Balkan Blues

Balkan Blues
Author: Joanna Labon
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1995
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780810113251

Essays, stories and a play set in Yugoslavia. The title piece, written by Dubravka Ugresic, is a satire on murderous folklore, while Bogdan Bogdanovic's The City of Death is on Belgrade.

Balkan Blues

Balkan Blues
Author: Yuson Jung
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2019-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0253036720

An exploration of how a state transitions from the collectivized production and distribution of socialism to the consumer-focused culture of capitalism. In Balkan Blues, Yuson Jung considers the state as an economic agent in upholding rights and responsibilities in the shift to a global market. Taking Bulgaria as her focus, Jung shows how impoverished Bulgarians developed a consumer-oriented society and how the concept of “need’ adapted in surprising ways to accommodate this new culture. Different legal frameworks arose to ensure the rights of vulnerable or deceived consumers. Consumer advocacy NGOs and government officers scrambled to navigate unfamiliar EU-imposed models for consumer affairs departments. All of these changes involved issues of responsibility, accountability, and civic engagement, which brought Bulgarians new ways of viewing both their identities and their sense of agency. Yet these opportunities also raised questions of inequality, injustice, and social stratification. Jung’s study provides a compelling argument for reconsidering of the role of the state in the construction of twenty-first-century consumer cultures. “A good contribution to post-socialist and Balkan studies, showing well that the concept of post-socialism can still be useful not only in the context of Central and Eastern Europe, but also in the Balkans. The book is based on long-term, deep ethnography and is well written . . . I recommend it to anyone who wants to try to understand social, political, and economic differences in Europe and everyday practices related to the (imaginaries of the) state.” —Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska, Ethnologia Polona

The Culture of Lies

The Culture of Lies
Author: Dubravka Ugre I
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1998
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780271018478

A funny and cynical collection of essays, observations, and sketches denouncing the perversions of political and cultural life in Croatia.

Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene

Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene
Author: Donna A. Buchanan
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2007-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0810866773

Since the early twentieth century, 'balkanization' has signified the often militant fracturing of territories, states, or groups along ethnic, religious, and linguistic divides. Yet the remarkable similarities found among contemporary Balkan popular music reveal the region as the site of a thriving creative dialogue and interchange. The eclectic interweaving of stylistic features evidenced by Albanian commercial folk music, Anatolian pop, Bosnian sevdah-rock, Bulgarian pop-folk, Greek ethniki mousike, Romanian muzica orientala, Serbian turbo folk, and Turkish arabesk, to name a few, points to an emergent regional popular culture circuit extending from southeastern Europe through Greece and Turkey. While this circuit is predicated upon older cultural confluences from a shared Ottoman heritage, it also has taken shape in active counterpoint with a variety of regional political discourses. Containing eleven ethnographic case studies, Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse examines the interplay between the musicians and popular music styles of the Balkan states during the late 1990s. These case studies, each written by an established regional expert, encompass a geographical scope that includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, and Montenegro. The book is accompanied by a VCD that contains a photo gallery, sound files, and music video excerpts.

Political, Social and Religious Studies of the Balkans

Political, Social and Religious Studies of the Balkans
Author: General Editor: Raphael Israeli, Jerusalem, Israel
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency
Total Pages: 850
Release: 2021-01-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1682352900

Since the end of the Bosnia War in 1995, a tradition was embraced by the West of vilifying the Serbs as the villains, and the Muslims as their victims. This necessitated the military intervention of the U.S. and NATO on the Muslim side, which caused an untold travesty of justice to the Serbs. For indeed, there was enough blame to go around to condemn all parties in that war, including Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, of committing massacres and huge abuses of the other parties. To single out the Serbs as the bad guys simply distorts the facts. This collective volume, which is the product of a Commission of Inquiry, worked 18 months on this project, redressing the balance based on a meticulous and well-documented report about the process of this inquiry, step by step.

Maneuvers

Maneuvers
Author: Cynthia Enloe
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2000-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 052092374X

Maneuvers takes readers on a global tour of the sprawling process called "militarization." With her incisive verve and moxie, eminent feminist Cynthia Enloe shows that the people who become militarized are not just the obvious ones—executives and factory floor workers who make fighter planes, land mines, and intercontinental missiles. They are also the employees of food companies, toy companies, clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages, and advertising agencies. Militarization is never gender-neutral, Enloe claims: It is a personal and political transformation that relies on ideas about femininity and masculinity. Films that equate action with war, condoms that are designed with a camouflage pattern, fashions that celebrate brass buttons and epaulettes, tomato soup that contains pasta shaped like Star Wars weapons—all of these contribute to militaristic values that mold our culture in both war and peace. Presenting new and groundbreaking material that builds on Enloe's acclaimed work in Does Khaki Become You? and Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, Maneuvers takes an international look at the politics of masculinity, nationalism, and globalization. Enloe ranges widely from Japan to Korea, Serbia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Britain, Israel, the United States, and many points in between. She covers a broad variety of subjects: gays in the military, the history of "camp followers," the politics of women who have sexually serviced male soldiers, married life in the military, military nurses, and the recruitment of women into the military. One chapter titled "When Soldiers Rape" explores the many facets of the issue in countries such as Chile, the Philippines, Okinawa, Rwanda, and the United States. Enloe outlines the dilemmas feminists around the globe face in trying to craft theories and strategies that support militarized women, locally and internationally, without unwittingly being militarized themselves. She explores the complicated militarized experiences of women as prostitutes, as rape victims, as mothers, as wives, as nurses, and as feminist activists, and she uncovers the "maneuvers" that military officials and their civilian supporters have made in order to ensure that each of these groups of women feel special and separate.

Balkan Blues

Balkan Blues
Author: Yuson Jung
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2019-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253036747

Balkan Blues explores how a state transitions from the collectivized production and distribution of socialism to the consumer-focused culture of capitalism. Yuson Jung considers the state as an economic agent in upholding rights and responsibilities in the shift to a global market. Taking Bulgaria as her focus, Jung shows how impoverished Bulgarians developed a consumer-oriented society and how the concept of "need" adapted in surprising ways to accommodate this new culture. Different legal frameworks arose to ensure the rights of vulnerable or deceived consumers. Consumer advocacy NGOs and government officers scrambled to navigate unfamiliar EU-imposed models for consumer affairs departments. All of these changes involved issues of responsibility, accountability, and civic engagement, which brought Bulgarians new ways of viewing both their identities and their sense of agency. Yet these opportunities also raised questions of inequality, injustice, and social stratification. Jung's study provides a compelling argument for reconsidering of the role of the state in the construction of 21st-century consumer cultures.

The No-Nonsense Guide to World Music

The No-Nonsense Guide to World Music
Author: Louise Gray
Publisher: New Internationalist
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2009-06-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1906523703

"World music" is an awkward phrase. Used to describe the hugely multifaceted nature of a range of typically non-English-language popular music from the world over, it's a tag that throws up as many problems as it does solutions. Louise Gray's The No-Nonsense Guide to World Music attempts to go behind the phrase to explore the reasons for the contemporary interest in world music, who listens to it, and why. Through chapters that focus on specific areas of music, such as rembetika, fado, trance music, and new folk, Gray explores the genres that have emerged from marginalized communities, music in conflict zones, and music as escapism. In this unique guide, which combines the seduction of sound with politics and social issues, the author makes the case for music as a powerful tool able to bring individuals together. Louise Gray is a writer and editor whose work on music and performing arts has appeared in the New Internationalist, The Wire, The Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, and Art Review. She co-edited Sound and the City (British Council, 2007), a book exploring the changing soundworld of China.