultural and political paradoxes of turbo-folk: described as ’backward’ music, whose misogynist and Serb nationalist iconography represents a threat to cosmopolitanism, turbo-folk’s iconography is also perceived as a ’genuinely Balkan’ form of resistance to the threat of neo-liberalism. Taking as its starting point turbo-folk’s popularity across national borders, Čvoro analyses key songs and performers in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia. The book also examines the effects of turbo on the broader cultural sphere - including art, film, sculpture and architecture - twenty years after its inception and popularization. What is proposed is a new way of reading the relationship of contemporary popular music to processes of cultural, political and social change - and a new understanding of how fundamental turbo-folk is to the recent history of former Yugoslavia and its successor states.

Vampire Nation
Vampire Nation

Author: Toma Longinović

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2011-08-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0822350394

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Analyzes how the rhetoric of Yugoslav intellectuals and politicians and the U.S.-led Western media and political leadership framed the serbs as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century.