Fitting the Balkans: The image of the Balkans in American culture in the long nineteenth century

The subject of this dissertation is how American culture constructed the image of the Balkans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dissertation is situated at the intersection of Balkanism/Orientalism and American Studies. It looks at key cultural sites and conditions of image production and dissemination, with special attention to the specific historical contexts that framed them. My approach has been to analyze the perception and representation of the Balkans against two of the leading cultural concepts of the period, civilization and race, thus accounting for the role of the a priori in shaping them. Furthermore, I have aimed to situate the emerging image in the framework of cultural hegemony and cultural hierarchy in the United States at the time, so as to contextualize it in terms of existing power relationships.; My analysis begins with the American missionaries in the Balkans, who represented the first systematic instance of image construction in the nineteenth century. Next, I discuss the treatment of the Balkans in the US immigration/labor/race discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both discourses were hegemonic, and both assigned the Balkans an inferior, inbetween place in the hierarchies of civilizations and races. I then turn to popular culture as a site of continuous and multiple image production and transmission, with enormous importance for the texture and longevity of the image of the Balkans. Specifically, I look at the Victorian World's Fairs and popular literature, notably the case of Dracula, to explore the mechanisms of the construction and its role in cultural hegemony.; Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the image of the Balkans that took shape in that period, was not a timeless expression of a Balkan essence but a historically specific product of American culture.