Until Baby Lasagna’s folk-techno breakthrough ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ leapt to the top of this year’s Eurovision odds, Croatia had never been among the Eurovision favourites since Doris Dragović’s ‘Marija Magdalena’ in 1999 – when Baby Lasagna was only two years old, Ukraine had not even begun to compete, and some members of Måneskin had not even been born.
Back in 1999, Croatia recording a first Eurovision win as an independent country would have seemed only a matter of time. Most of Yugoslavia’s nostalgically remembered light pop entries from the 1980s, including Dragović’s first Eurovision appearance in 1986 and Yugoslavia’s only winning song in 1989, had come from the Zagreb studio of Yugoslavia’s federal public broadcaster.
Zagreb hosted Eurovision 1990, with Tajči’s legendary home entry ‘Hajde da ludujemo’, days before the pro-independence Croatian Democratic Union would win multiparty elections, and weeks before RTV Zagreb would transform into Croatian Radio-Television (HRT), with the mission of promoting a Westernised, central European identity for the nation and separating from Yugoslav culture for good.
After making its independent Eurovision debut in 1993, Croatia took six top ten places in seven years between 1995 and 2001 – and then never again.
Where did it all go wrong?
As late as 2005–6 when established stars Boris Novković and Severina tried to mine the vein of Eurovision’s passion for ethnopop, Croatia could still expect to place just below the top ten (Novković came 11th, Severina 12th). Croatia’s next entry failed to qualify from the semi-final, the two next entries came 21st and 18th, and between 2010 and 2022 a dismal qualification record saw only two Croatian entries, in 2016–17, reach the grand final at all.
The broadcaster which had been so keen to join Eurovision in 1992 that it organised sovereign Croatia’s first national preselection before its European Broadcasting Union membership was even complete even skipped the contest altogether in 2014–15, after its attempt to celebrate the addition of traditional Dalmatian klapa singing to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list with a hastily-assembled klapa supergroup and tourist-trap video, ‘Mižerja’, fell flat in 2013.
Public finance problems, corruption, HRT management priorities, and the relatively lower stakes of being able to influence international perceptions of the nation through Eurovision once Croatia had EU membership in hand are all part of the story of Croatia’s Eurovision decline.
The tameness and Westernness of most of the songs even selected internally or chosen for HRT’s national final, Dora, since 2007 also suggests, however, an institutional fear of unleashing the kind of scandal Severina’s ‘Moja štikla’ caused in 2006 when her cheeky repackaging of folklore from the Dinaric highlands represented Croatia by combining her risqué humour with the most ‘Balkan’ of the folk traditions on the nation’s diverse cultural map.
HRT’s choice to allow Let 3 – who have played with that same folklore – to spin off a concept from their antimilitarist rock opera project into a Dora entry in 2023, then to give the veteran art-punk band the licence to transfer its satire of warmongering dictators to Eurovision with minimal changes, showed that creative risk was back on the menu, and earned Croatia its first grand final place since 2017.
Even then, producers did not originally choose ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ for Dora: the song that won such a landslide public vote from Croatian viewers that it scored more points than the other 15 finalists combined only moved up from HRT’s reserve list when another participant pulled out. Besides the anxious everyman of his performance or his back story as a metal guitarist going solo, Baby Lasagna’s persona is now also that of an underdog hero triumphing over corruption at the national broadcaster – what might in other circumstances be the plot of a post-Yugoslav Croatian film.
‘Rim tim tagi dim’ becoming so strong a favourite for Eurovision that Zagreb is among the European cities reserving their arenas for next May is ‘Moja štikla’’s revenge: proof that creative play with folklore, scaled up to the spectacle level that contemporary Eurovision demands, can put Croatian entries back into contention, and that the lode has been sitting there untapped all this while.
In the shadows
Marko Purišić, who took the name Baby Lasagna after leaving the folk metal band Manntra to start a solo career, comes from Umag on the tip of Croatia’s Istrian peninsula, almost the northernmost town before the Slovenian border and the still mildly contested Gulf of Piran.
Istria and the adjacent Gulf of Kvarner, where Let 3’s home town Rijeka is the largest city, both take pride in a cosmopolitan, multilingual identity which has often put the region at odds with homogenising patriotism at national level – and have now produced the two most talked-about Croatian Eurovision entries in years.
Manntra formed in Umag as teenagers, joining a list of musicians from the town which also includes Eurodance band Karma and the singer-songwriter Alka Vuica, whose kitsch image made her unusually able to explore Croatia’s Balkan hang-ups – and hint at sapphic relationships – in the mid-1990s’ and early 2000s’ Croatian pop scene. (The city council booked Vuica and Karma to make a summer dance video showing off Umag’s beach tourism in 2015.)
Except when the privately-owned Stella Maris resort plays host to the Sea Star electronic music festival or the Croatia Open tennis championships, Umag is somewhat off the map of Croatia’s headline tourist destinations. The hill towns and villages of inland Istria are even more so, though a regional ecotourism strategy aims to change that.
The 3.4 million views already gathered for the official video of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, filmed in the Umag countryside, are a promotional opportunity for Umag’s own brand that city leaders couldn’t fail to engage with: the city council and tourist board are even contributing to the logistical costs of Baby Lasagna’s performance in Malmö ‘so that Umag and Croatia will be represented in the “world” as they deserve.’
With just two online song releases before ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ to his name since leaving Manntra, Baby Lasagna’s Dora performance was his first as a lead vocalist, and the vulnerability he showed on Instagram and TikTok videos opening up about his confidence struggles immediately endeared him to a fan culture that commonly adores performances of ‘soft masculinity’ in its male idols.
Though only 28, Purišić has had the benefit of a decade’s experience in live music through Manntra, who began finding their way on to the German folk metal scene in 2017 by collaborating with the frontman of medieval metal band In Extremo, and saw their latest album without Purišić enter the German charts in 2023 – a level of exposure beyond the post-Yugoslav region of which many Croatian acts who are better-known at home only dream.
Manntra brought German folk metal style back to Dora in 2019 with their fourth-placed ‘In The Shadows’ (not the last Finnish coincidence in this post), where Purišić is just about visible in a grey tunic on the right:
Baby Lasagna’s folk metal and industrial background carries through into the lighter-hearted vibe of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, with strong influences of Rammstein, just like 2023’s Finnish Eurovision sensation Käärijä. ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ was always going to be compared to Käärijä’s ‘Cha cha cha’ because of its own driving riffs and its ability to explore both personal vulnerability and an actual social problem beneath hedonistic top-notes, even before Baby Lasagna’s Dora outfit turned out to also feature puffy sleeves – as able to inspire fan art as Käärijä’s green bolero in 2023, but in this case alluding to Istrian folk costume.
Those Rammstein-like riffs, similarly, also have roots in a wellspring of experimentation with local folk tradition by Istrian pop and rock musicians which dates back to the mid-1990s and even had a token presence at Dora but never came close to representing Croatia at Eurovision itself.
Ča, ča, ča, ča-ča-ča-ča
In the fraught cultural politics of mid-1990s Croatia, alternative-minded Istrian pop and rock musicians started affirming their regional identity by singing in their own dialect, creating a movement known as the ‘ča-val’ or ‘ča-wave’ (‘ča’ is the Istrian word for ‘what’, lending its name to the ‘čakavian’ dialect; standard literary Croatian, ‘štokavian’, says ‘što’).
Ča-val bands like Gustafi, from Pula, developed a laid-back musical idiom which expressed what they saw as the region’s mentality and claimed a full place for their own dialect in Croatian rock.
Ča-val overlapped with the ‘etno’ movement, where musicians across Croatia in the mid-1990s started exploring lower-profile regional folk traditions in more serious, authentic ways than mainstream showbusiness or TV folklore shows had been accommodating. The sound eventually crossed over into mainstream pop, with trained ethnomusicologist Lidija Bajuk and TV presenter Ivana Plechinger both presenting songs inspired by music from the northern region of Međimurje in Dora 1997.
Istria’s offerings to the etno movement were its traditional bagpipes (the ‘mih’) and oboe-like ‘sopile’ and ‘roženice’, played to the region’s distinctive six-tone musical scale.
In 1999, songwriter Livio Morosin and revivalist bagpiper Dario Marušić teamed up to record their defining Istrian etno album Bura, tramuntana, named for two winds that buffet the Istrian coast. Their combination of bagpipes, drumming, and electronic beats on one of its most experimental tracks created an effect not too far from ‘Rim tim tagi dim’:
Ča-val even trickled into Dora around 2000–1 in entries by its most chart-friendly representative, Alen Vitasović, and the etno musician / Radio Pula music editor Bruno Krajcar. Showcasing Istrian bagpipes, dialect and scale to variousextents, these typically appealed to voters in Istria and Kvarner but failed to resonate across the rest of the nation in the way that Let 3 and Baby Lasagna’s creative engagements with the region’s folklore would go on to do.
Like Let 3’s anti-war message, Baby Lasagna has also managed to speak to a serious social theme – the unprecedented scale of youth emigration which has become an ‘existential’ debate in Croatian society.
I’m going away and I sold my cow
Since the late 19th-century, hundreds of thousands of young men like the protagonist of ‘Rim tim tagi dim’, and smaller numbers of young women, have left impoverished Croatian towns and villages in search of a new life abroad. In the days before mass air travel evoked by Baby Lasagna’s sepia-toned lyrics video, these rite-of-passage journeys often meant decades-long or lifelong separation from the families, communities, crafts and traditions that emigrants were leaving behind.
The farmhouse setting of Baby Lasagna’s official video, filmed near Umag with local residents playing his friends and neighbours, wrapped a cinematic visual identity around the song and established a signature look for his Eurovision persona when it appeared online two days before Dora.
Finishing his last farm chores before a leaving party that becomes increasingly anarchic as night falls, fires are lit and home-made brandy flows, he shares his anxious emotions and his sense of humour with the viewer, rocks out in the barn with a band of metalheads in balaclavas inspired by traditional Istrian lacework (also on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list), and syncs the instantly memeable line ‘Meow, cat, please meow back’ with a second’s clip of him holding a one-eyed ginger cat, knowing exactly what the cat-based attention economy of digital culture will make of that.
The cat is his own cat, the internet will joyously find out. He has three cats. Their videos go on TikTok. The cats now have a children’s picture book.
The visuals on stage when the pyro finale kicks in are neon dancing cats. Of course they are. In Malmö there are supposed to be even more.
According to Croatia’s national statistics bureau, almost 350,000 Croatian citizens left the country between 2013 – the year Croatia joined the EU – and 2022, with sociologists finding that nearly three quarters of all young emigrants in their research were motivated by better salaries, employment prospects, and living standards abroad. Youth emigration on such a scale is widely debated in Croatian society as a crisis that has left villages in the poorest areas depopulated and primary schools closed down because they simply had no children to teach.
‘Rim tim tagi dim’ communicates the contradictory emotions of leaving for a better life abroad, voiced by a singer who could have followed that path himself – like his younger brother, now the drummer in German gothic rock band Mono Inc. – but chose the quiet of small-town life with his fiancée and his cats in a village of 300 people, Kaštelir.
Desiring to grow into maturity and modernity, his character simultaneously understands he is leaving behind the community that gives him his identity, so throws himself into celebrating with them one last time.
The emo angst of his chorus is familiar musical language for anyone who grew up in the same alternative subcultures, but meshes even more creatively with the lived angst of leaving your home to fulfil your dreams, quite possibly for good, because that home has failed to provide what you would have needed to fulfil them there. Under Baby Lasagna’s ‘round of decompress’ sits this collective, as well as personal, tragedy.
Such a predicament will be relatable across all Europe’s peripheries, but hit hardest in the Balkans, worst affected by the European financial crisis since 2007–8 and least well served by what they were promised on joining the EU. Beneath the fiction of Europe ‘uniting through music’ at Eurovision are structural inequalities between West and East which have left many south-east European broadcasters only able to intermittently take part.
Before Romania’s financial relationship with the EBU deteriorated so badly that its 2016 entry was disqualified from the contest at short notice and the broadcaster will not even broadcast Eurovision 2024, its 2015 entrants Voltaj dedicated their song ‘De la capăt’ – with one of Eurovision’s most poignant language switches – to the children left behind by Romanian parents who have seen no alternative to emigrating for work abroad if they want to be able to give their children a better life.
While Voltaj sang from the perspective of a migrant father, losing his own language as he reminds himself why he is away from his child, ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ is a young man’s eye-view of how migration and masculinity have resonated in this part of the world.
Maybe they also know our dance
Wrapped up in Baby Lasagna’s line about ‘those city boys’, ‘all so pretty and so advanced’ – which he has learned to deliver with an ever more camp wrist-flick as his confidence as a frontman has grown – are layers of meaning both inside and outside the song which point to post-Yugoslav masculinities in flux.
In the post-Yugoslav space’s conventional cultural politics of modernity and tradition, urban and rural, which have underpinned so many musical controversies like Severina’s scandal in 2006, the city is where the nation grows up beyond its peasant traditions to become cosmopolitan and European, and leave the Balkans behind: of course ‘they’ won’t want to know ‘our’ dance.
Though leave it until late at night, and – as anthropologists are still discussing – those dances from the village, the more Balkan the better, are where those city boys really go to cast off their modern European inhibitions, let their emotions out, and have their round of decompress. (Istria’s as far from the Balkans as you can get in Croatia, but in this context the village setting will still do.)
Eurovision’s cultural economy since the ethnopop winners of the 2000s further turns the conventional urban/rural cultural politics on its head. When the contest’s very concept as a popular music competition between nations rewards ideas which are simultaneously this contemporary in aesthetic and neotraditional in inspiration, those city boys will want to know our dance, so they can go off and win Eurovision with it.
Unlike the played-utterly-straight sentimentality of ‘Mižerja’, ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ remixes folklore into the kind of creative expression that has driven many of Eurovision’s most successful entries since Jamala and Salvador Sobral’s intimatewinning entries in 2016–17: where the personal authenticity of young masculine vulnerability and sensitivity, and a social anxiety with which neurodivergent fans have sensed something in common, meets the collective authenticity of a context that viewers in numerous countries may have lived themselves or witnessed in their migrant parents’ lives.
Since his Dora performance, Baby Lasagna’s journey from Eurovision has become inseparable from the digital fan culture he interacts with and his newfound national celebrity at home. The singer has been invited to advertise Kaufland supermarkets and Madre Badessa spirits (owned by the pop producer Tonči Huljić, composer of Doris’s ‘Marija Magdalena’ and three other Croatian Eurovision entries).
The broadcaster that did not judge ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ strong enough – or maybe judged it too strong – to initially select it for Dora has since coordinated flashmobs in Zagreb, Split, Zadar, Osijek and Umag with hundreds of schoolchildren, cheerleaders, police officers, firefighters, dance troupes and assorted local people performing the song’s dance.
The picture they paint of an often-so-divided nation uniting to celebrate Croatian achievement which, by leading the Eurovision odds, is already world-class is similar to the atmosphere that breaks out when the national football team heads towards the finals of the men’s World Cup, as it has a remarkable tendency to do.
Outspoken footballer Dejan Lovren might have denounced ‘Rim tim tagi dim’ as ‘demonic’ on the night it won Dora, but the Croatian football federation has jumped on the Baby Lasagna bandwagon by sending him a customised team shirt to bring him luck in Malmo. Even Croatia’s former HDZ president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović – no stranger to a patriotic bandwagon when Croatians do well at international competitions – has voiced her excitement for his song in terms that attempt to fit it into her own interpretation of national unity.
Fantastic to see a kind, modest, and grounded artist like Marko, who proudly celebrates his heritage and speaks of issues that resonate universally—offensive to none. Let’s rally behind him! Go Marko! Go 🇭🇷! #Eurovision2024#GoCroatia#BabyLasagna#RimTimTagiDim#VolimHrvatsku
— Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (@KolindaGK) May 3, 2024
Baby Lasagna travels to Malmö amid more excitement for a Croatian Eurovision entry than he will have been able to remember during his own lifetime, and the strongest chance of winning that Croatia has ever had as an independent country – in fact, probably higher chances than the only Croatian/Yugoslav winners, Riva, had in 1989.
Disunited by music
And yet, this is not a normal Eurovision. The apparent double standard of the EBU expelling Russian broadcasters from the contest in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but continuing to allow Israel’s broadcaster to participate despite the devastation Israeli forces have caused to Palestinian life and culture in Gaza since Hamas’s terror attack of 7 October 2023, has seen Eurovision added to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) list of targets for the first time in a year when the contest has been held outside Israel. (The EBU contends that the Russian and Israeli cases are not to be compared.)
