1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821499503321

Autore

Hajdarpasic Edin <1977->

Titolo

Whose Bosnia? : nationalism and political imagination in the Balkans, 1840-1914 / / Edin Hajdarpasic

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, New York ; ; London, [England] : , : Cornell University Press, , 2015

©2015

ISBN

1-5017-0111-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (286 p.)

Disciplina

320.540949742/09034

Soggetti

Nationalism - Bosnia and Herzegovina - History - 19th century

Nationalism - Bosnia and Herzegovina - History - 20th century

Bosnia and Herzegovina Politics and government 19th century

Bosnia and Herzegovina Politics and government 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Figures and Maps -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Whose Bosnia? -- 1. The Land of the People -- 2. The Land of Suffering -- 3. Nationalization and Its Discontents -- 4. Year X, or 1914? -- 5. Another Problem -- Epilogue: Another Bosnia -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

As the site of the assassination that triggered World War I and the place where the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990's, Bosnia has become a global symbol of nationalist conflict and ethnic division. But as Edin Hajdarpasic shows, formative contestations over the region began well before 1914, emerging with the rise of new nineteenth-century forces-Serbian and Croatian nationalisms as well as Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim, and Yugoslav political movements-that claimed this province as their own. Whose Bosnia? reveals the political pressures and moral arguments that made this land a prime target of escalating nationalist activity. To explain the remarkable proliferation of national movements since the nineteenth century, Hajdarpasic draws on a vast range of sources-records of secret societies, imperial surveillance files, poetry, paintings, personal



correspondences-spanning Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, and Austria. Challenging conventional readings of Balkan histories, Whose Bosnia? provides new insight into central themes of modern politics, illuminating core subjects like "the people," state-building, and national suffering. Hajdarpasic uses South Slavic debates over Bosnian Muslim identity to propose a new figure in the history of nationalism: the (br)other, a character signifying at the same time the potential of being both "brother" and "Other," containing the fantasy of both complete assimilation and insurmountable difference. By bringing such figures into focus, Whose Bosnia? shows nationalism to be an immensely dynamic and open-ended force, one that eludes any clear sense of historical closure.