BHA Webinar Series (Zoom)
Speaker: Ante Bralić (University of Zadar)
Date & Hour: June 11 (Thursday), 00:00 CET / 00:00 EET
Moderator: Timothy French
Technical assistance: Timothy French, contact: timothymfrench@yahoo.com
Webinar link
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/…
Webinar ID ….
How to name an ethnicity, and in later development a nation, is often not just a historiographical question. The complexity of this problem is more often related to political, ideological and other reasons than to the actual situation on the ground. The following works can serve as a theoretical basis: Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, Marija Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans and Nina Raspudić’s Jadranski (polu)orijentalizam, eng. Adriatic (Semi)Orientalisms. The use of the terms (“Slavi” and “Talijanaši”) in the period when the modern Italian, Croatian and Slovenian nations had already been formed was aimed at justifying Italian conquests of the eastern Adriatic in the first case and denying the existence of the Italian nation in the second case. The term “Slavi” denotes a semi-barbarian, politically and nationally amorphous mass that should be ruled by a “higher” Latin, i.e. Italian culture. The term “Talijanaši” was intended to show that there was no autochthonous Italian national community on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. In the Croatian and Slovenian cases, the term “Talijanaši” was abandoned at the end of the 20th century. It was only at the beginning of the 21st century that the Croatian and Slovenian names for the nations from the eastern coast of the Adriatic began to be used more widely within Italian historiography.