Elegantly written and full of unexpected (re)readings and provocative insights, this work towers over the already respectable stack of books on the cultural history of nationalism. The question “whose is Bosnia” is approached as a metonym for broader nationalist and imperial contestations. While forming an organic whole, the book can be approached as a collection of essays on different aspects of fashioning the nationalist subject. They are built around powerful tropes serving as nuclei around which national sensibilities coalesce: the people, suffering, national activism, youth, and heroism.
“The people” (narod) is a pliable concept, recognized by national activists and scholars alike. What Hajdarpašić brings to this analysis is a careful reassessment of known figures and their oeuvre. Thus, the central character in “The Land of the People” is Vuk Karadžić, alongside an array of other important persons. The approach to Karadžić is unexpected: Rather than dwell on the well-known story of his language reform as a central pillar of nation-building, it follows his evolution from a “man of the people” to “patriotic scholar.” This allows Hajdarpašić to develop his notion of “ethnographic populism” as a set of practices that encourage politically active amateurs in producing relevant scholarship.
The stress on suffering is ubiquitous in all nationalisms. Recording the different genres in which it was registered—poetry, essays, diplomatic dispatches, newspaper articles, paintings—is a distinct contribution to the new field of the history of emotions. But Hajdarpašić does something more interesting. He looks at the production of an aggrieved national subjectivity as a mode of communication addressed to a worldwide audience that was sensitized to questions of slavery, religious freedom, women's rights, and social justice, thus exploring the specific correspondence between nationalism and liberalism. Taking his cue from Ognjeslav Utješenović’s 1842 poem “Echoes from the Balkans,” Hajdarpašić evokes the echo as an effective metaphor for the repetitive compulsion to evoke suffering. It might have been interesting to analyze suffering as the mirror stage of national self-fashioning.
National activists were the conscious avant-garde of the national revolution, imbued with a mobilizing mission. From the outset, South Slav plans had the state in mind and the influence of Serbia was crucial. The Načertanjie of 1844 and other plans nicely conflated liberation with conquest. The consciousness-raising work was particularly difficult among Bosnian Muslims, who were seen as both integral and liminal to the Serbian and Croatian programs, allowing the author to introduce the “(br)other” as an apt interpretive device for analyzing claims of sameness and otherness. Youth as the future of the nation is the obvious target and finite goal of nationalist efforts. In the Balkans, this meant a highly educated, almost exclusively male, class in an overwhelmingly illiterate society. This went hand in hand with youth radicalization and “the naturalization of the assumption that youth and political violence are inseparable” (129). What the imperial state saw as criminals and terrorists were, of course, heroes and martyrs for the national cause, culminating in Gavrilo Princip and the Sarajevo assassination of 1914.
Hajdarpašić challenges the predominant interpretation of national and imperial programs as “ethnic” and “supra-ethnic.” Instead, he demonstrates their intertwined relationship, the extent to which imperial governments, while suppressing nationalism, also borrowed its strategies and idioms through print media, history, schools, museums, and especially folklore. The climax of the Habsburg imperial fairy tale was Alfons Mucha's “The Allegory of Bosnia-Herzegovina” for the Bosnian pavilion of the 1900 Paris World Fair, which serves as the book's attractive dust jacket.
Evoking Claudio Lomnitz's “grounded theory” is appropriate, although it has a tinge of defensiveness. After all, in theory each “theory” should be empirically grounded. At times, when emphasizing the processual character of nationalization, the author erects a straw man, overlooking the literature that stresses the open-ended character of nationalism. It is a disservice on the part of Cornell University Press, one of the premier outlets for East European scholarship, to be miserly and not make room for a bibliography. But these are small quibbles.
This is an admirable study, not just because it is the debut of a young scholar. Often first books turn out to be the best in a scholarly career. What makes this work attractive is the wide culture and sophistication displayed, the ease with which Hajdarpašić moves from literary to philosophical allusions, the erudite interdisciplinary sweep, from anthropology to sociology and political science. This, more than the “grounded theory,” really “de-provincializes” its subject, and makes the work an important contribution not only to East European literature broadly, but to nationalism studies in general.
