The Balkans, Europe's Other?: Literature, Film, History

Introduces the modern Balkans through a critical examination of literary and visual, historiographic and political, narratives. The course considers the contestation over a shared historical past and interreligious geographic space through common and divergent master narratives, motifs, myths, and recurring discourses. It also examines the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political relation to Europe. Do the Balkans constitute a traumatized, “balkanized,” self-colonized, abject modernity at Europe’s edges, its inner alterity? Given the acclaim achieved by Balkan filmmakers since 1989, the course also asks how Balkan artists, caught in-between nationalism, Orientalism, Eurocentrism and globalization, assert agency and subjectivity and captivate our imaginations.