Israeli forces’ new attack on Rafah started on the night of 6 May – last night, as I upload this post– with the Met Gala taking place in New York and with Eurovision week about to begin.
Contestants from ten countries (Baby Lasagna not among them) posted a joint statement in April about their discomfort at taking part in Eurovision in these circumstances, though PACBI still described their statement as a ‘patronising and colonial attitude’ that did not excuse them from ‘complicity in [the] artwashing’ of a ‘live-streamed genocide’.
Activists’ longstanding critique of how Israeli public diplomacy promotes the country as an LGBTQ+-friendly state to appeal to international LGBTQ+ public opinion, or what they call ‘pinkwashing’, means there has been particular pressure on queer artists with links to alternative scenes that advocate for solidarity with Palestine, like the UK’s Olly Alexander and Ireland’s Bambie Thug (who both signed the April statement), to withdraw from a contest in which, in the final reckoning, they may have been contractually compelled to take part. Every contestant in Malmö is entering a very different atmosphere than would have been expected after the highs of Liverpool in 2023 – an event that inspired the EBU to take up the BBC’s slogan ‘United By Music’ as a permanent one for the competition.
On the day of Eurovision’s heads of delegation meeting in Malmö to review and confirm each broadcaster’s performance plans, a public artwork outside Malmö Live event centre bearing that same slogan was defaced with fake blood by local protestors who oppose Eurovision being held in Malmö while Israel’s broadcaster is taking part.
Almost one in five musicians and cultural organisations who were due to be part of the city of Malmö’s cultural programming have pulled out in protest, including Malmö Dance Academy – who stated on Instagram that this was ‘because of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and in the West Bank’ – well-known acts from Sweden’s annual national final like Dotter and the 2024 runners-up Medina, and, reportedly, Malmö Pride, which is now no longer listed as a partner for a performance in the Eurovision fan village by Conchita Wurst that had been publicised only at the beginning of April.
Both security reasons and the drop in local buy-in seem to have made Malmö scale down its city-based activities, such as cancelling a public stage which should have hosted free performances in Malmö’s designated ‘Eurovision Street’ (remaining performances have moved into the fan village, which is easier to secure), and scaling back the ‘turquoise carpet’ ceremony which produced such dramatic photos from Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery last year that large brands immediately started contacting Liverpool’s museums service to book the space for advertising shoots.
Eurovision will not take over Malmö as Liverpool was praised for enabling it to do in 2023. The step change in musical creativity it has witnessed in recent years may also be threatened if the more alternative artists like Käärijä or Alexander who have given the event new life become dissuaded from participating, especially should PACBI’s boycott campaign become a standing one.
As the only city likely to meet the EBU’s hosting requirements should Croatia win, Zagreb has reserved the city’s arena for May 2025, and will organise a free public screening of the Eurovision grand final, as would usually only happen for major international sports matches. Just like Malmö, however, Zagreb would not reap the full benefits of hosting Eurovision if a repeat boycott hit the contest, or even if the brand’s image starts to alienate more of its once-faithful visitors and fans.
During the Obama presidency in the USA, the queer cultural theorist Lauren Berlant coined the phrase ‘cruel optimism’ to describe attachments to ideas of ‘the good life’ which cannot be fulfilled but, in our yearning for them, hold us back from what might be fulfilment otherwise.
Berlant’s theory has helped critical and feminist scholars make sense of the paradoxes of economic precarity in situations as diverse, and yet connected, as how young people navigate long-term unemployment in Turkey and why Nepalese Gurkhas wager their future happiness on training to work in militaries and private security companies that still subordinate them in paternalistic, pseudocolonial ways.
Migration as Baby Lasagna frames it is a cruel optimism: attachment to the good life that might be had abroad or in the big city, which might be materially more liveable if the cards fall right, pulls you away from the differently good life at home. But when the institution behind Eurovision as an event cannot, by its nature as an association of public service broadcasters responsible to their governments, deliver on all the hopes for justice that its fandom have projected on to it since at least Conchita Wurst’s apparently historic victory in 2014, feeling attached to Eurovision comes with a cruel optimism of its own.
Ukraine is the only country in Eurovision never to have failed to qualify from the semi-finals.
And in a happier year, that would be the first fact on fans’ minds when thinking about Kalush Orchestra’s chances in the competition.
Ten weeks ago, when Russian forces had just launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, far more urgent and horrific unknowns were pressing on Ukrainians and the watching world than whether their country would be in a position to send their entry to Eurovision in May. Under martial law, all men of military age, including the band members, were prohibited from leaving the country, while at least 5.7 million Ukrainians have fled abroad since the invasion began.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians are already thought to have died in the invasion, with the full extent of brutalities committed by the occupying forces in places like Mariupol still to be revealed, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have reportedly been deported to remote locations in Russia. Yet Ukraine’s victories around Kyiv and elsewhere, the determination of the Ukrainian public, and the military aid rallied by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have all meant that, in a war where Putin has targeted Ukraine’s very existence as a nation, Ukraine still endures.
Indeed, it wasn’t until 2 April, the same day that Ukrainian forces finished retaking control of the entire Kyiv region, that Ukraine’s public broadcaster UA:PBC announced Kalush Orchestra would travel to perform live in Turin after all.
Since 2014, when Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea and tried to create de facto Russian entities out of separatist uprisings, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Ukraine’s reactions to the provocation have become one of the most contentious geopolitical themes confronting Eurovision almost every year.
But from Ukraine’s earliest days in Eurovision, the contest has represented a platform for cultural diplomacy and an opportunity to convey narratives of Ukrainian cultural identity to a West that has often been scarcely able to differentiate between Ukraine and Russia – while the style and scale of 21st-century Eurovision contests also owes something to Ukraine.
Dai-na dai-na, wanna be loved, dai-na, gonna take my wild chances
Ukraine’s debut entry in 2003, Oleksandr Ponomariov’s ‘Hasta la vista’, looks with hindsight almost like Australia’s out-of-competition performance in Eurovision 2014 – an ambitious delegation’s first opportunity to gauge the scale of the contest and start working out what it would take to make Eurovision their own.
Besides the graphics of an Apollo rocket marked with the Ukrainian flag and the presence of a spinning contortionist dressed in light blue, Ponomariov’s song was a relatively undemanding production with the mildly Latin flavour that Estonia and Latvia had both brought to their winning songs in 2001 and 2002.
Riga, the host city in 2003, was the second in a string of capital cities on the eastern, northern and southern peripheries of Europe that would host the contest throughout the 2000s, as the prize for their countries winning Eurovision the previous year. Estonia’s surprise win in 2001 had become the perfect launchpad for a nation-branding strategy that Estonia’s national enterprise agency had already been preparing in any case: ‘Brand Estonia: Positively Transforming’ sought to reposition Estonia as a future-oriented, high-tech Nordic country and distance it from the ‘Soviet’ stereotypes that were still being projected on to it in Western eyes.
Whether or not, as Paul Jordan debates, ‘Brand Estonia’ really resonated with the Estonian public, Eurovision gave Estonia a springboard for its nation-branding that other broadcasters, and even governments, in central and eastern Europe couldn’t fail to notice. That mattered all the more in the context of the EU accession process, when getting recognised as a member or even a candidate meant showing that (as per a logic which set up western Europe as the supreme benchmark of progress) your country was ‘catching up’ with the West.
Ukrainian marketing agency CFC Consulting certainly had noticed, and according to Jordan – who interviewed both Estonian and Ukrainian Eurovision decision-makers for his doctoral research – the agency was instrumental in persuading the Ukrainian broadcaster NTU to start showing and participating in the competition.
The format of Eurovision, where winning countries’ broadcasters get the right to host, meant cities like Tallinn in 2002 or Riga in 2003 could become the symbolic centre of Europe for a night, answering back to western Europeans’ doubts about how ‘European’ their countries even were. In Riga, Turkey joined the debut winners’ roll of honour with Sertab Erener’s ‘Everyway That I Can’ – which packaged the erotic appeal of ‘harem’ stereotypes and the trendy sound of ‘Oriental R&B’ production into the first ever winning entry to be inspired by Balkan and eastern Mediterranean pop-folk.
To represent Ukraine in Istanbul, NTU (and CFC Consulting) found their perfect ambassador in Ruslana Lyzhychko – who had been developing her own ambitious ethnopop project based on repackaging the folklore of the Hutsul people of western Ukraine since 2002.
The Hutsuls and their supposedly timeless village lives in the Carpathian mountains – in the part of Ukraine that wasn’t occupied by the USSR until 1939 – have been romanticised and arguably objectified for decades as what the ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky calls the so-called ‘“wild folk” of Western Ukraine’. Sonevytsky, whose 2019 book Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Ukrainian cultural politics, starts her look at Ruslana’s ‘Hutsul project’ with Ruslana’s 2002 video ‘Znaiu ya’ (‘I know’).
Through what was then the most expensive music video ever produced in Ukraine, ‘Znaiu ya’ put Ruslana in the position of an explorer discovering the hidden secrets of Hutsul culture and conveying them to her audience, heralding a new stage in her career.
Musically, ‘Znaiu ya’ already exhibits some of the key features Ruslana carried over into her 2004 Eurovision entry ‘Wild dances’, including the loud calls of the Hutsul ‘trembita’ at the beginning, rhythms based on the traditional foot-stamping dances of Hutsul men, and beats accentuated by Ruslana’s tambourine. So did the rest of her 2003 Ukrainian album ‘Dyki tantsi’, which gave her Eurovision project its name.
What represented a small and exoticised part of the nation in a Ukrainian context, however, turned for the purposes of Eurovision into an exoticisation of Ukrainian culture itself. Ruslana’s image for the 2004 contest brought fur and leather costumes, fiery backdrops and ‘tribal’-style motifs together to create an ‘Amazon’ persona inspired by the mythologisation of Scythian warrior women who had lived in other parts of what is now Ukraine.
Many viewers outside Ukraine likely associated the look with Xena: Warrior Princess. And if we’re talking about exoticism and folk music from the Black Sea they’d have been more right to do so than they might have known, since (as another ethnomusicologist, Donna Buchanan, points out) the composer of Xena’s theme song, Joseph LoDuca, had himself been inspired by the polyphonic Bulgarian women’s singing which had become one of the most popular musical phenomena from this region on the 1990s world music scene.
Ruslana won Eurovision 2004 with a record-breaking score of 280 points (in a year when the introduction of a semi-final meant more countries could vote in the final than ever before), bringing Kyiv the chance to follow Tallinn, Riga and Istanbul and rebrand itself in western European eyes.
Four months later, though, Ukraine’s presidential election run-off led to mass demonstrations in Kyiv’s main square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), when authorities declared that the sitting prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, had beaten the opposition coalition’s leader Viktor Yushchenko and opposition supporters believed it was a fraudulent result.
We won’t stand this, no, revolution is on, ’cause lies be the weapon of mass destruction
Protestors occupied the Maidan until the result was overturned, taking Yushchenko’s campaign colour of orange as the symbol of their movement. Entertainers and public figures who supported the ‘Orange Revolution’ constantly visited the Maidan to keep up protestors’ morale, including the then-unknown hip-hop band GreenJolly who had recorded an anthem for the protests, and also Ruslana herself.
NTU’s selection process to choose the host entry for Eurovision 2005, with 45 announced acts across 15 semi-finals, had started in November 2004 before the Orange Revolution had even begun. By the time Ukraine’s Supreme Court had ordered a repeat run-off election and the Electoral Commission had declared Yushchenko the winner in January 2005, more than half of the heats had already taken place.
For the final on 27 February 2005, GreenJolly and three other acts were controversially given wildcards to go straight into the final, with GreenJolly performing their Orange Revolution anthem, ‘Razom nas bahato’.
Controversially, and reportedly at the behest of Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, GreenJolly won the final ahead of the prior favourite Ani Lorak, who was seen as a Yanukovych supporter – ensuring that the narrative of the Orange Revolution would carry directly into the competition. Eurovision’s rules against directly political messages meant that ‘Razom nas bahato’ had to take the lines about Yushchenko out of its chorus before it was allowed to take part.
The clips from the Orange Revolution that NTU inserted into GreenJolly’s pre-performance postcard, and the drummer’s orange shirt on stage, went a long way to making the connection clear.
More significant in Eurovision’s history than GreenJolly in the long run is probably how Ukraine and Kyiv approached hosting the contest, turning it into a touristic spectacle even more than had been the case with Tallinn, Riga and Istanbul. Throughout the week leading up to Eurovision, outdoor stages on the Maidan showcased Ukrainian musicians, and the government encouraged Western tourism by lifting visa requirements for EU visitors. The EU visitor visa regime was never reinstated after the contest, giving Ukraine an ongoing advantage over Russia in competing for tourists and their currency.
When Helena Paparizou won the Kyiv contest, her trophy was awarded by none other than Yushchenko himself, an unprecedented role for a head of state in a Eurovision final.
For almost a decade until the invasion of Crimea and Donbas forced Ukraine’s public broadcaster to miss the 2015 contest, Ukraine’s entries gave the country a trademark style at Eurovision that could be counted on to soar through the semi-finals and usually finished comfortably in the grand final’s top ten.
Show me your love, show me how much you care, talk to my heart, whisper my name
Most Ukrainian entries over the next few years followed a similar pattern, crafted to appeal to the public ‘televote’ that awarded 100% of the points in Eurovision until 2009: uptempo songs with a slight ethnopop flavour, built around female singers with assertive and sexually confident personas who were often already well-known in Russia and other neighbouring countries as well as Ukraine, and equipped with a new and unique staging concept every year.
Tina Karol’s ‘Show me your love’ in 2006 thus came with a crew of leaping ‘Cossack’ dancers who skipped rope during the instrumental break; Ani Lorak, three years after her disappointment in 2005, performed the fan-favourite ‘Shady lady’ in 2008 atop a set of giant light boxes; Svetlana Loboda brought shirtless gladiators, stiltwalkers, her own drum kit, and a set of three interlinked ladder/gyroscopes called the ‘Hell Machine’ to perform ‘Be my Valentine (Anti-crisis girl)’ on stage in Moscow in 2009.
Whether that crisis was the European financial crisis, the crisis following the Russian-Georgian war, or part of a Thunderdome far future was left to viewers’ imagination, and by the time gladiators were pulling Loboda’s drum kit across stage while she beat out a drum solo surrounded by Ukrainian flags, hardly anyone would have been asking anyway.
The celebrity culture that made Karol, Lorak and Loboda into entertainment personalities was often not to the taste of Ukrainian feminists, especially those who campaigned against the objectification of women, pornography and sex work. A co-founder of the controversial activist group FEMEN, who became internationally notorious in the early 2010s for their topless protests, told the feminists Olha Plakhotnik and Mariya Mayerchyk in 2010 that the media’s relentless sexualisation of female pop stars had even helped to inspire FEMEN’s own tactics:
I worked in show business for a year, and all this time I was curious why […] the work of civic organizations and civic movements is virtually unknown. […] But every one knows that, say, Tina Karol ripped her dress. And everyone is excited to look at that. The news of, I don’t know, say, Ani Lorak losing her panties is exciting. And every one is terribly excited about it.
In 2007, however, NTU had turned to a different corner of Ukrainian popular culture for its Eurovision entry, and delivered not just Ukraine’s second iconic representative but an act whose image has been taken up in Eurovision fan culture to symbolise the kitsch spirit of the 21st-century contest itself: Verka Serduchka, the creation of comedian Andriy Danylko, who like Ruslana had had a well-developed creative product at home before being chosen to translate it into Eurovision abroad.
‘Dancing lasha tumbai’, with its disco-ball uniforms, accordion riffs and semi-nonsense lyrics, is for many viewers the excess that defines Eurovision, and came second in Eurovision 2007 behind Marija Šerifović’s ‘Molitva’. As a cross-gender performance, Verka’s persona was also received by many viewers as one more in the line of Eurovision’s drag queens. In Ukrainian, and Russian, media culture, however, Verka had much more culturally specific meanings.
Verka, as portrayed by Danylko since the late 1990s, is a boisterous sleeper-train conductor swept along by the many transformations of postsocialist Ukraine, and speaking the mixture of Ukrainian and Russian known as Surzhyk, like many Ukrainians from her social background. As Sasha Raspopina writes, ‘anyone could name a “Serduchka” from their own lives’, not just in Ukraine but anywhere else which had been under Soviet rule.
