The Ghost of the Ottoman Scourge: Ottoman Hauntology and Dystopia in Socialist Yugoslav History Textbooks (1945–1990)

A post by Bakir Ovčina

INTRODUCTION

In 1991, prominent Yugoslav Communist-turned-dissident Milovan Đilas reflected on how the egalitarian utopia of Marxism-Leninism was rapidly coming to its end. He pondered whether a ‘body of new and attractive ideas might arise – perhaps a call for a new utopia’ (Djilas and Urban 1991, 178). When the world was looking to the future, former Yugoslavia was in a deep crisis. Djilas did not believe Yugoslavia would fall apart (Djilas and Urban 1991, 175). He was wrong. The end of the Bolshevik utopia in Yugoslavia brought a devastating war. In that war, Serb forces sought to create their own new utopia, ‘a state cleansed of any “foreign” elements – a nationally pure Greater Serbia’ (Weitz 2003, 236). Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević’s promised state was bound up in utopian language of ‘all Serbs in one state,’ ‘fast railways’ and ‘Swedish job protection’ (Korać 2014). This utopia also meant wholesale genocide of the Bosniak/Muslim population in Bosnia, culminating on 11 July 1995 in Srebrenica, where the forces of General Ratko Mladić, in his words, ‘took revenge on the Turks’ by butchering some 8,372 men and boys (Suljagić 2021, 1). The ‘Turks’ he referred to were the Bosnian Muslims, identified with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire (ca. 1299–1922) controlled much of former Yugoslavia, Southeastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. Its influence profoundly shaped the culture, customs and language, of especially the Balkan nations (Lory 2015, 391–404). Maria Todorova (1997, 46–47) argued it is ‘preposterous to look for an Ottoman legacy in the Balkans. The Balkans are the Ottoman legacy.’ However, this heritage has been often maligned, and the Ottoman Empire vilified.

Re-imagining the History of British Abolition: The New Historical Consciousness in Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights

A post by Xiting Qiao

Introduction

Abolitionism, the movement that aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade and to free the enslaved people, was important in the historical development of countries in Western Europe and the Americas. Although the movement began earlier in France and Britain, the United States is written in the history of abolition to have played a more important role. From a historiographical perspective, the movement in the United States was more intense, as a backdrop to the American Civil War. Moreover, it operated in tandem with other social reforms, such as the Prohibition and women’s suffrage movements, thus adding the complexity. On a literary level, slave narratives, abolitionist fiction, and neo-slave narratives also constitute important genres in the African American literary canon, playing an ongoing role in opposing slavery, preserving historical memory, and documenting the progress of civil rights. In the 21st century, the neo-slave narratives produced by cultural industries (musicals, films, documentaries, etc.) have also occupied a central place in the representation of abolitionist history.