Discursive Geography of the Balkans

press release: 

Dušan Bjelić, University of Southern Maine

About the talk: In the critique of Balkanism, the Balkans gain specificity by virtue of this liminal status, of being neither here nor there, but in two places at the same time. Many scholars share a tacit understanding that, for outsiders, the Balkans “cannot be told apart or put together,” which ultimately causes Balkan differences to melt into sameness. However, this Balkanist presupposition may also be turned into a heuristic device for concretizing the Balkans. As Fleming observes, discourse on the Balkans is one both of “sameness and of difference.” This liminal status must contribute not only to Balkan identity, but also to how we resist the representational stability that Balkanism implies. To this end, Fleming observes, “The Balkans’ liminal status—at the interstices between worlds, histories, and continents—is tantamount not so much to marginality as to a sort of centrality.” This centrality has two consequences: first, the Balkans may reclaim their representational con-creteness; second, the Balkans may be known through what Michel Foucault calls “subjugated knowledges.” According to Foucault’s notion of power and domination, knowledge of certain specific places, bodies, and histories is concealed and subjugated because such entities resist the discourse of universal nationality—indeed, their incorporation into that discourse would rupture it. Here another paradox of the Balkans looms. The intense internal polarities created by Balkanism’s binary logic (Christianity/Islam, civilization/barbarism, etc.) infuses any reality imposed upon the Balkans by Balkanism with pernicious instability.

About the speaker: Dušan I. Bjelić received both his B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1981) in Sociology from the University of Belgrade. He earned his Ph.D in Sociology from Boston University in 1989, joining the University of Southern Maine faculty in 1990. He has taught sociology at the University of Belgrade, Boston University, Tufts, Bentley, and Emerson College. His areas of interest are ethnomethodology, Balkan studies, and critical studies of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Professor Bjelić co-edited the book Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, (The MIT Press, 2002). He has also published Galileo's Pendulum: Science, Sexuality and the Body-Instrument Link, (SUNY Press, 2003) and Norrmalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (Ashgate, 2011). His most recent work is Intoxication, Modernity and Colonialism. Freud’s industrial Unconscious and Benjamin Hashish Mimesis (Palgrave, 2017).