Against Balkanism: Women's Academic Life-writing and Personal and Collective History in Vesna Goldsworthy's Chernobyl Strawberries

Abstract

How does the life experience of an academic matter and how may it shape the ways in which scholarship is pursued? Starting from this question, the article offers a reading of the use of the discourse of Balkanism in Vesna Goldsworthy's recent memoir Chernobyl Strawberries by placing it in dialogue with her academic work Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. Since the late 1990s several important studies have explored the construction of the Balkans in the Western imagination and Goldsworthy's work has been one of the key studies of the ways ‘the West looks East’. Through a close reading of Chernobyl Strawberries, I explore how the processes of identification and dis-identification with the Balkans are contingent upon the particular positioning of an academic, which to a large extent orients the scholarship in this or that direction, and how in Goldsworthy's case, it also affects self-representational practices used in her memoir. I argue that Goldsworthy's particular speaking position and material location is one of the critical factors that determine the development of her external critique of Balkanism. This complicated positioning that the dialectic of (un)belonging to the Balkans may entail is productively negotiated and mobilised in Goldsworthy's memoir for the purposes of critique—what is termed in this article as ‘against Balkanism’. Throughout the memoir, Goldsworthy actively engages with competing notions of personal and collective history, but rather than hunting down the big ghosts of post Yugoslav history, her memoir is underlined with a creative destabilisation of the workings of the Balkanist discourse.

Keywords:

• Balkanism
• Chernobyl Strawberries
• former Yugoslavia
• memoir
• Vesna Goldsworthy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Women's editorial team for their helpful suggestions and comments.

Notes

¹I am aware of possible problems in using ‘Eastern Europe’ as a term and agree with scholars arguing that the division of Europe (and of the world) into East and West is an invention that solidified during the Enlightenment (Wolff 1994). To go further would require another essay, but the variations of South Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Western Balkans and the recent construction ‘New Europe’ are wrought with tensions, exclusions, and ideological and political consequences; they have a shifting meaning depending on who uses the terms and for what purposes. I use it here to point broadly to a large body of scholarship on the Balkans emerging after 1989.

²See his book The Politics of Symbol in Serbia: Essays on Political Anthropology, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, London: Hurst, 2002, ‘Balkan Tower’ and recent articles available in English at http://pescanik.net/content/view/1793/152/ [accessed 10 March 2008].

³Although still unavailable in English, a good insight into his work can be found in Arsic's essay ‘Queer Serbs’ in Balkan as Metaphor (Bjelic and Savic 2003).

⁴An English editorial is available at http://www.zenskestudie.edu.yu/pages/genderandidentity.htm [accessed].