The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria - Hardcover

Neuburger, Mary C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801441323 ISBN 13: 9780801441325

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Bulgaria is a Slavic nation, Orthodox in faith but with a sizable Muslim minority. That minority is divided into various ethnic groups, including the most numerically significant Turks and the so-called Pomaks, Bulgarian-speaking men and women who have converted to Islam. Mary Neuburger explores how Muslim minorities were integral to Bulgaria's struggle to extricate itself from its Ottoman past and develop a national identity, a process complicated by its geographic and historical positioning between evolving and imagined parameters of East and West.

The Orient Within examines the Slavic majority's efforts to conceptualize and manage Turkish and Pomak identities and bodies through gendered dress practices, renaming of people and places, and land reclamation projects. Neuburger shows that the relationship between Muslims and the Bulgarian majority has run the gamut from accommodation to forced removal to total assimilation from 1878, when Bulgaria acquired autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, to 1989, when Bulgaria's Communist dictatorship collapsed. Neuburger subjects the concept of Orientalism to an important critique, showing its relevance and complexity in the Bulgarian context, where national identity and modernity were brokered in the shadow of Western Europe, Russia/USSR, and Turkey.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary C. Neuburger is Director of the Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, and Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria and The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria, both from Cornell.

Review:

"The Orient Within is a well researched and clearly written book. Its arguments and insights are cogent and illuminating, extremely sophisticated and intelligent. The topics addressed are extensively covered and very well argued: the Pomak question, communist policies toward the Muslims in the period immediately after the second world war, and the dress code legislation of the 1980s; themes concerning head-dress, the veil, and circumcision; and minority rights, the problems of interethnic communal relations, and the tensions created by modernization. Mary Neuburger's research and scholarship are impressive, and she has made considerable use of archives to which few western scholars have yet had access."

(Richard Crampton, Professor of East European History, University of Oxford)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0801441323
• ISBN 13: 9780801441325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248