| My dissertation examines the theories and practices behind Bulgarian state modernization projects and the continuities and ruptures in the Bulgarian national drive to development from the gaining of autonomy from Ottoman rule in 1878 though the end of Communist rule in 1989. I explore how the categories and imperatives of nationalism and later communism frame the shifting boundaries of the Bulgarian national self in relation to Muslim minority "Others" within, both Turks and Pomaks (Bulgarian speaking Muslims). I trace how Bulgarian bureaucrats and intellectuals, under the influence of Western ideas, increasingly approached Muslim minorities as both "backwards" and "foreign" and therefore a threat to national integration. I also explore how historical conditions demanded that Bulgarian policy vacillate between expulsion, assimilation, and co-optation of Muslim minorities from or into the Bulgarian body politic. Lastly, I address the diverse responses of Muslim minorities, who were co-opted into Bulgarian nation-building practices and/or contested them on the local level through various modes of everyday resistance, including migration.;In analyzing the emergence of Modern Bulgaria, I focus on one of the "objective criteria" of nationhood that is often ignored in studies of nationalism, namely territory and the connected phenomenon of property. My concept of "property" is broad, extending from national territory to domestic state and private properties to the personal properties of the hearth. I contend that these forms of property provide the foundations on which nations can be imagined and built, or conversely, they can pose a perceived threat to national integrity. Concretely, I explore the Bulgarianization of "Bulgarian lands" through coerced Turkish emigration, as well as the penetration of Bulgarian state control into Muslim properties, vakf(religiously endowed) properties, the mosque, the medrese and the home. Muslim minorities in Bulgaria, played a key role as cultural Other in the broader context of Bulgarian nation building that played itself out in the realm of national designs on territory and property. Furthermore, it was this very process--intertwined with Western concepts and developments linked to modernity--that created a deep rupture in Bulgaro-Muslim relations in Bulgaria. |
