Entertaining the Yugoslav capital: culture, urban space, and politics in Belgrade between the two wars

Babovic, Jovana

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Description

Title

Entertaining the Yugoslav capital: culture, urban space, and politics in Belgrade between the two wars

Author(s)

Babovic, Jovana

Issue Date

2014-09-16

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Todorova, Maria N.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Todorova, Maria N.

Committee Member(s)

• Steinberg, Mark D.
• Hitchins, Keith
• Lampe, John R.

Department of Study

History

Discipline

History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• East Europe
• Balkans
• Yugoslavia
• Belgrade
• Popular Culture
• Entertainment
• Urban History

Abstract

This dissertation examines entertainment in Belgrade during the 1920s and 1930s, a period when it was overwhelmingly foreign. Entertainment presented an everyday challenge to social hierarchies propped up by elites, conservatives, and reform-minded bourgeois and petit bourgeois residents. More importantly, its ubiquitous presence was yet another impeding force to the development of a unified Yugoslav culture, all the more detrimental in the state’s capital city. I argue that foreign entertainment destabilized the notions of class and gender that formed the fundamental pillars of Yugoslav society, just as it democratized both national and elite cultural hierarchies. At the same time, this dissertation situates the Yugoslav capital on the web of hegemonic urban culture originating in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin. Although Belgrade remained politically, economically, and socially peripheral to Europe’s metropolitan centers in the two decades after the Great War, I argue that foreign entertainment forged new links between the Yugoslav capital and Europe by privileging residents with access to the mainstream cultures of the continent’s metropolitan centers.

Graduation Semester

2014-08

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50412

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Jovana Babovic

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