2017 03/13 Edin Hajdarpasic

Edin Hajdarpasic

Strangers & Neighbors: The (br)other as an Analytical Device in the Study of Nationalism and Alterity

Edin Hajdarpasic, Loyola University Chicago, is the author of Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Cornell University Press, 2015) as well as numerous articles and chapters on Balkan history, conflict and memory, religious and ethnic relations, nationalism, and the Ottoman legacy in Southeastern Europe.

Graduate student inquirer: Frankee Lyons, UIC History Department

Summary

During the nineteenth century, Serbian and Croatian national movements defined themselves against the Turkish yoke and the specter of “the Turks.” Yet even as they explicitly named “the Turks” as sworn enemies, many Serbian-Croatian nationalists simultaneously described Bosnian “Turks” or Muslims as their “brothers.” I argue that struggles around Muslims’ status as potential co-nationals outline an exemplary figure of nation-making, a figure that is neither enemy nor ally, neither “ours” nor “theirs,” neither “brother” nor “Other”—an undecidable figure that I have called (br)other.