At least until she came to Eurovision, Galina Miazhevich argues, Verka had less to do with Western practices of drag and more to do with the Soviet and post-Soviet form of subversive irony known as steb or stiob – though the very fact that Verka was a cross-gender character still led one Ukrainian parliamentary deputy to criticise her selection using anti-intersex terms.
Once at Eurovision, however, Verka and Danylko both found out she could also be seen through the lens of drag, and her post-contest album, Dancing Europe, closed out with a semi-remix of her entry titled ‘Evro Vision Queen’.
On top of all that, the song’s nonsense title and Verka’s naïve persona gave the entry just enough cover for Verka to repeatedly sing lyrics that sound very, very like the words ‘Russia, goodbye’.
Rather than argue about whether ‘lasha tumbai’ really was the Mongolian word for ‘whipped cream’ (supposedly no such phrase exists), the EBU of 2007 let it through.
I want to see ‘Russia, goodbye!’
Verka notwithstanding, Ukrainian Eurovision entries after 2007 didn’t go on to say ‘Russia, goodbye!’ at once – just as Russia continued to be an important TV and live performance market for many Ukrainian stars. Ani Lorak’s ‘Shady lady’ was composed by the serial Russian Eurovision entrepreneur Philipp Kirkorov, who represented Russia himself in 1995 and has moved on to produce six Russian and Moldovan entries since 2014.
(How involved he’ll be in future contests is another matter, though, especially with future Russian participation in question: Lithuania and Ukraine banned him from entering their countries in 2021, and Estonia in 2022, making an increasing number of potential host countries where he wouldn’t even be able to appear.)
In 2008 Lorak was Ukraine’s second Eurovision runner-up in a row in Belgrade, but Dima Bilan won the contest, meaning Moscow would host Eurovision in 2009.
Russia’s attack on Georgia in August 2008, between the two contests, turned even more of a political lens on to the 2009 contest than there would already have been given the fact that Eurovision had become well established as a space for simultaneously celebrating LGBTQ+ and national pride, whereas since 2006 every attempt to hold Pride in the Russian capital had been banned by Moscow’s mayor.
Georgia’s broadcaster, which had only started competing in Eurovision in 2007, at first declared it would withdraw from the Moscow contest, then changed its mind after winning Junior Eurovision in November 2007. Treading the same linguistic tightrope as Verka’s ‘Lasha tumbai’, Stephane and 3G’s ‘We don’t wanna put in’ left listeners in no doubt as to the fate it desired for the Russian leader; ordered to change the lyrics by the EBU, Georgian television withdrew instead.
Loboda’s Ukrainian flags planted in the Moscow stage, in contrast, were well within the rules: who can object to a national flag when Eurovision itself makes them integral to the contest’s visual identity? From 2022’s viewpoint, they might seem to assert much more resistance to neoimperial Russian ambitions against Ukrainian sovereignty than they necessarily did in 2009, yet all the ingredients necessary to make that interpretation were already present then.
Russia’s own entrant in 2009, meanwhile, was from Ukraine herself: Anastasia Prikhodko was born in Kyiv but had taken part in a series of the Russian talent show Fabrika zvyozd in 2007, as Ukrainian contestants used quite often to do. She had already been eliminated from the 2009 Ukrainian final, in circumstances that led to her suing the organisers, before entering the Russian selection process instead. Her entry ‘Mamo’ (‘Oh, mother’), with lyrics in both Russian and Ukrainian, became the Russian host entry.
A dark ballad about a young woman confessing her mother had been right to warn her against running away with an untrustworthy man, ‘Mamo’ has had its own retrospective interpretations projected on to it since Putin’s launch of a full-scale invasion aimed at bringing Ukraine back under Moscow’s control: could it even have been Mother Russia she was meant to be singing to? Prikhodko herself, however, remained in Ukraine, made two more attempts to represent Ukraine at Eurovision, and joined the Euromaidan protests in 2013-14; after Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014 she gave up singing in Russian, and has been trying to build a political career with Yulia Tymoshenko’s party since 2018.
Ukraine’s entries in 2010 and 2011 continued with female soloists, though without the eroticism of the Karol/Lorak/Loboda years. Alyosha’s ‘Sweet people’ in 2010 was pitched as a warning against letting the world slide into environmental catastrophe, with a video filmed at Pripyat in the Chornobyl exclusion zone in Polesia – the first time a Ukrainian entry had alluded to the disaster that had fuelled many negative Western stereotypes of their country.
As much as it might have seemed to take Loboda’s ‘anti-crisis’ theme a step further, ‘Sweet people’ was only a last-minute, third-chance choice to represent Ukraine: NTU had first planned for a different artist, Vasyl Lazarovych, to sing Ukraine’s entry, then had to organise two different national finals in the space of a month, only for Alyosha’s original winning song to turn out to have been released before Eurovision’s eligibility deadline.
Mika Newton’s ‘Angel’, in 2011, nearly faced reselection as well after vote-rigging allegations, but the re-run was cancelled after the other two artists who would have been featured, Zlata Ognevich and Jamala, both decided not to take part. Newton’s staging featured a live performance by the Ukrainian sand painter Kseniya Simonova, whose appearances in Ukraine’s Got Talent had racked up a remarkable figure for the time of 2 million views.
For 2012, Ukrainian television knew that the country was about to be hosting a mega-event on an even greater scale than Eurovision 2005 – the men’s football European Championships, which Ukraine in co-operation with Poland had successfully bid for in 2005-7 (not that long after Kyiv had hosted Eurovision for the first time).
Welcome, girl and boy, take my hand, let’s enjoy
Ukraine’s preparations for Euro 2012 included major upgrades for the stadia in Kyiv and Kharkiv, two new stadia in Donetsk and Lviv, and new international airport terminals serving all four host cities to accommodate the tens of thousands of foreign fans who would be travelling unprecedented distances in a European football tournament to follow their teams.
(During the first phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-15, Donetsk’s airport became the site of a 242-day stand by Ukrainian troops who became mythologised in Ukraine as the ‘cyborgs of Donetsk’; Ukraine’s other airports are now all closed to passenger traffic and have been targets of Russian missile attacks.)
Gaitana’s uptempo entry ‘Be my guest’ doubled as a song of welcome for visiting football fans later in the summer, creating the same kind of sport/Eurovision crossover as the French entry in 2010, which France Télevisions also used as a theme for its coverage of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Kyiv-born and with a Congolese father, Gaitana also stood out in Ukraine as Ukrainian showbusiness’s most prominent Afro-Ukrainian. The central structure, or central myth, of Eurovision as a competition between representatives of national musical cultures means that contestants don’t just perform their songs but take on the symbolic role of representing their nations. Players and fans of colour before Euro 2012 had already been expressing concerns about racism in Poland and Ukraine, and Gaitana herself had faced opposition from a member of the far-right Svoboda party, who attacked her song as sending ‘a vision of Ukraine as a country located somewhere in remote Africa’.
Within Ukraine, Gaitana’s star image has arguably involved a certain amount of self-exoticism around the African elements of her heritage (Adriana Helbig in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration, for instance, comments that Gaitana’s videos in the late 2000s projected a ‘hypersexualised’, ‘alluring and mysterious’ persona, leveraging associations between sexuality and Blackness and remediating Soviet-era notions of Africa as a faraway, exotic land).
On the Eurovision stage, however, her floral ‘vinok’ or wreath – traditionally worn by marriageable girls – framed Gaitana as equally as authentic a carrier of Ukrainian tradition and national womanhood as any white Ukrainian woman.
In its first ten years at Eurovision, then, Ukraine had already been energetically using the contest as a platform to define and communicate certain narratives of Ukrainian national identity – as hospitable, welcoming, creative, ‘wild’, but with a knowing ability to package that ‘wildness’ for Western tastes that proved Ukrainian creativity was at ‘European’ standards.
To many of the Ukrainian students and other members of the public Jordan interviewed in 2007-8, Ukraine’s early entries were quite clearly representing the culture of western Ukraine and sometimes appeared as an elite-driven, rather than popular, narrative of the nation. Debates within Ukraine about both Verka and Gaitana, in particular, continued to illustrate the ‘ambiguity and complexity’ of defining Ukrainianness itself.
Somewhat on a principle of ‘turn and turn about’, Ukraine’s national final in 2013 was won by Zlata Ognevich, one of Mika Newton’s unsuccessful contenders in 2011. Here too the delegation hired a Ukrainian known for something else to join the stage performance: Igor Vovkovinskiy, who carried the 1.65-m Ognevich on stage dressed as a medieval giant, then held the record as the tallest living person from both Ukraine and the USA (though sadly died in August 2021, aged 38).
Ognevich’s ‘Gravity’ was hardly the only Eurovision entry around that time to nod to fantasy medievalism, two years into Game of Thrones’s reign as a transnational cultural phenomenon, and it’s probably not fanciful to hear hints of Disney and Idina Menzel in there (Menzel having made her name with Wicked’s showstopper ‘Defying gravity’) even though Frozen was still six months away.
In 2013-14, Ukraine was about to go through even greater upheaval than the Orange Revolution – though, unlike in 2004-5, it would take several years to see its effects on the Eurovision stage.
Tick tock, can you hear me go tick tock?
For all the hopes of change that Ukrainians had invested in Yushchenko on the Maidan in 2004, in the long run public disaffection with politics after the Orange Revolution remained the order of the day. A rivalry had broken out between Yushchenko and his Orange Revolution ally Tymoshenko; ruling coalitions had repeatedly failed to form stable governments, causing new parliamentary elections; and in 2010 Viktor Yanukovych, Yushchenko’s opponent in 2004, defeated Tymoshenko in the presidential elections.
Believing in closer relations with Russia, Yanukovych changed his mind about signing an association agreement with the EU in November 2013: the activists who gathered on the Maidan to protest the decision, and the artists – including Ruslana again – who flocked to the Maidan to support them, were mobilising against Yanukovych for a second time.
(Ruslana was then the only Ukrainian Eurovision entrant to have served as a parliamentary deputy, representing Yushchenko’s faction in 2006-07; since the second fall of Yanukovych, Prikhodko represented Tymoshenko’s party in 2018-19 and Ognevich represented the Radical Party of Oleh Liashko in 2014-15.)
Between November 2013 and February 2014, the ‘Euromaidan’ protests escalated into what Ukrainians know as the Revolution of Dignity, as Yanukovych used increasingly authoritarian tactics against protestors and activists formed self-defence groups in response – a pattern of popular mobilisation which primed the Ukrainian public to react so quickly to Russian invasion in 2022, but also gave Ukrainian far-right movements an unsettling place in the revolution’s history, since their members had been among the first to be ready to fight.
On 21 February, after three days of activists marching on parliament under police sniper fire, Yanukovych signed a deal with the opposition calling for a unity government, and fled Kyiv the next day. A new government could be expected to distance itself from Russia again and move closer to the EU. Putin’s Russia considered the revolution to have been a coup d’etat, and Russian security services stirred up pro-Russian demonstrations in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. The first pro-Russian demonstrations in Crimea took place on 23 February, the same day as the closing of the Sochi Winter Olympics, and on 27 February Russian special forces seized the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol so that the annexation could begin.
On 6-7 April, Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk started the process of declaring themselves independent republics. Fierce fighting in Donbas between Ukrainian forces and the separatist militias, which had covert Russian backing, broke out and lasted until the ‘Minsk II’ ceasefire in February 2015, though hostilities along the line of separation never ended, and more than 2 million people had fled the separatist-held areas.
None of this background was reflected in Ukraine’s 2014 Eurovision entry, which had been selected through a national final in December 2013. Unlike in 2005, no serious attempts were made to change it after the revolution – not only would time have been much tighter (Yanukovych was ousted in the last week of February, and Eurovision entries would have to be confirmed by mid-March), but the emergency in Crimea and Donbas was already breaking out.
Instead, Mariya Yaremchuk’s ‘Tick tock’ went down in Eurovision history as the performance which gave Måns Zelmerlow and Petra Mede’s ‘Love love peace peace’, then the 2020 Netflix movie, their man in a hamster wheel.
The escalation of the war in Donbas left NTU unable to commit to participating in Eurovision 2015 (leaving the Vienna contest ‘building bridges’ all the way to Australia while leaving out Ukraine) – so Ukrainian television’s first opportunity to communicate a national narrative in these new conditions would be 2016, when NTU launched a partnership with the commercial network STB. The outcome was another landmark in Ukraine’s Eurovision history.
Where is your heart? Humanity rise
With hindsight, the talent that both Jamala and her stage director Konstantin Tomilchenko poured into channeling the personal and collective emotions of ‘1944’, and our knowledge of what’s happened in Ukraine since then, might make it seem as if Ukraine would always have been the preordained winner of Eurovision 2016.
The pre-contest discourse, however, was much more about whether as contentious, divisive and politicised a song as ‘1944’ was widely seen to be could appeal to juries and audience members across the whole of Europe. Direct political messages are, of course, banned in Eurovision, as NTU had found with GreenJolly’s lyrics in 2005; Eurovision’s reference group had however concluded that ‘1944’ did not break the rules, presumably because it was not directly commenting on the politics of the day.
From academic perspectives on history and memory, of course, few things are more political than commemorating the past, above all when that past has immediate resonances with a conflict which is still going on: indeed, conveying a narrative of a conflict in the present by framing it as a continuation of a conflict that happened in the past is one of the most foundational discursive moves to look out for in studying historical memory.
As expansive as one might like the definition of ‘political’ to be in many other contexts, the fact that the reference group applied a much narrower definition worked in Jamala’s favour – and is probably important for creative freedom at the contest in a wider sense.
When necessary, Jamala could parry allegations that the song was political by explaining that it was about what her own Crimean Tatar great-grandparents had suffered in 1944 when her people were deported from Crimea. Any viewer knowing that Stalin had ordered those deportations and that Putin has looked to Stalinism as an era of lost Russian greatness, however, could already fill in the gaps with the present; while the song’s evocation of the traumas of ‘1944’, and Jamala’s skill in communicating vocal anguish, could also speak more widely to viewers across the rest of Europe whose own family histories had been scarred by the Second World War.
By the time of the contest, Jamala, whose grandparents were still living in occupied Crimea, could openly tell journalists that ‘of course [the song] is about 2014 as well’.
The song’s opening lines, graphic by Eurovision standards (‘When strangers are coming, they come to your house / they kill you all and say “We’re not guilty”’) deftly explained how Ukrainian public diplomacy would want European viewers to see through Russian disinformation about responsibility for violence in Crimea and Donbas. The chorus in Crimean Tatar incorporated allusions to a Crimean Tatar folk song understood as a protest against Stalin’s deportations (‘Ey, güzel Qırım’), and her virtuoso ‘melismatic wail’ over the sound of a duduk worked, as Sonevytsky explains it, to ‘include the Eurovision audience as co-participants in the experience of grieving, of experiencing anguish over loss’.
‘1944’ might well not have been organisers’ ideal winner in 2016: ‘Love love peace peace’, that contest’s legendary interval act, even joked that winning the competition with a song about war, like Abba’s ‘Waterloo’, ‘is not something we recommend’.
Yet in showing that a song with such complex emotions and politics could win, it arguably helped to make a step forward for the health of creative diversity at Eurovision – even if Kyiv hosting Eurovision 2017 meant that contentious public diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia was going to be at the centre of the contest’s politics for another year.
Time to find truth, time against the lies
Eurovision 2017 took place in a Ukraine which, since 2014, had seen sweeping government interventions against Russian-language media and remaining traces of Soviet public memory. A law in June 2016 introduced a quota for Ukrainian-language music and programming on Ukrainian broadcasters – similar to a move France made in 1994 to protect French culture from Anglophone competition, but particularly likely to affect Russian cultural products, in a context where Ukrainians experience Putin’s denials of Ukrainian nationhood as a continuation of 19th-century Russian imperial repression of Ukrainian linguistic and cultural expression.
(Since then, a further law in 2019 has defined Ukrainian as the only state language, and introduced further requirements on education and media in languages other than Ukrainian which operate most stringently for content in Russian.)
Becoming the first, and still only, city in central and eastern Europe to ever host Eurovision twice meant that Kyiv and Ukraine would not just be showing themselves off to ‘Europe’ again but illustrating how much had changed there since 2005 – while using the diplomatic platform of hosting the contest to counter Russian disinformation narratives about Ukraine.
