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Typologies of the East: On

Distinguishing Balkanism and
Orientalism
a
Andrew Hammond
a
Faculty of Humanities, Swansea Institute of Higher Education,
University of Wales

Available online: 24 Jun 2008

To cite this article: Andrew Hammond (2007): Typologies of the East: On Distinguishing Balkanism
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 Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Vol. 29, Nos 23, June/September 2007, pp. 201218

Typologies of the East:

On Distinguishing Balkanism
and Orientalism
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Andrew Hammond
Faculty of Humanities, Swansea Institute of Higher Education, University of Wales

For the study of Western imaginative geography, it is difficult to overestimate the

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influence of Edward Saids Orientalism, a work that did much to create the critical
school of colonial discourse analysis. It was here that Said first demystified Anglo-
French-American (17) representations of the Islamic Middle East and North Africa,
viewing their binaristic constructs not as empirically grounded but as an institutional-
ized, cumulative tradition of textual statements which have channelled and controlled
Western knowledge of the Orient from the eighteenth century onwards. Drawing on
Michel Foucaults conjunction of knowledge and power, Said also considered such
representation a performative discourse which advances Western imperial supremacy
in the region. It was in reference to Foucault, for example, that Said summarized
orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority
over the Orient, lamenting how European or Western knowledge about the Orient
[is] synonymous with European domination (3, 197). Naturally, the thirty years
since the publication of Orientalism have seen challenges to Saids original thesis.
Feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and Marxism have questioned his line of
inquiry, revealing orientalism to be less fixed and monolithic than Said suggested.1 Yet
the works status remains unimpaired. Orientalism not only continues to inform criti-
cal analyses of Western views of the Middle East, with few studies not using Said as a
starting point of discussion, but also informs scholarship on Western representations
of other parts of the world.
The influence of Saids work on these other fields is particularly apparent in the crit-
icism that addresses Western representation of the Balkans. Emerging from the
discourse studies that dominated the last two decades of the twentieth century, such crit-
icism was at its most productive during the Balkan crises of the 1990s, when South-East
Europe became, via a plethora of travel accounts, films, memoirs, and media articles,

ISSN 08905495 (print)/ISSN 14772663 (online) 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/08905490701623235
 202 A. Hammond
one of the Wests most significant others. While being inspired by Saids work, however,
early research in the field was also hampered by his theories of Western representation.
Despite their frequent acuteness, critics initially allotted little specificity to the interpre-
tative framework that structured the Balkans, and, largely due to the regions position
in the East and its history of control by the Ottoman Empire, viewed that framework
as merely a branch of orientalism. In John Allcocks seminal Constructing the
Balkans, for example, differences are admitted, yet the focus remains on how Saids
writings ring very true with respect to the process by which [South-East Europe] and
its peoples have come to be constructed, Allcock summarizing the examination of the
image of the Balkans as a sub-theme to Saids study (17879). A similar assertion
appears in the work of Milica Bakic-Hayden. In two important articles from the early
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1990s, Bakic-Hayden accepts that it is important to recognize the specific rhetoric on

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the Balkans, only to go on to argue that such rhetoric forms a variation on the orien-
talist theme and that orientalist imagery is often highly reminiscent of depictions
of eastern Europe (Nesting Orientalism 32021).2 Bakic-Haydens shift in the final
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phrase to the wider geographical category is an acknowledgement of the work of Larry

