Naslov
Nation as a Real-and-Imagined Spatial Category: Conceptualizing Cultural Space(s) in Yugoslavia, 1918-1941

Autori
Duančić, Vedran

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
7th Annual Graduate Conference in European History

Mjesto i datum
Budimpešta, Mađarska, 25.04.2013. - 27.04.2013

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
Yugoslavia ; Geography and Nationalism ; Geographical Narration of the Nation ; Cultural Space ; Real-and-Imaniged Spaces

Sažetak
This paper is a part of a PhD project which reassesses the role of space and spatial discourse in creating competing visions of Yugoslavia’s internal arrangement and its position within the Versailles system. It analyses spatial-geographical discourse as the main vehicle of nation-building projects, both Yugoslav and particular ‘tribal’. The starting hypothesis is that after the creation of the Yugoslav state, in 1918, for a number of reasons, spatial discourse could employ strategies of stressing the national coherence more effectively than purely historical approach. The foundational non-fictions – geographical works which dealt with fundamental issues of Yugoslavia – mirrored competing national projects that existed in academia(s) as well as in politics. Despite the predominance of Jovan Cvijić’s anthropogeographical methodology, several traditions of geographical thinking developed in Yugoslavia, with different scholarly strategies, political affiliations, and relations to European intellectual and academic milieus. The main issues of human geography in interwar Yugoslavia correlated with the most pressing cultural and political dispute – whether there was a single Yugoslav nation, or separate Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian ones? The paper analyzes the relationship between space and nation through the concept of national cultural space(s). The absence of historically clearly bounded political territories and the ethnocultural understanding of nation directed the deliberations of nationhood towards cultural space, where the national spirit was supposedly manifested. This spatial discourse was heavily historicized (much more than the historical discourse was spatialized): both spatial and temporal arguments were evoked in describing and delineating cultural spaces. Relying on Edward Soja’s concept of ‘real-and-imagined’ spaces, this paper aims to go beyond imaginary and symbolic spaces predominant in the field of the Balkan studies since the 1990s. By focusing on scholarly works in the field of human geography (which was inextricably connected to ethnology) across Yugoslavia – in Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb – with different political affiliations and attitudes towards the Yugoslav question, the paper analyzes the conceptualizations of the relationship between nation and space. Particularly the link between physical and cultural landscapes in a longue durée perspective, articulated as a framework where the national spirit and character were manifested, directs the analysis of spatial discourse towards what Soja describes as Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace. In this case, to ask what were the specific strategies of constructing national cultural spaces as ‘real-and-imagined’ categories also opens the question of relation between temporal and spatial, of historical and geographical argumentation.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Povijest

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