Imagining the Balkans. by Maria Todorova (New York, Oxford Univer- Sity Press, 1997) 257 Pp

REVIEWS | 127 Imagining the Balkans. By Maria Todorova (New York, Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1997) 257 pp. $45.00 Todorova’s book is a passionate, provocative, and necessary attemptNICHOLAS J.to MILLER retrace the construction of a pejorative image of the Balkans. She bases her enterprise on the proposal that “the reductionism and stereotyping of the Balkans has been of such degree and intensity that the discourse merits and requires special analysis” (3). To conduct her investigation, she collected and cataloged, in a densely packed volume, several cen- turies of travel writing, scholarly production, and political analysis by outsiders and insiders alike. Todorova acknowledges the daunting nature of her task at the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/29/1/127/1693966/jinh.1998.29.1.127.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 outset: Its accomplishment, she allows, would ideally require an inter- disciplinary team, not just one scholar. But she brings impressive qualiªcations to her work, utilizing sources in at least twelve languages and moving comfortably from local literatures to scholarly treatises. Her most important and problematic qualiªcation, however, is that she has roots in both the Balkans and the United States—a Bulgarian scholar now employed in the West, “sharing the privilege and responsibility to be simultaneously outside and inside both the object of inquiry and the process of attaining knowledge about it” (ix). This is a source of her zeal in tracking down all manifestations of the reductionist ill that she has diagnosed. It could also be the source of some of the book’s problems. Todorova’s work, and her proposal of the term, “balkanism,” to encompass the pattern of understanding that she examines in her study, demand comparison ªrst and foremost with Said’s “orientalism.”1 Other writers—Bakib-Hayden and Hayden to name two—have applied the concept of orientalism to Western conceptualizations of the Balkans already.2 Though respecting their work and accepting the obvious relationship of her own to Said’s, Todorova asserts that balkanism is not analogous to orientalism. The Balkans, she notes, are real, whereas Said’s “Orient” is not. Todorova further acknowledges her debt to recent scholars of identity (national and otherwise), noting that her work is part of the growing study of the “invention of tradition.” Todorova traces the invention of the Balkans as a divisive, warlike, even barbaric region through early travel writing, nineteenth-century scholarly output, and twentieth-century categorizations produced by Europeans. She provides a convincing and informative narrative tracing the development of an extremely negative stereotype of the Balkans. 1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979). 2 Milica Bakib-Hayden and Robert Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Yugoslav Cultural Politics, 1987–90,” The Slavic Review, LI (1992), 1–15. 128 | BARBARA L. SOLOW To appreciate this book fully, one must accept the author’s conten- tion that the term “Balkan” is both pejorative and omnipresent in modern political discourse. “Where is the adversarial group that has not been decried as ‘Balkan’ and ‘balkanizing’ by its opponents? Where the accused have not hurled back the branding reproach of ‘Balkanism’?” (3). Such assertions demand rigorous use of evidence, and Todorova is occasionally cavalier in that regard. In order to slay the beast of “Bal- kanism,” she seems to ask readers to deny the obvious, that the Balkans are in fact different from other regions in Europe. If acknowledging the formation and existence of a negative stereotype means abandoning any attempt to understand historical processes at work in a given region, then Balkanism will merely be jettisoned in favor of a similarly reduc- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/29/1/127/1693966/jinh.1998.29.1.127.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 tionist relativism. But as Todorova herself acknowledges in the preface, the theme with which she grapples is demanding. One can only assume that this compelling and invigorating exploration will be the ªrst of many attempts to explain the phenomenon of “Balkanism,” the existence of which cannot be doubted. Nicholas J. Miller Boise State University The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. By Robin Blackburn (New York, Verso, 1997) 602 pp. $35.00 “This book furnishes an account of the European systems of colonialBARBARA L. SOLOW slavery in the Americas, and seeks to illuminate their role in the advent of modernity” (3). The theme and scope of Blackburn’s book, an- nounced in the ªrst sentence of the introduction, demonstrates a courage unmatched in this ªeld since Curtin undertook a census of the Atlantic slave trade.1 Blackburn takes the story of New World slavery out of Afro-American departments and places it in the mainstream of European history. The range of the book and the author’s command of sources is astonishing: The book will be valuable and stimulating, even to those who disagree with some of its conclusions. Blackburn makes broad claims for the signiªcance of slavery for “modernity.” It is “associated with” the growth of instrumental ration- ality, the rise of the nation-state, radicalized perceptions of identity, spread of market relations and wage labor, development of modern tax systems and administrative bureaucracies, the growing sophistication of communication and commerce, the birth of consumer societies, the publication of newspapers and advertising, and the development of an individualist sensibility (4). The task of the book is to show how slavery contributed to this impressive list. 1 Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969)..

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