O.Torvald, a rock band from Poltava, won Ukraine’s national final in February 2017 with the song ‘Time’ – a second Ukrainian host entry by an all-male group (in a year also featuring an unusually all-male presenter team), in contrast to the iconic female performances which had defined most of Ukraine’s Eurovision history to date.
O.Torvald’s national final performance featured the band playing in what appeared to be the aftermath of an explosion, with red ticking clocks seemingly implanted in their chests counting down a three-minute time limit and the frontman Yevhen Halych spreading his arms during the breaks as if waiting to be shot. When the song and countdown ended, the band members stood stunned as whatever was impending failed to happen, and the countdown at the back of the stage started ticking back up in green.
‘Time’ wouldn’t be the last occasion that Ukrainian Eurovision entries toyed with apocalyptic themes, but the rawness of the national final performance was significantly toned down for the contest itself: with a more abstractly dystopian vibe, the band performed in outfits that looked a little like futuristic chainmail in front of a giant, hologram-style head.
Compared to ‘1944’, or even O.Torvald’s original performance, reading politics into the version of ‘Time’ staged at Eurovision would have taken much more active interpretive work. The main political narratives of Kyiv’s hosting Eurovision were instead offstage. Questions over whether LGBTQ+ visitors would be welcome and safe in the Ukrainian capital were being intensively fielded by Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko, the British Embassy and British Council, and activists from Kyiv Pride, who were only just beginning to win municipal support for the marches they had been organising since 2013.
The slogan of Eurovision 2017, ‘Celebrate diversity’, could but did not have to allude to LGBTQ+ diversity as well as the diversity of national and ethnic cultures, and the same strategic ambiguity attended the city authorities’ decision to temporarily rename Kyiv’s late-Soviet-era People’s Friendship Arch the ‘Arch of Diversity’ and paint it in rainbow colours; this decoration would last through Eurovision and Kyiv Pride. (Far-right activists temporarily halted the paint job during Eurovision week.) The arch itself had been scheduled for dismantling since May 2016 under Ukraine’s new decommunisation laws, and in April 2022 Klitschko did order the sculpture of two friendly Ukrainian and Russian workers beneath the arch to be removed.
Post-2014 Ukraine’s policy of cultural separation from Russia, made in the context of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Donbas and its ongoing strategy of ‘hybrid war’, directly affected the 2017 contest when security services announced that the Russian representative Yulia Samoilova would not be allowed to enter Ukraine.
Dozens of Russian entertainers since 2014 who had taken stances in support of Putin or the annexation of Crimea had already been added to a ‘list of persons posing a threat to the national security of Ukraine’ compiled by the Ukrainian security service (SBU) and culture ministry, and Russians were also ineligible to enter Ukraine if they had made what Ukrainian law considered to be illegal visits to Crimea (travelling there directly from Russia, without crossing a Ukrainian border post).
Samoilova, who had been runner-up on Russian X Factor in 2013 and appeared in the opening ceremony of the Sochi Paralympics, was not an established enough star to have come to Ukrainian security services’ attention, but had performed in Crimea in 2015. The day after she was selected for Eurovision, the SBU announced that she could be banned from entry to Ukraine, causing a month-long stand-off that ended in Russia withdrawing from the 2017 contest.
The circumstances of the tussle over Samoilova, who has spinal muscular atrophy and performs from her wheelchair, left room for suspicion that those responsible for selecting her had exploited her disability for extra sympathy. Russia selected her again for Eurovision 2018, where her song became the only Russian entry to date not to qualify from the semi-finals – at the time leaving only Ukraine and Australia with a 100% qualification record.
Ukraine’s own 2018 entry, ‘Under the ladder’, might have caused technical headaches but at least not political ones: Mélovin began the song by bursting out of a hydraulic coffin ten feet above the stage, and ended it sitting at another of the gimmicks celebrated in ‘Love love peace peace’, a burning fake piano. (Retrospectively, Mélovin now figures as Ukraine’s first LGBTQ representative, having come out as bi while performing at a Kyiv music festival in 2021.)
The programme of cultural sanctions against Russia came back to bite Ukraine’s Eurovision participation in 2019, when Maruv won the national final but was forced to pull out because she was not prepared to sign a contract with UA:PBC agreeing not to perform in Russia for some months after the contest. In 2017-18, as Tatiana Zhurzhenko notes, the Ukrainian parliament had debated several proposals to directly ban or sanction Ukrainian artists touring in Russia, sparking wider discussion about whether such so-called ‘unpatriotic behaviour’ should be left to the music industry to regulate or governed by the law.
UA:PBC had made its stance on the matter unequivocal, and so had Jamala – who had put Maruv on the spot during the final by role-playing a Eurovision press conference and asking Maruv the ‘very uncomfortable question’ of whether or not she believed that Crimea was Ukraine.
As a result, Ukraine never found out whether Maruv would have kept up the country’s 100% qualification record – though the hypersexualised style of ‘Siren song (Bang!)’ might have gone somewhat out of fashion since Eurovision’s all-televote years.
Siyu, siyu, siyu, siyu zelenesenki
Before Covid-19 wrote 2020 into Eurovision history as the only year when the contest has ever had to be cancelled in almost seven decades, Rotterdam 2020 was already going to open a new chapter in Ukraine’s own Eurovision history – as the first time a Ukrainian entry had ever been performed solely in Ukrainian.
Jamala’s lines in Crimean Tatar and Verka’s phrases in German and Surzhyk aside, every Ukrainian entry since 2006 had been wholly in English; Ruslana had sung predominantly in English with some words of Ukrainian, and even GreenJolly had mixed Ukrainian and English together.
‘Solovey’, by the electronic folk band Go_A, both updated Ukraine’s reputation for repackaging folklore as expertly-crafted Eurovision spectacle into the 2020s, and helped to express a creative spirit that Zhurzhenko has described as a ‘cultural revolution’ in Ukraine since Euromaidan.
This creative revival was characterised, Zhurzhenko writes, by ‘the active role in the long-due reforms claimed by a new generation of artists, cultural managers and activists, the redefinition of the very notion of Ukrainian culture (such as reclaiming the Ukrainian contribution to what is usually labelled Russian avantgarde and Soviet modernism), the growing understanding of Ukraine as a multicultural polity and, finally, the new appreciation of Ukrainian culture as an instrument of soft power’ – just as Jamala had proven in 2016.
Founded in 2012 by keyboardist/percussionist Taras Shevchenko (who shares his name with Ukraine’s national poet), Go_A’s four-piece membership also includes guitarist Ivan Hryhoriak, folkloric multi-instrumentalist Ihor Didenchuk, and the hypnotic vocals and stage presence of Kateryna Pavlenko, who learned traditional ‘white voice’ singing from her grandmother during her childhood in Polesia and trained in folklore at Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts.
How the transfixing production of ‘Solovey’ would be translated on to a Eurovision stage was one of the most anticipated questions of the 2020 Eurovision season – until the contest was cancelled and Go_A’s participation was rolled over to 2021.
Eurovision 2021’s standing as an instant classic in the contest’s history owes much, of course, to the collective emotions of being able to come together once again and share in the rituals of the Eurovision year – but also, perhaps, to the fact that the many acts from 2020 reconfirmed for 2021 had had months longer than usual to prepare their songs.
Go_A were no exception, and worked on three different options before settling on ‘Shum’, a song they had released online in January 2021. Trimmed to fit into Eurovision’s three-minute time limit and differentiate itself more from the traditional folk song about awakening the spring which had inspired it, the Eurovision version of ‘Shum’ premiered in March with a video reimagining the spring ritual as a post-apocalyptic rave, filmed in forests near the vicinity of Chornobyl.
Second only to Måneskin in the public vote at Eurovision 2021, and indeed in the contest’s year-end global streaming stats, ‘Shum’ captivated its audience from Kateryna’s first note through to its ever-accelerating finale – while, as with Ruslana and Xena, any resemblance one might have perceived to the style of The Matrix very much worked in its favour too.
Even in strictly musical terms, following up on the phenomenon of ‘Shum’ in 2022 might have seemed a nigh-impossible task – though that didn’t deter Didenchuk, who re-entered Ukraine’s national selection in 2022 as the flute-player of his other band, Oleh Psiuh’s folk/rap project Kalush Orchestra.
Remember your ancestors, but write your own history
Since ‘1944’ and its response to the Russian annexation of Crimea, at the very latest, Eurovision has represented an explicit, not just implicit, site of Ukrainian public diplomacy, on top of the role it has had as a platform for communicating narratives of Ukrainian national identity ever since 2003-4.
(With that public diplomacy function in mind, in fact, Jamala’s infamous question to Maruv – as coercive as it seemed on the night – might not have been an unrealistic reflection of the role that Ukrainian TV would have expected a national representative to play in the Eurovision press circus.)
After weeks when Russian forces had been massing at the Ukrainian border, Ukraine and its allies were already on high alert for an imminent invasion when the national final took place on 12 February. Knowledge of what might be to come gave the competition a sombre extra layer of meaning: as well as competing for the right to represent Ukraine at Eurovision, would they also be auditioning for no less than the role of begging allies to save their very nation if the worst warnings came true?
Kalush Orchestra and their tribute to Psiuh’s mother Stefania came second on the night behind Alina Pash, another 1990s-born musician who experiments with fusions of rap and Ukrainian folklore. Pash’s song ‘Tini zabutykh predkiv’ combined strategies that both Jamala and Ruslana had used in winning entries: Jamala’s emotional intensity of describing her own family history in the context of national tragedy, and Ruslana’s ability to present herself as a mediator of Carpathian and Hutsul folklore for a modern age.
The song shared its title, translating to ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, with the famous film directed by Sergei Parajanov in 1964-5 which re-romanticised the Hutsuls of western Ukraine – and which influenced Ruslana’s Hutsul project to such an extent that the trembita calls introducing ‘Wild dances’ follow very closely the calls over the title sequence of Parajanov’s film.
As a historical narrative, it referenced a free Ukrainian people dating back to pre-Christian times, the early Slavic form of popular assembly known as the ‘viche’, and the role of the hetmans and Cossacks in defending their land – thus directly resisting the imperialist narrative of Ukrainians as a people without history that Putin’s propaganda had been carrying abroad, and arguing that the Ukrainian people had a claim to the land dating back centuries further than the claims of any Russian-centred state.
Its English-language rap section vocalised Pash’s creative identity and patriotic duty to her people as aligned with the work of Dumas, Dante, Picasso, Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm – suggesting Ukraine belonged equally at the centre of European high culture, and touching off the national cultural reference points of almost as many countries as Zelenskyy has managed to address in his own televised addresses to the leaders and parliaments of the liberal West. Her performance ended by projecting a map of Ukraine in its internationally recognised borders, including the whole of Crimea, plus Donbas.
‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’ practically foretold itself playing out as the winning reprise of Eurovision 2022, in other words – until it started being reported that Pash had committed one of the cardinal sins of post-2014 Ukraine’s ‘cultural revolution’ by illegally visiting Crimea herself in 2015.
Vidbir’s rules, on paper, should have prevented the national selection being derailed by a second Crimea scandal in three years, since all artists were expected to confirm that they had not performed in Russia or crossed through it to visit Crimea since 2014. As the authenticity of documents her team had shown UA:PBC about her visit started being questioned, Pash pulled out of Eurovision of her own accord.
Ten days later, Ukraine’s representatives for 2022 were finally confirmed as Kalush Orchestra – who had been vocal since the final about irregularities they believed had taken place in the jury vote, which had narrowly awarded Pash victory in the first place.
Two days after that, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began – and Mama Stefania, like so many suffering mothers and grandmothers in the wartime media of this and other conflicts (not least the Yugoslav wars), has come to symbolise the suffering of the Ukrainian nation as a collective.
Psiuh’s promise to his mother that ‘I’ll always find my way home, even if all roads are destroyed’, means something else altogether when millions of Ukrainians are separated from their loved ones by ruined roads and bridges or by battle lines: as Psiuh told the Associated Press from Turin, ‘After it all started with the war and the hostilities, it took on additional meaning, and many people started seeing it as their mother, Ukraine’.
‘Stefania’ itself, meanwhile, is already soundtracking more than 150,000 TikTok videos, many of them showing the new daily life of Ukrainian social media users who have joined the military or relaying the ubiquitous videos of Ukrainian tractors towing away abandoned Russian tanks. When Ukrainian scholars reflect on the culture of everyday life in wartime (as Croatian scholars found themselves having to do three decades ago), Kalush Orchestra’s song would already have been part of the story even if the band had never gone to Turin.
Even if all roads are destroyed
By giving the band members permission to leave Ukraine to promote their entry internationally and to perform in the contest live (which almost all of them took up – only the net-wearing hypeman, Johnny Strange, stayed behind in Ukraine’s territorial defence, to be replaced for Turin by Salto Nazad’s Sasha Tab), the Ukrainian state has acknowledged how important Eurovision has been as a platform for articulating Ukrainian diplomatic narratives and 21st-century interpretations of Ukraine’s national cultural identity, not just in 2022 but ever since Ukraine started taking part.
For Ukraine in 2022, like Bosnia in 1993, the platform that competing in Eurovision affords a nation at war is more significant than the part any one musician could play in military ranks – and, unlike in 1993 (when Bosnia only received votes from the Italian, Turkish, Belgian, Maltese, French and Irish juries, and came 16th), the votes of a transnational public which has mobilised in remarkable solidarity with Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion will account for 50% of the points.
Having only declared independence from Yugoslavia at the beginning of March 1992, however, Bosnia-Herzegovina never had the chance to function as a peacetime state before its war began (and even though Yugoslavia had been competing in Eurovision since 1961, TV Sarajevo had been far less successful in steering representatives through the national selection process than the TV studios in Ljubljana, Belgrade or Zagreb). Ukraine’s independence is three decades old, and artists in their late 20s like Psiuh do not even have living memory of a time when Ukraine was under Moscow’s rule.
With a critical eye towards how national identities are constructed and represented, Ukraine’s record in Eurovision offers much to unpick. Although Russian is an everyday language for many Ukrainians (up to and including Zelenskyy), Ukrainian entries have never featured more than the odd Russian word.
The cultural centre of gravity for Ukrainian entries has often tacked towards the nation’s west as if it represents the whole of the country, while arguably writing out the histories of non-Ukrainians in western Ukraine (including Jews, Poles, Armenians and Roma, Sonetvysky notes in Wild Music) who have also been objectified and oppressed.
The wide-ranging extent of Ukraine’s post-2014 laws on national language and ‘decommunisation’ are open to critique – though the level of aggression against Ukraine from Putin’s Russia has influenced some Russian-speakers to switch more towards Ukrainian in daily life, all the more so since the full-scale invasion began.
As far as Eurovision is concerned, meanwhile, Ukrainian entries have used the contest for political ends, and have tested the limits of its rules against political messaging again and again – though the EBU has never disqualified any Ukrainian entry on political grounds. Ukraine’s national selections have often seemed to privilege perceptions of suitability for Eurovision above the appearance of a transparent selection, and 2022 was scarcely the first time that participants distrusted the result. Indeed, without speaking Ukrainian I don’t have the in-depth knowledge of the patronage networks within Ukrainian entertainment and media circles that would put the relationships between performers and producers in more context.
As of the beginning of May 2022, Ukraine has still qualified from every semi-final it has appeared in – yet beneath that headline record, Ukraine didn’t even get to perform an entry in 2015 or 2019, for reasons far beyond the broadcaster’s control the first time but well within them in 2019.
Nevertheless, without the creativity of Ukrainian musicians and designers, each responding to the politics of 21st-century Ukraine in their own way, Ukrainian Eurovision delegations would never have had the wherewithal to pursue public diplomacy objectives through the contest so effectively. While broadcasters select their entries with certain strategic objectives in mind, it’s primarily the music and performance of Ukrainian contestants which have defined what Eurovision viewers come to expect from Ukraine, and Ukraine’s most iconic Eurovision entries have been those where the entrants themselves brought most creative vision of their own.
In an unmissable address to the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies’ annual conference in April 2022, Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute in London and a historian of gender and nationalism in 20th- and 21st-century Ukraine, asked her audience of scholars of eastern Europe: where is Ukraine on the international academic community’s ‘mental maps’?
