1st Edition

Balkan Transnationalism at the Time of Neoliberal Catastrophe

Edited By Dušan I. Bjelić Copyright 2019
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    Offering a fresh look at the ways in which neoliberalism has claimed to cure the Balkan region of its ethnic particularities under the pretext of Europeanization, this book shows how the reconfiguration of the economic, political, and cultural landscape of the region has resulted in its functioning as Europe’s neocolony.



    The contributors to this volume engage in postcolonial analysis of the Balkans’ past and present coloniality by way of interrogating race, racism, trauma, film, and global capitalism. They challenge the idea of a United Europe that rests on the assumption that the European Union’s ‘newness’ represents both a clean slate and the right to shift ownership of its colonial histories to former colonial subjects and their national histories. Taken as a whole, the volume seeks to transform Europe’s colonial amnesia into postcolonial awareness and to speak from within the Balkans as a site of Europe’s neocolony.



    As it critically interrogates a neocolonial reconfiguration of the Balkans as a massive social overhaul, which includes at once global integration and local social disintegration, this book will be of interest to those studying the region, as well as postcolonialism in general.



    This book was originally published as a special issue of Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

    Introduction: Balkan Transnationalism at the Time of Neoliberal Catastrophe  1. Postcoloniality Without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies  2. Rethinking East-European Socialism: Notes Toward an Anti-Capitalist Decolonial Methodology  3. Foreign Investment Inflows to Former Socialist Countries in the Balkans: Mapping Global Capitalism  4. Race in the Balkans: The Case of Erased Residents of Slovenia  5. Roma Filmic Representation as Postcolonial "Object"  6. Financialization in the Crypto-Colonies: Greece and Thailand  7. The Migrant Crypt: Cultural Translation Across the Balkans  8. Toward a Genealogy of the Balkan Discourses on Race  9. The Politics of Postcolonial Erasure in Sarajevo

    Biography



    Dušan I. Bjelić is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Criminology at the University of Maine, Portland, USA. He has published extensively in the area of Balkan Studies, including the books Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (2002, ed. with Obrad Savić) and Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (2011).