Danubiana Carpathica (2024)
Topic: “Laboratories of Cultural Diversity and Mixing. The Microspaces of Southeast Europe in a Global Framework”.
Danubiana Carpathica: Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Kultur in den deutschen Siedlungsgebieten Südosteuropas [Yearbook for History and Culture in the German Settlement Areas in South East Europe] is seeking new contributions for publication in 2024. We are inviting proposals for individual articles.
Call for Papers. Deadline for abstract submission: 31 Mai 2023
Southeastern Europe and its local spaces are characterized by an extraordinary diversity. Before the regions of Southeastern Europe began to evolve into distinct nation-states, their historical development over the past centuries was influenced by the structures of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Republic of Venice. Considering the migration processes from, into and within Southeastern Europe, these regions can be understood as imperial and nation-state testing grounds for diversity and mixing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they were all part of national spaces and homogenizing paradigms shaped by the nation-state. The diagnoses of Southeastern European regions as pluralistic and mixed are linked to the processes of differentiation and categorization of people on the part of states and governments, but also on the part of local actors in the respective microspaces.
The discourse about diversity has undergone several social and political transformations since the eighteenth century to the current politics of multiculturalism. The consideration of “mixing” as a concept from the sources, can be seen as one of the recent trends in Southeast European studies. The aim of this volume is to reflect on the production and practice of knowledge about cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity and mixing that served as the basis for ordering social life in twentieth-century Southeastern Europe. Special attention will be paid to the categorization and differentiation of “Germans” or German-speaking people and the “in-between spaces” in language, culture, etc. that are made visible in the process. Collective knowledge is fundamental to the categorization of groups and individuals, while diversity is understood as a translocal existence. Therefore, the planned volume also focuses on processes, relationships and interconnections between local situations in order to identify translocal knowledge transfer regarding diversity and mixing.
The volume addresses the question of how and by whom categories and differentiations are organized, destabilized, violently reshaped, or suppressed in the twentieth century. It can be asked whether diversity is organized differently by states than by local actors in communities. From this perspective, many practices (and their consequences) can be made visible, such as statistical and ethnographic surveys, cartography, the organization of membership in parties and associations, the negotiation of school language, the invention of terms to describe “mixed”/”hybrid” and politically, ethnically, nationally or culturally “indifferent” and “ambiguous” groups and individuals, etc. Equally important is the analysis of the characteristics of individual and collective participation in social processes and cultural exchange of those people, who were described as “mixed”, in a multicultural environment. The focus can be on specific situations such as public places, city festivals, cultural centers, hospitals, markets, etc.
Insights into Southeastern Europe as a macrospace deeply rooted in global discourses are of particular interest for the planned volume. Characterized by migratory flows of people, knowledge, and goods, and by the fragmentation of individual spaces through their shifting political affiliations, Southeastern Europe is a veritable laboratory for the interplay of the global and the local. Symptomatic is the tension between differentiation and hybridization of identities and affiliations at the local level. This volume seeks to provide an overview of the negotiation of diversity and mixing in many of its microspaces and to situate Southeastern Europe within a global narrative. It should serve to shed light on the processes of Europeanization and globalization and the direction of cultural transfers. Cultural practices that contributed to the stabilization of local orders in the twentieth century can be examined for their exemplary role in further research. Obstacles and failures will also be considered. Finally, Southeast European microspaces are viewed as a model for comparison with other microspaces in a global framework.
Contributions are expected on one or more specific micro-spaces in Southeastern Europe, from a singular or comparative perspective. Submitted analyses can be both empirical and theoretical. Perspectives from sociology, history, literature, politics and cultural studies are welcome.
Abstracts in English with a maximum length of 300 words should be sent to PD Dr. Daniela Simon (Daniela.Simon@idgl.bwl.de) by May 31, 2023. Following positive feedback (by June 15, 2023), full papers of approximately 30,000 characters should be submitted by September 17, 2023.