As ‘the largest state in Europe,’ Khromeychuk points out, Ukraine has taken its rightful place since 1991 on geographical maps, even with its cities misspelled or an unnecessary definite article inserted before its name. And yet, on Western scholars’ mental maps, Ukraine has largely remained colonially subsumed by versions of Russian culture which imperialistically appropriated it, or torn between Russia and NATO as simply a pawn in a greater geopolitical game.
The worlds of sport, fashion and technology have all offered counter-narratives to that erasure – yet out of all the forms of international exchange and co-operation Ukraine has participated in since becoming independent, participating in Eurovision is where Ukraine has staked its place most forcefully and inextricably on an international public’s mental maps. 21st-century Ukrainian cultural politics might not have been quite the same without Eurovision – but 21st-century Eurovision would certainly not have been the same without Ukraine.
It’s the Saturday night of the Millennium journal’s conference on race and racism in International Relations, and four of us from our panel on race, Yugoslavia, India and Non-Alignment have walked up the back ways of Holborn in the October night looking for a place where we can sit and drink; a cramped, semi-underground Indo-Chinese cocktail bar has its back door open (I later found out it was called ‘Bollywood Stories’), and we settle around a small cellar table under the stairs, Srđan, Jelena, Aida and I, one candle flickering between us, contemplating what we don’t have to say out loud about the vote there’s just been in this country and the vote there’s about to be in the USA, and where what we know about what we don’t have to say comes from;
Four months earlier, it’s the day after that referendum, I’ve been away in Newcastle at a feminist international relations conference, up till 4.30 am until I couldn’t take any more of Nigel Farage grinning about bullets ten days after a white nationalist had shot Jo Cox dead in the middle of the street, and the group of us from my department who sometimes go for a drink after work have mutually agreed we need one tonight. We’re all white men and women from various parts of England, two from Hull, one from Derbyshire, me from the South (or maybe there are five of us, and our colleague who’s Australian is there as well); and soon after I’ve dropped my bag at home and found them in the large back room of one of the pubs near work, we’ve got on to constitutional implications, and I’ve said ‘Scotland’s gone’ without missing a beat; and someone or everyone says ‘Really?!’ because my consciousness has made a leap theirs hasn’t yet. (A few days later I think through all the resonances of constitutional fragmentation and ethnicised polarisation from the break-up of Yugoslavia that the atmosphere before and after the referendum is evoking, in an essay for LSE’s European Politics and Policy blog that comes out in one sitting about fourteen hours long: it comes to about 7,000 words.)
The astonishingly wise, frank, raw, and honest series of daily blog posts that Aida, Jelena and Srđan have edited all month at The Disorder of Things calls a foreknowledge based on living through the disintegration and destruction of Yugoslavia ‘Yugosplaining’:
At the time, the Yugoslav wars and their extreme violence were viewed by the West as idiosyncratic, isolated events, unrelated to broader process of political and economic transformation in the world – the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of communism. Indeed, they were just outright inconvenient for the world that celebrated the end of history. Yugoslavia, once deeply entangled with both the East and the West and even more so with the Global South, was all of a sudden isolated from history – including its own.
Yet now, as the West (and the allegedly democratized East) unravel under the weight of their own unresolved histories – and not just of the successive lost wars, financial crises or the pandemics – it seems that the ghosts of the 1990s are back to haunt us. Nationalism, ethnic and racial violence, populism, militias, lies and conspiracies can no longer be viewed as “the Balkan” phenomena. Instead, “the Balkans” now appears as the vanguard of a common catastrophe (Subotić, Hemon).
The aim was twofold: first, to use the authors’ lived personal experience of Yugoslavia as a way of explaining our lived political experience elsewhere. Second, to reclaim the narrative of our own lives rather than be made subject to outsiders’ accounts.
Decades after its demise, Yugoslavia continues to act as an open wound. We live what Saida Hodžić wrote in her essay – “if home is a wound that splits open the world, the world neither stays open nor heals over.” Therefore, this series was not designed to explain what Yugoslavia was, what it meant to whom, who it included or excluded, or how it came apart or why. It was, instead, designed to explain our current moment – that world split open – through the experience of our past.
These are knowledges that, working in the Western academy, the contributors have seen painfully silenced again and again by Western presumptions about what happened in ‘the Balkans’ and what ‘the Balkans’ must have been like for it to happen there, as Aida, Azra Hromadžić and Saida Hodžić all painfully record.
I felt none of Yugoslavia’s break-up on my body. My experiences of the wars were mediatised backdrops to everyday pre-teen routine, as a racial- and ethnic-majority subject of a nation that was setting itself up as a humanitarian donor, diplomatic negotiator and conditional peacekeeper (which measured its contributions by the risk to British, not Bosnian, lives): a newsreader on my mother’s radio in the kitchen saying tanks had crossed the Slovenian border; the War Child appeal and ‘Miss Sarajevo’ on Top of the Pops; an Evening Standard headline about Srebrenica at the station, and footage of disarmed Dutch soldiers on the six o’clock news by the time I came home from school.
And yet the ways I’ve tried to understand how the wars became possible and what they did to everyday life have done something to my subjectivity, to the deep premises I know about how societies and international politics work, about how people come to see others as enemies, and the myths they tell about the future and the past.
As a PhD student, I wanted to understand how a music industry like Croatia’s could have separated itself from Yugoslavia so quickly, and how it had been part of transforming everyday public consciousness in the ways that the Croatian anthropologists and ethnomusicologists I’d started reading during my Masters haddocumented at the very beginning of the war. Stitching together the Croatian war of independence and its aftermath, day by day, over one long spring and two long summers in Croatia’s national library (year by year in reverse, so 1990 came last every time, and then it was back to the then-present with another newspaper or showbusiness magazine), the slippage of political deadlock into armed clashes into something ever worse was not the sudden blaze of Western book covers and documentary title screens; how would I know if this were only a few months away?
More of what I know about living through those years comes from deep listening. In my postdoctoral work, I interviewed thirty-odd Bosnians and other ex-Yugoslavs about the work they’d done as interpreters and translators for foreign peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, during and after the war. Some would have been direct contemporaries of Danijela Majstorović, who wrote about her own and her research participants’ migration in another of the Yugosplaining essays; we somehow missed each other during my research visits (we’re still not sure how). I must have been in Priština, where I’d gone to interview a former British military linguist for another strand of the project, just as former Bosnian interpreters were responding to a post I’d made in a Facebook reunion group about setting up interviews later in the year, when I was coming back from meeting an ex-KFOR interpreter someone had connected me to and the thought came to me: many of the people I’d been meeting had been languages students or languages graduates when the war came; so were most of my friends at the time; if something like this had happened where we lived [in a completely different global configuration of languages, statehood and power, of course; but that only came later], is this what we’d have done?
These are acts of imagination, just as everything I know about the region that used to be Yugoslavia is in some way a construction. It only sits inside my mind through scholarship; it does not sit in my bones. What do sit in my bones are the experiences and sensations of the scholarship itself – the work, the research, the presentations, the listening, the conversations, and all the imaginative backchannels that run while my frontstage does those things. Among the authors are friends, contemporaries, authorities, table-of-contents mates and tablemates, people to whom I strive to make my representations of Yugoslavia and its aftermath authentic and accountable, to whom I owe a responsibility to depict as much complexity as they can see.
In essays such as the piece by Dženeta Karabegović, Slađana Lazić, Vjosa Musliu, Julija Sardelić, Elena B Stavrevska and Jelena Obradović-Wochnik, writing as the Yugoslawomen+ Collective and using their own experiences as knowledge-producers and subjects who have waited to cross borders to think through how rhetoric about ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ migrants has changed since the 1990s, I hear echoes of dialogues that I’ve joined in as well in conference corridors and email exchanges, working through this last decade’s reckoning with racism and the global legacies of colonialism from where we each are:
The post-Yugoslav space from which people once fled, and from which they still continue to migrate, is now also known as a ‘transit’ zone for those fleeing ongoing violence elsewhere. The region once known for ‘the Yugoslav wars’ is now ‘the Balkan Route’, the EU’s imagined ‘Badlands’, the outer periphery where border security funds are channelled to prevent the onward migration of racialised ‘others.’ The so-called ‘Balkan route’ became an alternative once the sea crossings were deemed too dangerous; today, it has become so entrenched in the violence of EU’s border-keeping that just one monitoring group in the region has recorded more than 700 reports of police brutality and asylum denials, with 70% of incidents reportedly taking place in Croatia.
Countries of the former Yugoslavia, most notably Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, whose ‘good migrants’ have often managed to leave the region and arrive in relative safety to countries of the Global North, are now implicated in the EU’s border-keeping to the extent that they regularly participate in the violent ‘push backs’ of men, women and children from the EU’s external border. Their aspirations to ‘Europeanness’, understood primarily as EU membership, are exercised through the protection and legitimization of the European superiority, even though their own citizens’ mobility within the EU is limited. […] The region is, thus, simultaneously othered and implicated in further othering in migration discourses. These racialised and classed hierarchies of people on the move are perpetuated, despite thousands of people from the post-Yugoslav space continuously lining up in front of EU and other Global North countries’ embassies or looking for ways to get EU citizenship so they can migrate more easily.
Something has, or somethings have, committed all of us to perceiving Yugoslavia and the violence of its collapse, and the systemic violence emanating in all its global forms from Europeans’ enslavement of Africans and colonisation of Indigenous lands, as part of the same world.
(The very question of who feels able to write themselves into a ‘Yugoslav’ past is shaped by such power relations, as Vjosa noted at the beginning of the series when explaining why she had participated in it as an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, and as Jelena, Srđan and Aida acknowledged in their conclusion: almost all its contributors came from South Slav backgrounds, and Yugoslavia’s failure to confront ‘the longer history of anti-Albanian bigotry’ in the region undercut its aspirations to ‘brotherhood and unity’ even before we weigh up how well it balanced the rights and interests of different South Slavs.)
Later in Azra’s essay, she writes of discussing her wartime experiences of being labelled as a Bosnian Muslim with inner-city Philadelphia schools, and trying to comfort disoriented students on her ‘Peace and Conflict in the Balkans’ class immediately after Trump’s election, as ‘openings’ that defy the ‘closings’ that have pressed on her in prestigious academic spaces: these openings are ‘transactions in sociopolitical life when “structures of feeling” were somehow transmitted and felt, almost understood, across the sociopolitical, geographic, and historical spectrum’. My own knowledge and I are the outcomes of many such openings, and are measured by them as well.
Three weeks after Srđan, Aida, Jelena and I sat together in Holborn, the US election result came in: overnight for them, first thing in the morning for me. Whatever else I’d been meant to do that day, the only thing I could do was write, a messy 3,000 words on coming to terms with how quickly queer people’s newborn rights could be taken away overnight, and why the result filled me as a queer woman with dread even an ocean away. (I re-used part of it when Cai Wilkinson was editing a special section of Critical Studies on Security and invited me to rework it as an essay I ended up calling ‘The filter is so much more fragile when you are queer’.
(One line I added to the piece for Cai has kept coming back into my head, this pandemic year: ‘There are people I know or used to know who will be dead in four years’ time.’)
My consciousness of my own nation and its past would not be what it is without learning about post-Yugoslavia for so long. Jelena (Subotić) writes, in her essay on citizens’ moral implication in the violence of Milošević’s Serbia or Trump’s USA, of our ‘larger, metaphysical responsibility as citizens who still benefit from structural racism or from structural inequality, or from structural anti-immigration policies. Even if we oppose them, by our own position in society we are implicated in them – an argument that goes at least as far back as Karl Jaspers’. To hope for a transparent reckoning with the past in Croatia or Serbia (I’d understood by the end of my PhD), it would be a double standard not to work towards the same in Britain – a country whose imperial and slave-trading past had systemic consequences around the world.
Knowing about post-Yugoslavia through the ‘openings’ I’d been part of for years, I suggested at the end of the queer in/security pieces, had made me more able to understand that Britain was not immune to the kind of authoritarian, nationalist future that now seemed to be coming to pass:
I know without having lived it that ethnopolitical conflict works like that.
The anxieties over ‘dilution’ or ‘undermining’ national cultural values that racists and xenophobes intensify in order to mobilise public support for restricting immigration work like that.
[…] Studying the Yugoslav wars since my early twenties, when all that preoccupied me at the time they were happening was making sense of the confusion with which I entered my own queer teens: I know identities wax strongest, turn from individual to collective, description to politics, when people believe or are led to believe that that identity is why they’re under threat.
I know it through compressing acres of wartime newsprint into weeks of research, through collecting hours upon hours of memories, through years of friendship and listening and solidarity, all breaking down my own filter of it-can’t-happen-here.
But I’d also suggested that having grown up queer, knowing that my belonging to the respectable majority would only ever be conditional, had made that filter more fragile and perhaps helped me to feel the solidarities I do:
There are freedoms I have in England or would have in America, which I didn’t even expect to enjoy as a teenager but which my queer elders won for me. In doing so, I gained a strange kind of everyday security with an uncanny contingency underneath – which I could lose again in ways that, if they were proposed for straight people, would be the stuff of dystopia, ‘some Handmaid’s Tale shit right there’.
(Dystopia still happens. But it takes so many more guns.)
Did knowing these kinds of insecurity with my own body make me more detachable from the idea that the territory–nation–culture nexus I was born in should automatically be a place of safety, progress and inspiration to the rest of the world – an idea that has so readily slipped into many Westerners’ belief that their knowledge is the most authoritative on ‘Balkan affairs’? I am wary of saying that queerness alone is enough to create an alliance – and yet if anything in my life has predisposed me to step away from the Anglophone West being at the centre of the world, that must be what it must be. (Did failing to fit the norms of heterosexual and class success at a school that was supposed to train girls to join Britain’s institutions of power do that?)
Without directly experiencing the Yugoslav wars, my consciousness of history, politics and security – of what can happen, and how it starts, and where it ends – has still been Yugosplained. Jelena, Aida and Srđan warn in their concluding essay, as our mood seemed to when we sat together:
Yugoslavia also carries a message for our friends and colleagues in the countries we now find ourselves in – believe in your exceptionalism – at your own peril; ignore your past – at your own peril; do not listen to Others amongst you – at your own peril.
My thoughts sit there too. And that sits in my bones.
I wrote the second part of this text almost a year ago, in July 2016, at a loose end in central London after the March for Europe, and didn’t post it until a documentary about Geri Halliwell in the 1990s – which ended with her becoming a UN Population Fund goodwill ambassador – reminded me again about the memory that prompted it in the first place – a Model United Nations based around the UN Millennium Development Goals that I went to in April 2000. Then something else happened, so I didn’t post it then either, and now it’s Article 50.
Sometimes these last few years have managed to be mind-bendingly resonant with their counterparts from twenty years ago – who would have thought my old school would start offering its gender-variant students recognition in a way I could never have imagined then (when I didn’t even know there were other things to be recognised as) – but when it comes to ‘Europe’ it’s the kind of looking-glass where everything’s shaped wrong.
This is going to get worse as 2017 turns to 2018 turns to 2019, and to Brexit, when 1997 turned to 1998 to 1999 and turned to future, politically, but also for my late teenage self as well.
The late 1990s were when I developed my lived experience of ‘Europe’ in a way that was an important part of my identity for a long time – as a language learner, as someone who belonged to literary and musical cultures beyond the nation and linguistic area I’d grown up in, as someone who expected to be working in another European country one day.
The optimism of those few years is already outside the living memory of most of the students I teach – who very soon are going to have been born after the Millennium, and a year or two after that will mostly have been born after 9/11.
By 2000, I’d visited other European countries five times, all since 1996. The first was a family holiday to Greece, to the most meaningful places my parents had visited in the 70s, when Britain must have only just joined the EEC and the Greek military junta must only just have come down; being 14, I moped for two weeks over that summer’s confusing friendships and gave the impression of paying as little attention to my surroundings as I could get away with. Needless to say this didn’t go down well.
We still used travellers’ cheques, which you queued up at the bank to cash every few days. I didn’t have a passport until that holiday; the covers were red, and as far as I knew always would be. The only problem about being in the European Union was that when you visited another member state they didn’t stamp the page.
Everywhere else I travelled was through the school. I hadn’t asked to go on a foreign trip before, conscious of the cost, until our Spanish class was due to go on an exchange to Barcelona in 1997. I used to say that I came out in Barcelona, or rather, had to accept while I was there that I was going to need to. I brought a necklace back from Barcelona that I wore for years, until it fell off at work; it’s still there (I’ve just seen) in photos from the first academic conference I ever took part in, in Dubrovnik in 2004 where I had to give a presentation in Croatian about my Masters research in front of a woman who had been head of the communist party in Serbia until 1972.
