Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2009 Myth, Memory, Mother: Negotiating Nation in Marko the Prince Elizabeth B. Harbaugh Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE AND DANCE MYTH, MEMORY, MOTHER: NEGOTIATING NATION IN MARKO THE PRINCE By ELIZABETH B. HARBAUGH A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2009 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Elizabeth B. Harbaugh defended on March 30, 2009. Natalya Baldyga Professor Directing Thesis Irma Mayorga Committee Member Kris Salata Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For Barbara J. Britzke and Joseph D. Harbaugh iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With great appreciation for: Dr. Gary Gershman, for leading students to war-torn Serbia and Kosovo and laying the path before my feet; Professors Jane and Mark Duncan, for reintroducing me to the theatre and their continuing encouragement; John Stark, for allowing me the opportunity to investigate this dramatic text; Timothy R. Saunders, Aaron C. Thomas, and Jay M. Gipson-King, for their emotional reinforcement and keen editorial eyes; Drs. Irma Mayorga and Kris Salata, for their guidance and support; and, Dr. Natalya Baldyga, for her insight, humor, and inspiration. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ...................................................................................................... vi 1. Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 A Balkan Trilogy......................................................................................... 3 “At world’s end”: A Brief Contemporary History of the Balkans.............. 5 “Your mind can only take so much horror”: Theatrical Representations of the Yugoslav Civil War................................................ 10 An “emotionally plausible” Place: Reading Marko the Prince through Theory ................................................................................................ 12 “Reinterpreting legends and myths”: The Inheritance of Marko................ 16 “A memory of clay”: Rediscovering Father, Reinventing Self.................. 17 “No more dead babies”: Recreating “Mother”........................................... 17 2. “Reinterpreting legends and myths”: The Inheritance of Marko..................... 19 3. “A memory of clay”: Rediscovering Father, Reinventing Self....................... 34 4. “No more dead babies”: Recreating “Mother”................................................ 50 5. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 65 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 67 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .............................................................................. 71 v ABSTRACT U.S. and Western media depict the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s as one of the most horrific ethnic conflicts since the Holocaust. The Yugoslav Civil War developed while Yugoslavia was attempting to adjust to new definitions of state lines after the fall of Communism. The state of Yugoslavia had combined the former Hungarian province Croatia- Slavonia, former Austrian territories Slovenia and Dalmatia, former Austro-Hungarian Bosnia- Herzegovina as well as the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro, and had enfolded different ethnic populations including Serbs, Albanians, Croats, and Bosnians. While differences between ethnic communities were suppressed when Yugoslavia was a functioning state, after Communism the assertion of independence by disparate states and the subordination of various ethnic minorities encouraged rising tensions and violence. Presenting the war as the product of solely Serbian aggression, the Western media helped promote the problematic idea of a centuries-long ethnic hatred between Yugoslavia’s uneasily conjoined peoples as the cause for the civil war’s eruption. In this project, I suggest that Jovanka Bach’s unpublished play Marko the Prince (2002), the final installment of her trio of plays about Serbia and its diaspora, entitled A Balkan Trilogy, reframes the conflict for a U.S. readership. My examination explores how various strategies of identity construction in Marko the Prince reflect larger operations of nationalist discourse through which the text reconstructs the nation by means of heroicizing its ideal(ized) representatives. As I argue, Marko the Prince’s heroicization of Serbian nationalism reiterates how the construction of national identity is dependent upon by and for whom it is recreated, suggesting means through which dramatic texts can uncover ideological strategies. To redefine the tenets of Serbian nationalism, my investigation examines the invocation of myth, the creation of sympathetic masculine figures, and explores the conflation of the idealized woman with the Serbian motherland. Homi Bhabha, in his theory of “acts of enunciation,” argues that in the moment when cultures meet, they are simultaneously defined and exposed as constructed. This thesis positions Marko the Prince’s reconstruction of Serbian nationalism as an act of cultural enunciation by and for a U.S. audience in light of Bhabha’s theory. By redefining Serbian nationalism as a “heroic” construction, rather than the “monstrous” entity represented by Western media, I argue that Marko the Prince provides its readers and audience with an alternate encounter with discourses of the Balkan world. vi INTRODUCTION “The very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities – as the grounds of cultural comparativism – are in a profound process of redefinition. The hideous extremity of Serbian nationalism proves that the very idea of a pure, ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through the death, literal and figurative, of the complex interweavings of history, and the culturally contingent borderlines of modern nationhood.” – Homi K. Bhabha, 2004 (7) As Bhabha suggests, contemporary national identity is never static; on the contrary, the new nations of the world unceasingly attempt to define themselves through the negotiation of their historical and cultural inheritance. On February 17th, 2008, the Republic of Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. Following nearly twenty years of bloody civil conflict, the creation and international recognition of this new nation-state reignited violent, paramilitary demonstrations of national identity in the former Yugoslavia. For the international community, the vehemence of conflicting nationalisms in the Balkans is both tantalizing and troubling. Citizens of Western Europe and the United States tend to have difficulty positioning the Balkans: discourse often constructs the region as a “bridge” between Europe and Asia, a nebulous place that belongs neither to itself nor to either continent. Indeed, the Balkans as a whole are decidedly, simultaneously not European and not “Oriental;” even the loaded Western term “Balkanized” connotes incomprehensible chaos. Because swathes of the Balkans were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the territories have substantial Muslim populations, some scholars suggest positioning the region as an Oriental territory. Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997) examines the discursive construction of the Balkans both within the region and by outsiders, specifically in Western Europe and America. She rejects an “Oriental” positioning of the Balkans in favor of a unique position indescribable through Said’s terms; ultimately, Todorova argues that Western Europe and the U.S. must construct the idea of the Balkans in order to maintain their own superiority: By being geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as ‘the other’ within, the Balkans have been able to absorb conveniently a number of externalized political, ideological, and cultural frustrations stemming from tensions and contradictions inherent to the regions and societies outside the 1 Balkans. Balkanism became, in time, a convenient substitute for the emotional discharge that orientalism provided, exempting the West from charges of racism, colonialism, eurocentrism, and Christian intolerance against Islam. After all, the Balkans are in Europe; they are white; they are predominantly Christian, and therefore the externalization of frustrations on them can circumvent the usual racial or religious bias allegations. As in the case of the Orient, the Balkans have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self- congratulatory image of the ‘European’ and the ‘West’ has been constructed. (188) Todorova suggests that the Balkans are, fundamentally, an ideological creation borne in the “West,” rather than a discrete political or geographic arena. Therefore, discussions of the Balkans are less about geopolitics than they are about U.S. and Western European ideology. The region, however, remains important to the rest of the world, as the international community invades its borders and condemns its conflicts. Therefore, I suggest that projects such as mine, which will attempt to read the way a Montenegrin-American