Scaling the Balkans

Maria Todorova, PhD (1977) is the Gutgsell Professor of History and CAS Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of numerous monographs, articles and edited volumes, including Imagining the Balkans (1997, 2009, translated in 14 languages).

List of Illustrations, Tables, Figures and Maps



Introduction



Part 1: Concepts

Section 1: Modernism, Backwardness and Legacy

1 The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism

2 Modernism

3 Historical Legacies between Europe and the Near East



Section 2: Balkanism, Postcolonialism and Orientalism

4 Balkan

5 Balkanism and Postcolonialism or On the Beauty of the Airplane View

6 The Balkans: from Discovery to Invention

7 The Balkans: from Invention to Intervention

8 Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid



Section 3: Nationalism, Identity and Alterity

9 Is There Weak Nationalism and Is It a Useful Category?

10 Is “the Other” a Useful Cross-cultural Concept? Some Thoughts on Its Implementation to the Balkan Region

11 Isn’t Central Europe Dead? Comments on Iver Neumann’s “Forgetting the Central Europe of the 1980s”

12 What Is or Is There a Balkan Culture, and Do or Should the Balkans Have a Regional Identity?



Part 2: Structures, Processes and Events

Section 1: Demography and Social Structure

13 European Population History: the Balkans

14 Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria within the European Pattern

15 On the Epistemological Value of Family Models: the Balkans within the European Pattern

16 Historical Tradition and Transformation in Bulgaria: Women’s Issues, Feminist Issues



Section 2: Nation- and Society-Building

17 The Course and Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism

18 Language as a Cultural Unifier in a Multilingual Setting: the Bulgarian Case during the Nineteenth Century

19 Identity (Trans)formation among Bulgarian Muslims

20 Midhat Pasha and the Bulgarians

21 Improbable Maverick or Typical Conformist? Seven Thoughts on the New Bulgaria



Section 3: Historiography and Memory

22 East European Studies in the US: Thematic and Methodological Problems

23 The Ottoman Menace in Post-Habsburg Historiography

24 Conversion to Islam as a Trope in Bulgarian Historiography, Fiction and Film

25 The Balkan Wars in Memory: the Carnegie Report and Trotsky’s War Correspondence



Section 4: Socialism and Communism in Memory

26 Shared or Contested Heritage? Commemorating Socialism and Communism in Europe

27 1917 in the Balkans: Divergent “Horizons of Expectation”

28 Was there Civil Society and a Public Sphere under Socialism? The Debates around Vasil Levski’s Alleged Reburial in Bulgaria

29 Blowing Up the Past: the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as Lieu de Mémoire

30 Remembering Communism: Similar Trajectories, Different Memories



Index