I have no idea where the rest of this photo went.
Two years later we had another exchange visit to Spain, in Murcia, where I wanted to spend my time so differently from most of my classmates that it felt like I wanted to distance myself from Englishness and Britishness altogether, which lasted several years. (I write that now and think: is that a politically dangerous thing to admit, when our prime minister has described ‘people who believe they’re citizens of the world’ as ‘citizens of nowhere’ and when even wanting to be mobile is a symbolic social boundary that didn’t used to mean so much?)
My exchange partner’s older sister gave me a novel in Spanish that perfectly matched my tastes then, probably even better than she knew, Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El club Dumas; I acquired all the rest of his books, and anything else like it, from the European Bookshop on – I think on Warwick Street, before you could order them reliably online and shops like that were still spaces of discovery.
The last summer at school I had the chance to go to Moscow/St Petersburg and, my first time through the Channel Tunnel, Paris: I’d left the country three times in a year.
The next encounter with Europe was Europe coming to me, at what felt like the beginning of a new moment in history but now feels like a millennial dead end.
*
I’m writing this – of course I’m not writing this now; this is still July 2016, when we could still joke that Vladimir and Estragon ‘do not send the Article 50 Notification‘ – a few metres away from the International Maritime Organization’s headquarters in Vauxhall, after walking in the March for Europe – bigger than anyone who came seems to have expected, still probably too small on its own to ever count.
It was a young march. Whiter and more middle-class – just going by the people and accents around me – than a march representing London ought to have been; but most marchers younger than me. Some of that is me getting older. (I’m in London for a birthday celebration put back by a week for several reasons, one of them being to keep it at least somewhat separate from the referendum.) Some of it isn’t.
Many of them would have been young people anticipating using their freedom of movement rights, in either direction, along routes they might not even have thought of as constrained by nationality until the question was suddenly thrown open, until now a week later the front-runner for the Conservative leadership is even sounding as if she’s prepared to play poker with the long-term residency rights of EU citizens who are already living here.
Not quite as many other European countries’ flags as you’d see in a Eurovision audience, but getting close. (I tried to play flag bingo: Denmark, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Poland with the biggest flag of all, Romania, Italy and Sweden holding hands, the Czech Republic, one Catalan separatist flag with a Union Jack taped on, and a baby in a red and white checked hat I’m calling for Croatia because you never know.)
I’m struck by how many of them might have been queer, in ways that young people in London might be legible as queer (and obviously more of them will have been queer than that), with far more confidence and expressiveness and diverseness of expression than I remember being surrounded by at the same age at all; now about to have rights they’d taken for granted taken away in at least two ways at once.
Why have I walked down here. Partly to circumvent weekend engineering works that no mayor of London, not even last-hope-of-the-Jedi Sadiq Khan, has managed to do anything about; partly (I realised from the bridge where I saw the tall red building with its light blue flag and its whiteboard-marker roof, just as I used to look out for when Waterloo trains passed Vauxhall) because this is where Europe as a thing, not just Europe as a collection of other countries, first started being something I lived in.
I’d travelled to Greece once, Spain twice, Paris for a weekend, and even Russia, but my first experience of Europe in a slice of its complexity was the year our school’s debating society entered a team to the Model United Nations that was going to be held to celebrate the signing of the Millennium Development Goals by modelling UN committee work to agree a Millennium Declaration of our own.
This must have been organised by the UN (I could find out which agency if I waited to write this until I’m back in Hull, where I still have the programme from it somewhere).
I did have the programme: I tweeted a few pages from it after the Geri documentary. I’m even in one of the photos, obliquely, not really looking like myself-in-2000 yet at all, but holding up a large ‘Croatia’ sign.
The keynote speakers were Geri Halliwell (these days, it would probably be Angelina Jolie-Pitt; you get a more famous calibre of celebrity humanitarian this half-generation), an Irish peacekeeper, and the writer Zlata Filipovic, five years after publishing her childhood diary of the siege of Sarajevo, who we met during a break and who might have looked at me more guardedly than I remember when she saw that I had the Croatian seat.
There might have been a hundred participants – or maybe they did fill every last member seat – all supposed to be 18 or thereabouts, because this was the generation that was going to go out and change the new millennium. (The young men not much older who flew their hijacked planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon less than a year and a half later would do much more towards that than us.) I was still 17, without a vote in the coming or just-passed London mayoral elections, to the consternation of some of my classmates when it came up in a History seminar.
(I can’t remember when the elections happened in relation to this. These pieces come out differently when I’m not online.)
About two thirds were from the UK, the others from pretty much everywhere else in western and northern Europe. There might have been a few Poles and Hungarians – or maybe there was a parallel Eastern European one of these? – but not the greater number who’d have been able to afford to come after the low-cost airlines (what were those bright orange things?) really got going.
Croatia had just elected a liberal president and the tide seemed to be turning against authoritarian nationalism, which made them timely to represent, if not as challenging for a historian as it would have been to have to intuit the positions of an ideology with which I profoundly disagreed.
But that didn’t seem to be what anyone was doing (except a few performative moments in committee if someone had, say, Belarus). The mood among this group of young Europeans – all from schools that had heard about this thing and could afford to send students to it, let’s be clear, we weren’t a demographic cross-section of the continent by any means – was: let’s come up with something that is fit for purpose and expresses that strange intangible sense that just because the first digit of the year has turned around it might mean we could do something differently.
I could probably find the final text, which they sent us in a commemorative binder two or three months later, and tick off the resolutions: that one hasn’t happened; that one hasn’t happened; that one… yeah.
These days now I know people who actually do discourse analysis of UN documents, it’s a piece of historical evidence, isn’t it: a snapshot of a young people’s history and geography of internationalism, part of the only eighteen-month-long Millennium there’s ever been.
(A car stuck at the lights is playing ATB’s ‘9 am Till I Come’, wasn’t that 1999?, and that would be an interesting time slip. You know what book you’re going to have written last year? That’ bit went all right. The rest of the world around it… not so much.
Except a few of the songs I had taped on to a cassette for the train into Vauxhall were already from Croatia, Vanna’s ‘Kao rijeka’ which had nearly been picked for Eurovision and which I was just beginning to have enough language competence to realise was probably about the Millennium (it was), with a leaving-the-past-behind-us motif which from 1999-2000 Croatia sounds now as if it could only be about one thing; except that in a lot of places people felt like that.)
Within all that, the effort of will that it took Catherine at 17 to even begin speaking to a delegate from Portugal who, a few years later, a friend of mine looking at the commemorative folder from this thing would go on to mistake for me but who I could never even have begun to compare myself with at the time.
Would I rather have been 17 then, or 17 now and entering the next stages of a global crisis (which, I didn’t appreciate then but came to understand, has many of its longest-term roots in the legacies of the dominance through which my own country got rich in the first place)? I’d be in a position, assuming the same complex of identifications and insecurities, to understand much more about my self and sexuality-and-gender than I could have then. Maybe I would have done better, half a generation later.
But in terms of being able to access the conditions for a life that promised to be fulfilling and have some advancement in it in the long term even when things temporarily fell down – I worry that half a generation makes a difference that is already hard to repair. And will get harder to repair now that the result of the referendum has added an extra layer of instability to those already facing Britain and the rest of Europe. [And then there was still more.]
So much for the Millennium, and its goals, and whatever it was we voted to develop anyway; except that, as any pedant with a calendar will tell you, millennia really start themselves in 2001.
*
Will young people growing into their late teens in Britain now have the same opportunities to get to know that the cultures you can belong to don’t just depend on where you were born, or what language you grew up with as your first one?
The Europe I believed in at that point was a liberal fantasy anyway, and I didn’t understand how much privilege I moved through it with. Opportunities for me weren’t opportunities for everyone. But at least we hadn’t gone through the rejection of Britain’s European future that the referendum result in 2016 implied, the escalation of xenophobia against white EU citizens as well as the people of colour it already stigmatised, or the symbolic politics that mean if I speak about attachment to Europe now some people might hear it as she doesn’t want to listen to us.
The answer will probably look very different from each of Britain’s four nations – to an extent I’d also have found unimaginable in 2000, except that by studying the end of Yugoslavia I was already imagining it after all.
One of the things about academic life that, when you’ve done them a lot, you start forgetting you didn’t always know how to do is writing conference abstracts.
Answering a conference’s call for papers will nearly always involve writing an abstract, or a summary of what your talk is going to be about, to a word limit the organisers have set – usually 200, 250, 300 or 500 words.
(Some may ask for other things, like a biographical note or a short CV, and some will choose papers on the abstracts alone – so make sure you know what else to send, and what word limit you’re working towards for a particular one.)
Some large conferences, like the ones scholarly associations hold in different subject areas, will ask for this almost a year in advance, which makes it even more difficult to know what to put in the abstract – since, especially if you’re a postgrad, you probably won’t yet have done the research.
I’ve probably been writing 5-6 of these things, with a success rate of more than 90%, most years since 2006, when I was in the middle of my PhD (on a topic – popular music and narratives of identity in post-Yugoslav Croatia – that followed on from my Masters, so I already had well-worked-out arguments to talk about) – most of these presentations will have needed abstracts written for them, aimed at audiences with different disciplinary and thematic interests (even the ones where I’ve been invited to give the talk, the organisers have usually asked me for an abstract so they can tell their networks what it’s going to be about).
Before I’d had to write most of these, I’d also been involved in selecting abstracts for a large postgraduate conference that a group of PhD students in my department organised in 2006 – so I’d read a whole spectrum of abstracts from stunningly clear and exciting to utterly baffling or, once or twice, so off-topic I wondered if it was meant for something else.
Smaller conferences often circulate all the speakers’ abstracts in one document before the conference or put them in registration packs; larger conferences usually make them available through their online system. Most abstracts at academic conferences that were high enough quality to be accepted have a similar structure, as you’ll probably start to see if you look through your next conference’s abstracts book.
Their purpose once they’ve been accepted is so people at the conference can work out which papers and panels they want to hear. Their first purpose, on the other hand is to persuade the organisers that they want your paper – and you – to be part of the discussion they’re having about their conference topic, in a context where they’ll almost certainly have more submissions than they can accommodate.
They don’t just want you and your research to be there – they need you and your research to be there – or that’s the impression your abstract ought to give.
The five-part structure I’m going to go through here would make sense to organisers throughout the humanities and social sciences (I’ve used it for abstracts that needed to fit into history, politics, sociology, geography, media or cultural or popular music studies, interdisciplinary area studies, anthropology, education, even conferences on topics my CV looked like I don’t study explaining why I did study them after all) – some of its principles probably apply in sciences as well, though your fields might have more formal requirements for what you put where.
This is an abstract I wrote in 2012, based on work from my postdoctoral project on translation/interpreting and peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for submission to a set of Feminist Security Studies panels at the International Studies Association conference in 2013. I’d been realising that my research about everyday intercultural encounters on military bases actually fitted in with what this expanding field of International Relations was doing, so I needed to emphasise topics that field was talking about (peace support operations) and concepts and approaches that the organisers would recognise as relevant (power and, since this was a feminist strand, above all gender).
Here’s the abstract, and then we’ll go through how each part works:
Gender, translation/interpreting, and the exercise of power in peace support operations
Dr Catherine Baker
University of Hull
cbakertw1@googlemail.com
Ethnographic perspectives on peace support operations invite us to view their activities, and thus their exercise of power, as constituted by multiple acts of written and spoken communication between agents of foreign intervention and local people and institutions within the sites of intervention (Pouligny, 2006; Rubinstein, 2008; Higate and Henry, 2009). Yet since most military personnel in most interventions rarely speak the language(s) of their destination, this power rests in fact on multiple acts of translation and interpreting. To fully understand this dimension of international security we must therefore understand the experiences and positionalities of language intermediaries, not just of foreign military actors. Reflecting on 52 semi-structured interviews with foreign soldiers and locally-recruited interpreters collected during a project on peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this paper suggests ways in which language and translation/identity are embodied, exploring nationality, ethnicity, military/civilian status and, primarily, gender. How did the discursive gendering of language and translation/interpreting structure recruitment and employment practices for language intermediaries? How did male interpreters negotiate the feminisation of their role? And how did the feminisation of translation/interpreting intersect with what has been perceived (with problematic essentialism) as a wider conceptual feminisation of contemporary militaries through peace support?
Here’s a model of the structure I mocked up for historian Stephanie McKellop when she was asking about abstract-writing advice on Twitter today:
Let’s take each of those sections in turn.
Step 1: start with the current state of knowledge in the field you’re engaging with. What do we think we know? (What you put here is also a bit of a performance of who you think ‘we’ are, for the purposes of joining this conversation.)
Ethnographic perspectives on peace support operations invite us to view their activities, and thus their exercise of power, as constituted by multiple acts of written and spoken communication between agents of foreign intervention and local people and institutions within the sites of intervention (Pouligny, 2006; Rubinstein, 2008; Higate and Henry, 2009).
Here I’m making a point that had already been well established by recent literature on peacekeeping and peacebuilding: all these operations achieve what they achieve because they happen on an everyday level, and all these interactions are made up of acts of communication.
I’ve even referred to some recent academic works that have contributed to showing that. I cite them in a way that suggests I’m familiar with them and I think the organisers and audience will be too – don’t overuse this, but it’s another way to signal that this presentation would be contributing to a conversation that’s already going on. (And yes, I’ve used author-date referencing; sorry, humanities. Footnotes in conference abstracts don’t work well.[1])
I could add a first line with a really eye-catching detail that expresses the point I’m making as Step 1, but either I couldn’t pick one or the word limit was too short, so…
Step 2: move the narrative forward: something is WRONG with what we think we know.
Yet since most military personnel in most interventions rarely speak the language(s) of their destination, this power rests in fact on multiple acts of translation and interpreting.
All this (brilliant, valuable) work on the everyday politics of peacekeeping has missed something super important: language, translation and interpreting. (Words like ‘yet’ and ‘in fact’ are your signals here for showing that the argument is changing course.)
Suddenly we have a problem that needs solving. Narrative tension!
Luckily, someone’s just done some research about that…
Step 3: offering a solution.
To fully understand this dimension of international security we must therefore understand the experiences and positionalities of language intermediaries, not just of foreign military actors.
Here, I’m pointing to what I think can resolve the problem: accounting for language intermediaries (translators and interpreters) as well as foreign peacekeepers themselves. It isn’t perfect (for one thing, there’s a clunky repetition that I should have caught), but in using phrases like ‘to fully understand…’ it signals that it’s about what we can do to overcome whatever Step 2 is. The narrative moves forward again.
I’m benefiting in this particular Step 3 from having two feet in different disciplines. There’s a well-known idea in Translation Studies of ‘the invisibility of the translator’ (thanks, Lawrence Venuti), which had motivated not just me but also the senior academics who designed the project to research language intermediaries in war and conflict in the first place. Taken into other settings where people don’t talk about the invisibility of the translator so much, it’s one of those ideas that can stop people and make them say ‘oh, of course’ – which is exactly the kind of feedback I got after I gave this talk.
Even if your research doesn’t have this kind of background, though, there’s still something about the concepts, theory or literature that you use which will help cut through the problem you posed in Step 2 – and that’s part of what makes your research original.
(Remember that you’re much more used to the material you draw on most closely than most of your audience will be – what seems to go without saying for you now you’ve been reading about it for months or years can seem much more original to an audience who hasn’t.)
So what are we going to do about this? The next step tells them.
Step 4: methodology. What did you do (or what will you have done by the time the presentation happens) to solve the problem like you said you would?
Reflecting on 52 semi-structured interviews with foreign soldiers and locally-recruited interpreters collected during a project on peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
This is where your research volunteers as tribute. Summarising your methodology (was it interview-based? archival? creative? quantitative? What sources and data did you use?) shows that the findings from the research will be rigorous, and produce the kind of knowledge that the audience expects – or maybe the kind of knowledge that the audience doesn’t expect, because their methodologies have been too limited all along as well.
This was quite familiar methodology for my audience, so I didn’t spend much time on it – really just to specify the size of my collection of material, and something of the scope.
