Black and Balkan: A Comparison of Caribbean, African, African-American and Balkan History, Theory and Art

Jovic, Anja

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Year:: 2015
Contributor:: Jovic, Anja (creator); Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne (Director); Whitfield, Esther (Reader); Henry, Paget (Reader); Brown University. Comparative Literature (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: English; Methods of Reading Postcolonialism; Africana; Histories of Enslavement; Form; Comparative literature; Postcolonialism; Race; Ethnicity; African-American studies; African literature; Caribbean literature; Balkan literature
Extent:: viii, 216 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0ZC8174

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Abstract:: “Black and Balkan: A Comparison of Caribbean, African, African-American and Balkan History, Theory and Art” is a project on black and Balkan identities and an extensive exploration of the roots and consequences of this comparison that reaches across the globe. The first chapter traces the origins of Aimé Césaire’s poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and explores the poet’s connection to the Yugoslav linguist Petar Guberina and the Balkans. In order to show the foundations of this – perhaps unexpected – comparison, I proceed to delineate the histories of enslavement of African and Balkan peoples, and discuss the rationalizations of these enslavements by Western European philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and Engels. I start with etymology, as the word slave, which primarily reminds most of us of the Atlantic slave trade, in every Western European language originates from the word Slav (English slave, French esclave, Italian schiavo, German Sklave, Swedish slav etc.) because of the massive slave trade of Slavic people, which lasted for centuries. I then show how this Du Boisian double-consciousness, two-ness, or simply markedness have been affecting cultural production of black and Balkan authors – from slave narratives to contemporary works of fiction. I show deep connections between narrative, “communal” voices of Toni Morrison and Ivo Andrić, and try to theorize the ways in which we read works by “marked” subjects. This dissertation searches for postcolonial methods of reading that do not always first pass through the “Western” filter, but instead engage postcolonial authors, works and cultures directly to each other, with no mediator.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)

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Jovic, Anja, "Black and Balkan: A Comparison of Caribbean, African, African-American and Balkan History, Theory and Art" (2015). Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0ZC8174

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Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Comparative Literature department.
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