The Past in Exile: Serbian Long-distance Nationalism and Identity in the Wake of the Third Balkan War

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LIT Verlag Münster, 2007 - History - 254 pages
In this study of identity politics, memory and long-distance nationalism among Serbian migrants in California, the author examines the complicated ways in which visions of the past are used to form Diaspora subjects and make claims to the homeland in the present. Drawing on extended fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area community, she shows how the Yugoslav wars generated a revaluation Serbian history and personal life stories, resulting in the strengthening of ethnic identity. Nevertheless, strategies for dealing with rupture and change also included contestation of exile nationalism.
 

Contents

I
9
II
11
III
43
IV
51
V
91
VI
108
VII
130
VIII
165
IX
182
XII
202
XIII
232
XIV
242
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Page 22 - Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.
Page 16 - For while technically a citizen of the state in which he comfortably lives, but to which he may feel little attachment, he finds it tempting to play identity politics by participating (via propaganda, money, weapons, any way but voting) in the conflicts of his imagined Heimat - now only fax-time away.