Wolff, whose Inventing Eastern Europe also appeared during the decade. Once again,
despite some suggestion of specificity, Wolffs study views the invention of Eastern
Europe as an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization (7). The influence of the
Saidian model was, in fact, so pervasive that the conflation of orientalism and the
Western discourse on the Balkans was continuing in the late 1990s. David Norriss In
the Wake of the Balkan Myth claims that the latter overlaps with Saids formulations
concerning Orientalism, and Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis despecify the
Western image of the Balkans by terming its academic exploration an Orientalist
approach (Norris 1213; Bracewell and Drace-Francis 60).
It was not that discursive specificity was unrecognized in such work, but rather that
the specific traits projected onto South-East Europe were so under-explored that they
became eclipsed by the sense of congruence between the two rhetorical traditions.
Without doubt, any suggestion that congruence does not exist would be misleading.
Even the briefest survey of the discourses that the West has deployed on the Balkans
and the Orient will discover motifs, images, registers, and evaluations which appear to
have floated free of historical and geographical context. This is true, most obviously, of
the tone in which commentators have described the Balkans, berating this cut-throat
part of Europe, these inferior nationalities (Foster Fraser 205; Upward 279), with a
moral outrage which matches that of comparable critiques of the Middle East. At the
same time, the denigratory essentialisation of the Balkans has been pursued via
tropesof mystery, degeneracy, savagery, immorality, chaosthat are found in orien-
talism and that have recurred persistently in post-Enlightenment writings on the two
regions. Furthermore, the two strains of discourse have been structured according to
exactly the same binarist logic, with South-East Europe proving as effective an antitype
for the enlightened, progressive, imperial West as the Islamic East. Indeed, many of
Saids depictions of orientalist binarism could as easily stand for the dichotomies
between Western and South-Eastern Europe (or indeed between the West and any
foreign other). When cultural production divides the world into us (Westerners) and
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 203
they (Orientals), and constructs the former as rational, virtuous, mature, normal
and the latter as irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, different, one has the basic
ontological template for the absolute division of Europe itself, not only that separat-
ing Europe and the Middle East (Said, Orientalism 45, 40, 40 300). There is nothing
surprising about these similarities between representational forms. The ethnocentric
motifs that gained ground in nineteenth-century discourse were ubiquitous in pres-
ence and indiscriminate in usage, pervading Western European culture and being
deployed on a wide range of non-European territories. Yet should this imply that no
specificity occurred at all? One would assume that, as a cross-cultural discourse inter-
acts with the particularities of a region, it would gain a measure of uniqueness and, over
time, begin to assume some of the features of a distinctive tradition. This indeed was
the case with the Balkans, and it was not long before late-twentieth-century critics
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began to explore the idiosyncrasies of Western representation of the peninsula.

The breakthrough was made by two studies written in the latter half of the 1990s, the
first and most important being Maria Todorovas Imagining the Balkans. Addressing the
earlier scholarship, Todorova states that the Western view of South-East Europe should
not be circumscribed in the category of orientalism and that, rather than view the
former as merely a subspecies of the latter, the emphasis should be on the delineation
of a seemingly identical, but actually only similar phenomenon (8, 11). It was to this
end that Todorova introduced the term balkanism, a crucial step forward for the field.
Drawing the term from linguistics, where it refers to attributes of local languages, she
used balkanism as a shorthand for the range of discursive practices, political projects,
and representational motifs found in writings on South-East Europe. These motifs,
although not explored in depth, were particularly important to her thesis. If one takes
Saids definition of a cross-cultural discourseas the vocabulary, representative
figures and tropes deployed when describing a region or culture other than ones
own (Said, Orientalism 71)then for Todorova the depiction of the Balkans has been
composed of specific linguistic material and specific traditions of imagery and empha-
sis. It was this divergence that led her to conclude that [b]alkanism evolved to a great
extent independently from orientalism and, in certain aspects, against or despite it
(20). Todorovas argument was soon augmented by K.E. Flemings Orientalism, the
Balkans, and Balkan Historiography. Stated boldly, Flemings focus was on the limited
utility of a Saidian approach to the Balkans, feeling that critics would be more usefully
employed in testing (and perhaps ultimately rejecting) Saids model (1220). The
proof for Fleming was less the form which balkanism had taken than the conditions in
which it had been produced. In particular, she argued that South-East Europe has
received less weighty and sustained treatment than the Orient, with the Wests interest
in the region beginning relatively late and lacking the authority of the orientalist canon.
In contrast to the erudite, specialized academic infrastructure awarded the Middle East,
for example, balkanism has largely been pursued in the populist genres of adventure
fiction and travelogue (1225), often produced by non-experts during moments
of crises. Flemings emphasis on the conditions of production, when wedded to
Todorovas emphasis on representational tropes, proved beyond doubt that a distinct
field of study was emerging.
 204 A. Hammond
This essay aims to further their analysis of a unique, distinctive balkanism by
expanding upon one area of study: Todorovas exploration of discursive imagery. To
this end, I shall be using British travel writing as a source material, the major genre in
which Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslaviaor the countries of
the Balkan peninsulahave been imagined. While accepting points of interdepen-
dence, I shall posit some general areas of variance between balkanism and orientalism
as they developed during the long nineteenth century, especially from the 1840s to the
outbreak of the First World War. As part of this, the essay will question a number of
claims that Todorova has made. Above all, her assertion that, in contrast to writings
on the Orient, travellers have rarely romanticiz[ed] the Balkans (15) will be chal-
lenged, and the case made that the style of romanticization to be found in Balkan trav-
elogues is central to the distinctiveness that the discourse has achieved. In contrast to
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Todorovas work, I shall also be making the Foucauldian issue of power-knowledge

