This seminar for graduate and advanced undergraduate students has two main objectives. First, it is to critically assess competing and conflicting conceptions of the Balkans, Balkanism, and Balkanization. Second, it engages with border studies, a vast and thriving field that makes sense of widely different and constantly changing definitions of the border. The course’s case studies focus on the region of the former Yugoslavia across the disciplines currently recognized as the humanities and social sciences. We will examine what those disciplinary borders do to the different types of borders we have chosen to analyze. We will discuss the concepts of copy and imitation in relation to Balkan arts and politics in the contemporary globalized world. We will explore documentary film and performance art representations of how refugees, migrant minorities, and borderline populations counter marginalizations and trauma.
- Subject
- CLSS GU
- Credits (min)
- 3
- Credits (max)
- 3
- Credit unit
- points
- Type
- course
- Edition
- 2026
- Source
- bulletin.columbia.edu