Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse

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Donna A. Buchanan
Scarecrow Press, 2007 M10 1 - 472 pages
Since the early twentieth century, 'balkanization' has signified the often militant fracturing of territories, states, or groups along ethnic, religious, and linguistic divides. Yet the remarkable similarities found among contemporary Balkan popular music reveal the region as the site of a thriving creative dialogue and interchange. The eclectic interweaving of stylistic features evidenced by Albanian commercial folk music, Anatolian pop, Bosnian sevdah-rock, Bulgarian pop-folk, Greek ethniki mousike, Romanian muzica orientala, Serbian turbo folk, and Turkish arabesk, to name a few, points to an emergent regional popular culture circuit extending from southeastern Europe through Greece and Turkey. While this circuit is predicated upon older cultural confluences from a shared Ottoman heritage, it also has taken shape in active counterpoint with a variety of regional political discourses. Containing eleven ethnographic case studies, Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse examines the interplay between the musicians and popular music styles of the Balkan states during the late 1990s. These case studies, each written by an established regional expert, encompass a geographical scope that includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, and Montenegro. The book is accompanied by a VCD that contains a photo gallery, sound files, and music video excerpts.
 

Contents

Part I POST1989 CULTURE INDUSTRIES AND THEIR NATIONALIST ICONS
56
REGIONALISMS IN A COSMOPOLITAN FRAME
191
POSTLUDE
364
References
385
Discography
417
Filmography and Videography
423
Index
425
About the Editor and Contributors
439
Copyright

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About the author (2007)

Donna A. Buchanan is associate professor of music at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is also the Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center. She is the author of Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition (2006).

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