If you’re doing something unconventional with methodology, like Saara Sarma who uses collages of internet images to expand the boundaries of how International Relations experts think about world politics, you’ll want to spend relatively longer here. It’ll need more explanation, but it’s also one of your biggest selling points, so make sure you’re telling a strong story about that throughout the abstract: it’ll grab the organisers’ attention, but they’ll also want to know how the innovative thing you’re doing fits into or changes something about a field that doesn’t normally do that, and if you don’t make this clear you’re depending on how well or willing they’ll be to extrapolate from what they are able to see.
This may well be the hardest part of the abstract to write if the conference is many months away. Don’t worry if some things about your methods, sources or data change between now and then; conference audiences are used to that, and explaining why that happened can often become part of the talk.
By now the narrative’s really moving along. There was a problem; you Did The Thing; and now we’re somewhere different than we were before.
Step 5: RESOLUTION. We got there!
this paper suggests ways in which language and translation/identity are embodied, exploring nationality, ethnicity, military/civilian status and, primarily, gender. How did the discursive gendering of language and translation/interpreting structure recruitment and employment practices for language intermediaries? How did male interpreters negotiate the feminisation of their role? And how did the feminisation of translation/interpreting intersect with what has been perceived (with problematic essentialism) as a wider conceptual feminisation of contemporary militaries through peace support?
This is your hypothesis or conclusion, depending on what stage the research is at – either what you expect to find, or what you found. Frame it in a way which shows the reader what you’re contributing, in a way that resonates with what already matters to them because of what field they’re in.
Here, for instance, I’ve made some suggestions why gendered perceptions of translation and interpreting could tell us something about wider issues feminists and International Relations researchers would be interested in (gender inequalities in employment and the military; experiences of men working in jobs that are usually gendered feminine; an ongoing debate about how far peacekeeping might have been changing the gender politics of international security itself).
This part could have been a lot better: it ought to end in a more emphatic sentence, rather than a question, about how this research will change the part of the field you’ve seen that it could change. It still did enough to get the abstract accepted, because Steps 1 to 4 had made a compelling and original case – and it also gave me the basic structure for my talk.
You can use this structure to pitch almost any piece of research for almost any conference – once you’ve worked out what story it can tell.
[1] Unless, of course, you’re writing an abstract in a field where you’ve already seen a lot of other conference abstracts that look like that.
One of the joys of historical research is finding unusual things in old books.
One of the joys of social media once you link a whole lot of historians, linguists and literature people up with each other is finding the unusual things people have found in a lot of old books.
Like these pages from Josiah Ricraft’s The Peculier Characters of the Orientall Languages and Sundry Others, published in London in or around 1645, that Heather Froehlich encountered while looking at texts in languages other than English in the Early English Books Online collection:
(Make that The Peculier Characters of the Orientall Languages and Sundry Others, Exactly Delineated for the Benifit of All Such as Are Studious in the Languages, and the Choice Rarities Thereof, and for the Advancement of Language Learning in These Latter Dayes. That claim to precision with its millenarian twist at the end – the same combination that introduced readers of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens to an occult text called The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – is exactly what you want in your early-modern-English-book-title aesthetic.)
Two of these scripts – the ‘Alphabet of the Slavs’ and ‘Alphabet of the Croats’ – are forms of Glagolitic, one of the scripts devised for writing down Old Church Slavonic by the early medieval Byzantine missionaries who spread Orthodox Christianity in eastern Europe. Cyrillic (named after one of the two most famous missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius) endured and became the basis of alphabets for eastern Slavonic languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, and for south Slavonic languages in nations with strong Orthodox traditions (Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian).
Glagolitic (somehow, it never got called ‘Methodian’) didn’t become the basis of any modern-day national language’s literary script, but as a liturgical and monumental script lasted longest in Croatia. For 19th- and 20th-century Croatian national movements, the 12th-century Baška tablet, discovered by a Croatian priest in 1851 when Croatian (and many other) national ‘awakenings’ were in full swing, has both symbolised the continuity of Croatian statehood and connected to layers of Croatian national myth.
The inscription acknowledges the historic King Zvonimir, who ruled the medieval Croatian kingdom until being betrayed by his own noblemen; moreover, it provides the first reference to ‘the national Croatian name […] in the Croatian language’. And it does it in Glagolitic. (In the words of one of the most famous new patriotic songs that emerged in 1991 at the beginning of the Croatian war of independence, resonant with the karst landscapes of the Dalmatian hinterland, history is quite literally ‘written on a firm stone’.)
(Today, narratives and iconography of the Croatian national past that play on the ‘primordialism’ of ethnicity and tradition in the landscape continue to make Glagolitic script a symbol of Croatian ethnic continuity on the land, immediately distinguishable for a Croatian onlooker from the Cyrillic script which in the region’s late 20th/early 21st century language politics connotes Orthodoxy and Serbdom. It’s not uncommon on patriotic t-shirts and tattoos; some monuments commemorating 20th-century Croatian national ‘martyrs’ are inscribed in Glagolitic; and the Zagreb-based designers Vesna and Marija Miljkovic have used the script as detail for an entire clothing and accessories line.)
Ricraft’s fourth script, a version of Cyrillic, is the ‘Alphabet of the Muscovites’, inverting the balance of power between Russian and South Slav languages that most inhabitants of Slavonic languages departments will be used to these days.
It’s the first script, the ‘Alphabet of the Illyrian Slavs’, that looks hardest to place. Glagolitic-but-not-quite, Greek-but-not-quite, serpentine tails where you don’t expect them to go – tipping its ‘peculier characters’ into the uncanny valley between historic typography, modern-day invention and contemporaneous alchemical esoterica to which several decades’ worth of films and book covers have tied the aesthetic of early modern printing for a contemporary eye.
(Take a novel like Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Dumas Club, filmed as The Ninth Gate, about an antiquarian book dealer hunting a 17th-century treatise that can supposedly summon the Devil; just put up a woodcut on screen and the viewer should start to be smelling brimstone.)
Indeed, as a place-name Illyria itself is in much the same valley – the name of a historic tribe in south-east Europe who pre-date the migration of the Slavs, attached to a Roman province, Napoleon’s Adriatic satellite state and the first wave of the South Slav national ‘revival’ in the Habsburg Empire; part of an Albanian myth of national origin; and, as Vesna Goldsworthy records in her history of fictional Balkan countries, one of literature’s most popular go-to names for imagining the Balkans behind the one that gave her book its title, Inventing Ruritania.And then there was that time Joss Whedon named an ancient warrior demon after it.
To paraphrase Kieron Gillen’s line from The Wicked + The Divine about the mysteriously reincarnated goddess Tara (‘We don’t know if she’s Buddhist, Hindu or Tara from fucking Buffy‘), semidetached from its historic moorings the name has permeated literature so far that ‘we’ might be forgiven for not knowing if it’s from Shakespeare, Greater Albania or Illyria from fucking Angel.
Except the background to the Alphabet of Illyrian Slavs is less Ninth Gate, more in the equally time-honoured bibliographic tradition of printers messing about – with something to reveal about how north-west European typographers thought about foreign languages in the 16th to 18th centuries.
Ricraft’s was far from the only handbook to include the Alphabet of the Illyrian Slavs, according to the Slavonic linguist Sebastian Kempgen, collector of Slavic alphabet tables from 1538 to 1824. It’s there in Richard Daniels’s Copy-Book of 1664, also from London, and a Leipzig printing manual in 1740; it surfaces in France in 1766, in Pierre Simon Fournier’s Manuel typographique, and in Edmund Fry’s 1799 Pantographia. De Bry’s Alphabeta et characteres, printed in Frankfurt in 1596, contains several Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets, the Illyrian script and a Cyrillic ‘Moscovitian’, putting it into the same lineage as Ricraft. Several Italian handbooks, meanwhile, don’t have the script at all. Finally, Kempgen traces it back to Zurich: Urban Wyss’s Libellus valde doctus, elegans, & utilis, published for the edification of calligraphers in 1549, where Kempgen notes no other Slavonic languages were printed at all.
‘Illyrian’ alphabets in the later books, compared to the greater variations of Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts, resemble the Wyss models much more:
These later copies reproduced the alphabet very faithfully, but it is obvious that, for 250 years, none of the authors of these copybooks had a “living” alphabet to check his engravings against, that there actually were no texts that could be used to sample these letters from, no speakers to correct anything etc. Whereas in all these typographic books the Glagolitic and the Cyrillic alphabets do exhibit certain changes over time as they changed naturally, this one alphabet seems to be frozen in time, as if it had been photocopied by one author after the other. (Kempgen 2015: 6)
Kempgen speculates that Wyss invented the alphabet himself, using Glagolitic as a model but adding embellishments of his own that matched the codes of what he perceived as exotic (something he also seemed to have done to his book’s ‘Egyptian’ alphabet):
Having no idea which parts of the Glagolitic letters were distinctive and which weren’t, he transformed the Glagolitic letters into fanciful designs that fit the rest of the exotic alphabets that he cut for his book […] In Zurich at the time, there would have been no one who could have given him advice on how to interpret the Glagolitic letters best – which parts were important and which of his ornamental additions or re-interpretations made them unrecognizable as Glagolitic letters. (Kempgen 2015: 11)
The ‘mysterious’ Illyrian script, in other words, belongs somewhere between the chain of early-modern biblical typos, litanies of unfortunately transcribed script tattoos, and the comedies of errors through which Google Translate error messages and out-of-office emails end up written on signs.
Moreover, it’s missing several important sounds that the alphabet of any Slavonic language would be likely to contain; and the Italian manuals, printed closest to the Adriatic where their readership was likely to be in most contact with the script, have no trace of the Wyss alphabet whatsoever. Esteemed typographers in north-west Europe, for two and a half centuries, still reprinted the ‘Illyrian’ alphabet as fact. As Kempgen concludes:
Due to lack of better knowledge, it has been faithfully reprinted for 250 years – but never anywhere near Slavic-speaking countries. (Kempgen 2015: 11)
Wyss’s alphabet circulated because it looked plausible; other Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts were and had been in use, ‘Illyria’ already existed as a designation, the Illyrian alphabet looked like its neighbours, why shouldn’t it be there? It’s as if the Dothraki language, knowingly constructed by George R R Martin and David Peterson for Game of Thrones in evocation of the horse-nomads of Eurasian steppes, were actually to appear in a handbook on the languages of Central Asia.
Two centuries before the Venetian traveller Alberto Fortis was romanticising the nomads and bandits of the Dalmatian hinterland as ‘Morlachs’, a generation before Shakespeare was imagining his shipwrecked twins making landfall in Illyria, Wyss was playing his own part in the European imagination of the Balkans. Whether Ricraft regarded the Illyrian Slavs as speakers of one of his ‘orientall languages’ or ‘sundry others’, his woodcut contributed a small node to the network of representations that south-east European cultural theorists such as Maria Todorova and Milica Bakic-Hayden have often compared to orientalism, or the politics of imperialist Europe representing and exoticising the Middle East.
Similar fabrications, in the age of national ‘awakenings’, could sometimes inspire nationalist imaginations anyway; the poems of Ossian, a third-century Gaelic bard, were part of a cultural movement that moved not only some Scots but romantic nationalists in other countries to imagine a folkloric national past even when they turned out to have been written by a contemporaneous Scottish poet, James MacPherson, in the 1760s.
If the Illyrian alphabet has never lent itself to an invention-of-tradition move, it might be because the chain of transmission ends abruptly, according to Kempgen, with Pantographia; linguists active in the 19th-century national ‘awakenings’ put enough new material into circulation about their languages’ scripts that they stopped depending on handbooks in the Wyss lineage and the error did not persist into the 20th century. Its lack of the full complement of South Slavonic letters means it would be hard to adapt to revivalist purposes in the same way that Glagolitic itself, though out of daily use, lives on in contemporary Croatian patriotic iconography.
Benifit or not to any such as were studious in the languages, Ricraft’s perpetuation of the alphabet-that-wasn’t certainly stands as a choice rarity thereof; an insight, even if not the one he might have wished for, into the advancement of language learning in his own latter dayes.
I’m supposed to write one of these a year and this time have actually done it – here are the various new things I published in 2015…
First of all, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s – an introductory text (in Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Studies in European History’ series) that actively involves the reader in thinking through what’s at stake in how historians, lawyers, or anyone else – including the reader themselves – interprets the wars and the break-up of Yugoslavia. I’ve written about the objectives behind the book here, here and here.
I coordinated a special issue of Contemporary Southeastern Europe on the Eurovision Song Contest, and published an introduction to the issue on ‘Gender and geopolitics in the Eurovision Song Contest’ which revisited my earlier work on the politics of Eurovision in south-east Europe.
My article on historical narratives of national identity in the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony appeared in print in Rethinking History this year (also available here).
My book chapter on the language politics of peacebuilding appeared in Linda Cardinal and Selma K Sonntag’s volume State Traditions and Language Regimes(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press) (also available here).
Next on their way in 2016 or soon after – print publication of an article on the reuse of ‘found footage’ and built environments from the Yugoslav wars in a Hollywood adaptation of Coriolanus which will be appearing in International Feminist Journal of Politics (which has already published it online) – something else I want to extend in future; hopefully the volume on Gender in 20th-Century Eastern Europe and the USSR (including my introduction, and a chapter of mine giving an overview of transnational LGBT politics in the region(s) after the Cold War), depending on how long it takes to go through review and typesetting; a short piece on writing about militarism and embodiment as a form of translation, developed out of part of a talk I gave at the International Studies Association conference this year; and maybe other work that’s still under review…
Since 2013 I’ve been working on a new kind of book project for me: an introductory text on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, which I spent most of 2014 working on intensively and which is now due for publication later this year. (Indeed, it’s close enough that the publishers have been showing me options for the cover design; I’m happy with the one we’ve chosen, and am hoping it’ll be going public very soon.)
Secondly, it puts me in a very different relationship to its subject matter; Sounds of the Borderland and Interpreting the Peace were both the result of multi-year research projects after which I was the only person (or with Interpreting the Peace part of the only team) to have been able to write those books that way. With this book, on the other hand, several dozen scholars would have the subject knowledge to be able to write a book fitting the general remit I had when I began the project: a 50,000-word book aimed at a reader who is new to the topic and which fits into a series that puts ‘a strong emphasis on the different perspectives from which familiar events can be seen’.
(And it’s the right time to be doing a book like this; despite the volume of new research that continues to be published about the wars and their consequences, it’s still hard to find an up-to-date book to recommend to a reader who is new to the subject that will help to open up all the other books for them.)
Why should I do this, then, rather than anyone else?
In a post last year I talked about some of the micro-level decisions I was having to make while I was writing the book – choices, for instance, about organising events into a narrative, imposing an order on events by breaking them up into chapters and periods, making sure the reader can understand what’s at stake in essentialist or anti-essentialist representations of nationalism and ethnicity, and trying to make visible what truth claims are based on. I hope some of those thought processes will still be visible in the text (I wish I could have worked meta-commentary on my own narrativisation into the book in a much more structured way, but just didn’t have the word count to do it).
I set myself three objectives at the beginning of the writing process, which I think I have fulfilled – though ultimately the people who read and (I hope) use the book will be the judges of that.
First of all, I wanted it to help the reader understand research that is happening right now. The last few years have seen a new wave of archival studies about the core history of the wars, such as Josip Glaurdić’s The Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia or Robert Donia’s new biography of Radovan Karadžić, but also research that has been trying to expand the angles from which historians and other scholars might look at the wars (such as Bojan Bilić and Vesna Janković’s important edited volume, Resisting the Evil: (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Contention), not to mention work that takes a position on the longer-term human consequences of the wars and the collapse of Yugoslav socialism (for instance, Damir Arsenijević’s edited volume Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: the Fight for the Commons, which was published earlier this year in response to the Bosnian ‘plenum’ protests of 2014).
Another objective was for the writing to show the reader how scholars make interventions into fields of knowledge, by giving some examples of how authors have set out to reinterpret or reassess elements of the histories of the wars. And a third – which perhaps can’t be entirely disentangled from the second – is to make explicit to the reader that their own beliefs and values are going to form part of how they (or the authors of any of the books in the bibliography, or me) go about interpreting and evaluating the events.
