Montenegro - Part 5

posted by usha on 2005/10/29 11:38

[ Montenegro ]

The synopsis of the whole research project P 16511 and the conference on the Construction of Space and Borders in Austria-Hungary, 1867-1918 is now online.

My own research on Montenegro as being "the periphery of all peripheries" of the Habsburg monarchy is within this context. The fragility of borders as it is analysed by Edit Király dealing with literary representations of the Danube as a border region, for example, is of high importance for the subject of Montenegro, as well. The representational techniques of this country expose the ever-changing intersection of discourses of the Orient and Orientalization and Occidentalism and Europeaness, modernity and archaism.

This is, of course, a well-known phenomenon of ethnic and national imaging and comes without surprise. But Montenegro's own political voice has not been as weak or even inaudible as the one of colonized countries. Her official sef-images, her own territorial claims, her relations with more powerful nations has been a constant source of irritation. The interplay of representation, self-imaging, and delineating spaces of power is ever-present in almost all the available documents. And the "correction of prejudices of Oriental gendering" to be found within the Newspaper from Cetinje, edited by the kk occupation forces from 1916-1918, clearly shows the internal and external dynamics of such discourses, constructions of images, and their counterdiscourses. Nobody can reset those discourses, they have a strong tendency to reproduce themselves, on the one hand, and to produce side-effects circumventing stable valuations, on the other hand.


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