UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference
Inclusion Exclusion
Saturday 18 February 12:00 – 1:30: Panel J4: Music, Culture, and Nationhood
Catherine Baker (UCL - SSEES): ‘Politicized showbusiness in Croatia: constructing the nation through popular music and myth’
In Croatia, as elsewhere, popular music represents one aspect of a national cultural space in which narratives of national and non-national identity are developed through processes of inclusion and exclusion. These dynamics can be observed in three particular cases: music produced between 1991 and 1995 directly relating to the war in Croatia; musical styles which have derived from the genre of ‘newly-composed folk music’ also associated with Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina; and the patriotic showbusiness which has emerged from 2001 onwards and expresses the standpoints of the militant political right.
Analysing the content of wartime showbusiness reveals much about the legitimising nationalist ideology of the 1990s and its themes of victimhood, unity, historical continuity, and gender imagery. This ideology provided a framework for including all Croats (whatever their other differences) as members of the national community, but was equally based on excluding all those who did not conform to the normative framework: while ethnicity formed one basis for exclusion, another was an individual’s refusal to accept the political and historical primacy of the Croatian state. Mass-circulation showbusiness here represented one pillar of the wider project to establish identification with a new nation-state explicitly defined against its predecessor, and it is valuable to examine what its producers chose to include in its symbolic repertoire.
Even outside the circumstances of the wartime context, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion permeate Croatian popular music: particular ambiguity surrounds the position of Croatia’s variant of newly-composed folk music, and its stylistic similarities to Serbian (and other Balkan) popular music provokes significant tensions founded on a dichotomy between the concepts of Balkan and European. This discourse gives rise to strategies of exclusion which are based on a variety of signifiers of geographical and historical otherness. In this framework, the biography of the Serbian folk singer Ceca Ražnatović allows her to signify the national, political and cultural Other perhaps more successfully than any other figure.
From 2001 onwards, politicised showbusiness again became a route to commercial success, coinciding with a climate of annual protests against the war crimes indictments of Croatian Army generals. This version of politicised showbusiness continues to flourish today in response to ongoing extradition controversies, and some performers have even produced songs to support specific indictees. The contemporary subjects of this music are depicted in terms of historical and folkloric parallels which incorporate the events of the 1990s into a mythic matrix where the violence of contemporary acts can be minimised by relating them to fairy-tale, and legitimised by including them in the continuum of historical ‘state-building’ heroism. The framers of this narrative include the knights, bandits, and fairies of romanticised folklore, while excluding the historical contingency of particular events, to elaborate an overarching narrative of persecution, heroism and betrayal which can be constructively compared with the state-sanctioned wartime showbusiness of the previous decade to illustrate the ways in which myths of identity may be selected, expressed, and shaped through popular music.
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