Balkan Transnationalism At The Time Of Neoliberal Catastrophe

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans is a comprehensive overview of major topics, established debates and new directions in the study of popular music and politics in this region. The vibrant growth of this subject area since the 1990s has been intertwined with the region’s political and socio-economic transformations, including the collapse of state socialism in much of the region, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the advent of neoliberal capitalism, the rise of Romani activism, the complex politics of ‘Europeanization’ before and after the global financial crisis, and the region’s relationship to the European Union border regime. The handbook illustrates the wide range of disciplines and methods that contribute to this field’s interdisciplinary dialogue and highlights emerging approaches such as the study of Black diasporas in the region, popular music’s links with LGBTQ+ communities, and the impact of digital technologies on musical cultures. This volume will benefit specialist researchers, tutors creating or refreshing courses on popular music in the region, and students interested in these topics, especially those who are at the point of developing their own independent research projects.

Advancing public dialogue surrounding the issues of migrants and refugees, the volume explores the dynamic representations of the recent movement of people from and through the Balkans. It investigates how people within the Balkans view their others, how the West regards the Balkans, and how emigrants from the Balkans reflect upon their experiences as members of cosmopolitan diasporic communities. Highlighting latent tensions between center and periphery and furthering the discussion of racialization related to the Balkans, the collection exposes contradictions in social values, which give rise to national anxieties. Approaching mobility from multiple disciplines, the volume examines several instances of border flows in media, literature, and culture in general, flows of ideas and people. To analyze mobility to, from, and in the Balkans requires one to address the issue of difference, otherness, and race as it relates to South East Europe and as it is understood and reproduced in both transnational and local forms. The racialized category of “migrant” necessitates an understanding of how transnational concepts of race translate into constructs of whiteness and blackness and inform subject positions of the individual and motivate discourses of racialization within communities.

This collectively written monograph is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'. At the centre of this history is the encounter between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on one hand, and a wider world casting off European empires or struggling against western imperialism on the other. The origins of these connections are traced back to new forms of internationalism enabled by the Russian Revolution; the interplay between the first 'decolonisation' of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe and rising anti-colonial movements; and the global rise of fascism, which created new connections between East and South. The heart of the study, however, lies in the Cold War, when these contacts and relationships dramatically intensified. A common embrace of socialist modernisation and anti-imperial culture opened up possibilities for a new and meaningful exchange between the peripheries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Such linkages are examined across many different fields - from health to archaeology, economic development to the arts - and through many people - from students to experts to labour migrants - who all helped to shape a different form and meaning of globalisation.

Drawing on the diverse experience of a team of internationally recognised specialists, Teaching Political Sociology provides educators with a concise and accessible guide to the main topic areas likely to form part of term, semester, or year-long courses in political sociology.

This volume foregrounds racial difference as a key to an alternative history of the Central and Eastern European region, which revolves around the role of whiteness as the unacknowledged foundation of semi-peripheral nation-states and national identities, and of the region’s current status as a global stronghold of unapologetic white, Christian nationalisms. Contributions address the pivotal role of whiteness in international diplomacy, geographical exploration, media cultures, music, intellectual discourses, academic theories, everyday language and banal nationalism’s many avenues of expressions. The book offers new paradigms for understanding the relationships among racial capitalism, populism, economic peripherality and race.

Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.

Diaspora & transnationalism are widely used concepts in academic & political discourses. Although originally referring to quite different phenomena, they increasingly overlap today. Such inflation of meanings goes hand in hand with a danger of essentialising collective identities. This book analyses this topic.

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.