The book has eight chapters, beginning with a chapter on the long-term historical background to the wars, then chapters that cover the ‘1980s crisis’ in Yugoslavia; the independence of Slovenia and Croatia; the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and the Kosovo War plus its implications for Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia as well as Kosovo. (Already that’s slipping the boundaries of the 1990s – but then I’m a ‘lecturer in 20th century history’ whose research regularly ends up going into the 2010s…)
The last chapters (which are also informed by the teaching and research I’ve done in different disciplines) introduce ways in which the consequences of the conflicts have been researched and show how these research questions can feed back into understanding the 1990s: from debates over peacebuilding and reconciliation, through the prosecution of war crimes (an activity which has itself helped to shape historical knowledge about the recent past), into the cultural and linguistic legacies of the wars.
The long-term chapter was almost the most challenging part of the book to write, and the one that’s changed most dramatically since the first draft of the text (where it was twice as long, and much more detailed bibliographically – but when the full draft of the book started pushing 75,000 words in September, I had to accept that the first chapter couldn’t stay that way without pushing out another chapter later on).
I say ‘almost’ the most challenging part of the book because the most difficult – appropriately, perhaps – was the conclusion. Within 1,500 or so words – because the book length in this series just wouldn’t give me any space for war – I had both to sum up an account of the conflicts that I found most convincing and to show the reader the approach to historical narrative that the book had taken.
At times I wasn’t sure if I’d even improved on David Campbell’s classic review article ‘MetaBosnia‘ from 1998, which compared how ten works written in the mid-1990s had presented 32 political events that took place between 1990 and 1992 in Bosnia-Herzegovina; I hadn’t even been able to get into Campbell’s level of detail, or the level of detail that (with quite a different philosophy of knowledge) Sabrina Ramet was able to employ in her 2005 book about academic interpretations of the wars.
Moreover, as someone who aims to deconstruct notions of collective identity and narratives based on them, I need – like every other scholar in this area – to balance that against the responsibility of writing about real lives and deaths.
Ultimately, this needs to be a book which equips the reader to read more books, rather than being the first and last thing that anyone should read. This is not supposed to be even close to the final word on the Yugoslav wars, and indeed the format of the series precludes it from being that – which is one of the reasons I felt comfortable taking up the opportunity to write it at all. (It could however help open up discussion on how we teach, and how we might teach, the history of the wars from the point of view of two decades later – something that there’s a lot more scope to think about than I could cover here.) Mainly, it’s the book I’ve wanted to recommend as a starting point but which didn’t previously exist – which is usually a good reason to write anything…
Over the last couple of years I’ve been revisiting some of my popular culture work, and indeed some of my interview-based research, by thinking about the concept of ’embodied militarism’ in the emerging field of Critical Military Studies – specifically, how bodily practices and representations of the body reflect and shape imaginations of war inside, around and outside actual armed forces.
In recent years interest in embodiments of militarism, and more generally in embodied experiences of war, has crossed from history and literature (think of Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain or Joanna Bourke’s Dismembering the Male) and sociology (John Hockey’s sensory ethnography of the infantry) into International Relations (through works such as Kevin McSorley’s War and the Body edited collection or Christine Sylvester’s War as Experience). Importantly for me, this approach incorporates both the lived experience of war and the fictional or fictionalised representations of war that appear in popular culture – joining together both sides of my research interests in a way that I used to find hard to express.
In War as Experience (2013), for instance, Sylvester calls for war to be studied as the same kind of ‘social institution’ as heterosexuality or marriage:
In the case of war, the institutional components include: heroic myths and stories about battles for freedom and tragic losses; memories of war passed from generation to generation; the workings of defense departments and militaries; the production of war-accepting or -glorifying masculinities; the steady production and development of weapon systems; religions that continue to weigh issues of just and unjust wars instead of advocating no wars; and aspects of global popular culture – films, video games, TV shows, advertisements, pop songs, and fashion design – that tacitly support activities of violent politics by mimicking or modeling their elements in everyday circumstances. (p4)
Of course, feminist International Relations has already been able to work for a long time with Cynthia Enloe’s concept of ‘militarisation‘, which includes both the material involvement of armed forces with the rest of society and the economy, and an ideological dimension of persuading the public to internalise the values of the military and war – which, Enloe comes to argue, occurs just as much through popular and consumer culture as through any other social process. (As one chapter in Enloe’s book Maneuvers: the International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2000) is titled: ‘How do they militarize a can of soup?‘) In the last decade, dozens of scholars have been able to use the idea of ‘militarised masculinities’ to talk about gendered representations and embodiments of militarism in contemporary and historic conflicts. (We hear less about ‘militarised femininities‘, even less about ‘female militarised masculinities’, and next to nothing about any non-binary engagements with militarisation, but they’re there too…)
At the International Studies Association conference this year, I was part of a panel on ’embodiment, experience and war’ where I talked about the process of writing about militarisation and embodiment – something I’ve been thinking about since a discussion I had with Synne Laastad-Dyvik during ISA last year. She and McSorley (plus Jesse Crane-Seeber and Lauren Wilcox) were also on the panel, with Sylvester as our discussant, and I took the opportunity to think further about what we communicate and what we ourselves might do or sense when we write about embodied experiences of war or mimetic representations of them.
Do we need to worry, for instance, that something about embodied, sensory experience is being lost when we write about it (especially in the format of academic writing)?
Loss vs. translation (because I never want to hear the phrase ‘lost in translation’ again)
In the panel, I suggested that we could think about it less as loss and more as translation – which lets us see what Translation Studies’ close engagement with the process and politics of translation could bring to thinking about this common concern of ours.
We do run into a problem here – whether the concept of translation can actually be extended beyond the interlingual at all. Anthropology and comparative literature have both used and critiqued the idea of ‘cultural translation’, for instance, but does this stretch ‘translation’ too far beyond the distinct things about translating between languages? Mary Louise Pratt offers one useful resolution by casting attention back on the writer as intermediary, focusing on positionality rather than process:
What is gained by using translation not only as a referent, but also as a metaphor for characterizing the transactions, the appropriations, negotiations, migrations, mediations that give rise to it? Perhaps this question invites us to reflect on the power (not the task) of the translator, as the one who knows both the codes; the one who has the power to do justice, be faithful, yet also to capture, deceive, betray one side to the other, or betray both to a third. (Pratt 2010: 96)
And now we’re back to the concern with the social positioning, agency, visibility and ethics of translation (and interpreting) that Translation Studies has been showing since the 1990s. Mona Baker and Anthony Pym, for instance, have both written on what the ethical responsibilities of translators might be; even though they interpret them differently, they’re still both concerned with how an intermediary uses the power that comes from their understanding of how to communicate in a source language and a target language at the same time.
The choices translators make – what to translate? how closely to accommodate the audience expectations? how strategically to unsettle those expectations through translation? – are all, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay ‘The politics of translation‘ sets out, political – not least because the intermediary is always part of some kind of relationship of power towards the source-language audience(s) and target-language audience(s) they are responsible to.
Other fields – ethnography, postcolonial theory, feminist theory and oral history to name a few – may be further ahead in considering positionality, power and trust during the writing process, but there’s a useful focus on the how as well as the why, what and who of writing that Translation Studies puts into the spotlight (at least for me, after several years researching translation/interpreting and ‘language support’ in peacekeeping operations, when Translation Studies was part of the conceptual framework the research team I belonged to was working with).
It’s also interesting to compare writing about embodiment with the problem of screen translation or audiovisual translation; in some ways, it puts you in the same position as a subtitler. Henrik Gottlieb used the phrase ‘diagonal translation‘ to describe what subtitling does: it has to translate from one language to another, but also from one set of senses to another (speech you hear into writing you read – but staying associated with images you see), within a restrictive set of technical conventions for how much text can appear on screen and once and how long it’s supposed to stay there for.
Subtitling, necessarily, compresses meaning: the diagonal translation, as David MacDougall writes in Transcultural Cinema, ‘distils out of a range of implicit or possible meanings certain explicit ones’ (p. 174).
This is more or less where I’d got up to with the ISA paper when Mona Baker visited Hull to give a seminar on her new research about activist subtitling and the Egyptian Revolution. The activists she worked with have tried to translate in ways that already express changes they want to bring about and – while still restricted by some technical constraints – to experiment with format to convey more of the original than subtitling usually can (e.g. one video that moved subtitles around the screen to emphasise the rhythm of a protest chant).
This was an occasion for me to rethink the instances of militarised embodiment that I’ve written about: if I’m worried that something about embodied experience is being lost when I write, is there anything else I can do to mitigate the effect of that compression of meaning?
Thinking about how Saara Sarma has used paper collages of 2D internet parody images to build arguments about the international politics of nuclear warfare (as explained in her 2014 PhD thesis) – based on Sylvester’s theory of collage as a method where ‘‘[i]f there is a storyline […] “it” is one we [as the viewer] must provide’ (Sylvester 2006: 208), I started developing an idea I’d had in a footnote of an earlier version of the paper: is there anything I could do with video remix, for instance, that I couldn’t do with writing? But, if so, what?
When representations recirculate through us
Although I originally meant to talk about writing about embodiment based on interviews and writing about embodiment based on popular-cultural texts, I found when I was putting the paper together I had far more unanswered questions about writing and popular culture research.
This isn’t what I’d have expected if I’d thought about it. Interviews are the narratives of real people to whom I clearly have ethical responsibilities, and directly represent a person’s embodied experience of war; most of the cultural texts I deal with are audiovisual texts and performances, imagined representations at much more of a distance from what Sylvester and McSorley both emphasise is the core activity of war – injuring the body. They feel less real or material in an important way (though audiovisual texts need people to embody their characters in order to be produced, and have their own politics of production and labour; they’re not quite immaterial, either).
But interview-based and fieldwork-based disciplines already have scripts for thinking about the writer as an intermediary of other people’s experience and the responsibilities that writers then have. Whatever the problem is, someone else has probably had it before, if only you know where to look. Working with/on audiovisual texts doesn’t free us of ethical responsibilities or detach us from our social positions relative to others – a point Laura Shepherd reiterated later in the conference during an excellent paper on the ethics of researching and circulating (or not circulating) viral internet memes – but, then, what responsibilities and positions are they?
After explaining some of the ways in which I’ve researched militarised embodiment in popular culture – both in contexts where you’d expect it (like Croatian patriotic popular music during the Homeland War)…
…and in contexts where you might not…
…and making the point that even as we critique the recirculation of images and narratives, they recirculate through us (and bring with them, often very problematically, their own invitations to desire and identify), I finished up wondering whether – like the activist subtitlers in Mona Baker’s research – there are ways narrative approaches that might help get at this point more successfully than I can do in academic writing.
(A few other kinds of narrative that come to mind here: the use of fiction by IR scholars such as Elizabeth Dauphinée or Richard Jackson to communicate ethical questions about researching political violence; the narrative about fandom, desire and identification in the comic The Wicked and the Divine which within a few months, with the creators’ knowledge, had started inspiring fanart and cosplay of its own; the fact that whatever any of us academics write about critical engagement with popular culture, we’ll never reach as many people as Suzanne Collins has with The Hunger Games.)
So far, the closest I’ve come to an audiovisual research output is the Powerpoint of looped and paired images I used a couple of years ago to illustrate a paper I was giving on representations of militarised masculinities and the Balkans in the film adaptation of Coriolanus. (Which eventually became an article itself.) I’d seen Victoria Basham do this with one image per slide during a talk on popular militarism in the UK. For the Coriolanus slides (I’ll put up some of these in a forthcoming blog post about the article), I paired one image from the film and a news image from the Yugoslav wars in order to illustrate the points about resemblance, identification and recirculation that I was making, and had each pair automatically rotate behind me as I talked; it can’t convey all the information that a paper can, but is there anything a display like that can convey that an academic paper can’t, precisely because it forces the listener to take more of a part in making sense of what they can see?
A digital argument?
Feeling that this worked well but not quite knowing why, and being aware of what Sarma has already done with 2D collage, brought me to thinking about video remix. Outside the academy, this has already started becoming established as a tool in cultural studies pedagogy: Jonathan McIntosh’s ‘Buffy vs. Edward: Twilight Remixed‘, which edits footage from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight together into a scene between Buffy Summers and Edward Cullen to comment on Twilight‘s eroticisation of an abusive relationship, has had more than 3 million viewers despite being temporarily removed from YouTube in a copyright dispute. Craig Saddlemire and Ryan Conrad’s ‘A.V.A.T.A.R.: Anglos Valiantly Aiding Tragic Awe-Inspiring Races’, which mixes lines from Avatar with lines from 16 historical films to draw attention to the persistence of ‘white saviour‘ tropes in Hollywood film-making, has 40,000 but could still do with more.
In some ways, this might not even be too far from what we do as academics after all. I’m interested by Virginia Kuhn’s concept of this form of remix as a ‘digital argument’:
[R]ecent attempts to categorize remix are limiting, mainly as a result of their reliance on the visual arts and cinema theory as the gauge by which remix is measured. A more valuable view of remix is as a digital argument that works across the registers of sound, text, and image to make claims and provides evidence to support those claims. […] [A]rgument is key to academic efforts, and as such, the term holds resonance for the scholarly community. Remix can be a scholarly pursuit: it cites, synthesizes, and juxtaposes its sources. Argument also contains connotations of the dialogic quality of communication that is not anchored to either speech or writing, and so digital argument can extend its features to writing with sound and image in addition to words.
But then, what sources are even mine to do things with, especially when I’ve been engaged in cross-cultural research? My gut sense is only those sources that I’m addressed by or maybe even that I’m marginalised by; but I’d like to see the fields I belong to do much more to develop the ethics of dissemination methods like these. And how, when we leave more of the meaning-making to the viewer, do we ensure that they can’t miss the critical engagement we want to bring about?
Thanks to my co-panellists at ISA, my colleagues in researching militarisation/embodiment generally, and to Sarah Maitland for conversations which have helped me develop this…
In lieu of two more posts on public memory of war in the UK which I haven’t yet had time to research, here’s a quick post rounding up several publications that have come out over the last few months:
‘Prosperity Without Security: the Precarity of Interpreters in Postsocialist, Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina’. Slavic Review 71:4 (2012): 849-72. Exploring how interpreters working for foreign military forces were socioeconomically positioned in the context of post-socialism and of global practices of security. This link works with subscription access, alternatively look here.
‘When Bosnia was a Commonwealth Country: British Forces and their Interpreters in Republika Srpska 1995-2007′. History Workshop Journal 74:1 (2012): 131-55. Identifying common experiences in the narratives of interpreters who worked for British units within IFOR and SFOR that were based in Republika Srpska. Access as text or PDF.
‘The Afterlife of Neda Ukraden: Negotiating Space and Memory Through Popular Music After the Fall of Yugoslavia’, in Music, Politics and Violence, ed. Susan Fast and Kip Pegley (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012): 60–82. Discussing the Bosnian and Croatian reception of a singer with a Serb background who moved from Sarajevo to Belgrade in 1992. For various reasons this has been on my in-press list for a while, and I’m delighted to see it in print.
It’s still less than a year since Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict, ed. Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) came out. I have one chapter in this on British perceptions of what was then called Serbo-Croatian during the Cold War, another chapter giving an overview of interpreters’ work in peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and two exciting joint chapters – one with Simona Tobia comparing the working identities of language intermediaries in/after WW2 and in the Bosnian operations, and another with Hilary Footitt exploring the shifting meanings of ‘fraternisation’.
Beyond this, there’s more in the pipeline for (hopefully) 2013, although book chapters sometimes have a way of taking a bit longer than expected:
My co-authored book with Michael Kelly, Interpreting the Peace: Peace Operations, Conflict and Language in Bosnia-Herzegovina, is due out from Palgrave Macmillan in the New Year – a more in-depth look at the histories of language support and the experiences of interpreters/translators that I’ve spotlighted in several articles. (Of course, now that I’ve posted it as forthcoming, watch them get it out before the end of the year!)
An article on discourses of music as a weapon of war during the post-Yugoslav conflicts (awaiting peer review).
An article on English/Croatian code switching in Croatian dance music during the 1990s (in press).
A book chapter on the problems of framing and identity in oral history interviewing, thinking particularly about the frame of ethnic identity (submitted, editorial revisions done).
A book chapter on the language politics of peacebuilding (submitted, editorial revisions done).
A book chapter on post-socialist and post-conflict mobilities and the exercise of power during peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina (reviewer reports received, under revision).
Further down the list: a pair of articles on precarity, post-socialism and the international organisation sector in former Yugoslavia, which are still seeking homes.
I’m also looking forward to speaking trips or conference visits to Munich, Halle, Manchester, Newcastle, San Francisco (ISA 2013), possibly Sussex, and quite likely more to be determined…
Catherine Baker 