central to my argument. It seems curious that for a field so grounded in Saidian analy-
sis the political interests governing representation are rarely analyzed in studies of
balkanism, despite the fact that a full understanding of the forms and transformations
of any discourse is dependent on exactly such analysis. For this theme, my timeframe
is admittedly a limiting factor. Both balkanism and orientalism have been complex
and mutable discourses, heterogeneous in structure and shifting over time in a
manner under-emphasised by Todorova and Said. In focusing solely on balkanisms
formative period, I can only aim to sketch out the broad disparities between the two
conceptual structures during the heyday of empire, aware that their historical trans-
formation requires a much longer study. I am also aware that, in a study of this length,
it is only possible to give an introductory outline of the areas of disparity in the hope
that a more detailed examination will follow.
One of the most important disparities, to begin with, involves the respective
positions and functions allotted to the Orient and the Balkans in Western imaginative
geography. On the one hand, the Orient has always been viewed as an absolute point of
otherness that exists outside the framework of Europe, threatening the continent from
without. As Said argues, the Orient is culturally, intellectually, spiritually outside
Europe and European civilization, an outsider with its own national, cultural, and
epistemological boundaries that lurk[s] alongside Europe [as] a constant danger
(Said, Orientalism 71, 70, 40, 59). The role it plays, in other words, is that of the clear
and powerful opposite, one grounded in a wholesale difference between the familiar
(Europe, the West, us) and the strange (the Orient, the East, them) (43) and with
whom altercation would produce catastrophe.3 The role of the Balkans, however, is
quite distinct. In the Western imagination, the region is less a secure marker of alterity
than an unstable and unsettling presence loosed from clear identity, an obscure bound-
ary along the European peripheries where categories, oppositions, and essentialized
groupings are cast into confusion. As David Norris has put it, in the ontological divi-
sion between East and West, the Balkans are the ambivalent lands between, a frontier
not belonging fully to either world (5).4 This is the part of Europe where Orient and
Occident merge, and where various ethnicities have infiltrated European space while
simultaneously refusing many of the Wests models of social development and cultural
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 205
organization. Therefore, contrary to the Orients role as a contiguous or exterior other,
the Balkans have become the other within, a liminal self that undermines continental
unity and stability by more subtle erosion.
On one level, the regions ambiguous position has caused bewilderment for Western
commentators, as illustrated by the usage of the terms Europe and European in
their writings. In James Creaghs Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah, for
example, there is no doubt that the Balkans are European territory, the author terming
them a section of the continent of Europe, yet he often manages to find nothing
European about Balkan culture (13, 85). Similarly, Henry Barkleys Bulgaria before the
War considers the region geographically European, designating Bulgaria part of
Europe, but then denies it European culture by reserving the epithet solely for the
achievements and judgements of those from the West (3, 248, 6, 176). On a deeper
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level, this act of stumbling upon an alien culture within Europe itself, of unearthing a
wildly distorted variant of European actuality, has been the cause of considerable
alarm. A useful example is found in Jan and Cora Gordons Two Vagabonds in the
Balkans, when the two writers arrive by train at Brod station, the first stop in the
new kingdom of Yugoslavia. Their description of the sudden dismay that the region
causes them crystallizes the major tropes of the previous hundred years of balkanist
discourse:
When you have been thrust out of the train at midnight into the blackest gloom, on to
what you must believe to be a station platform from the behaviour of your fellow passen-
gers rather than from any visual deduction, since no gleam of lamp relieves the darkness
when you have in panic bewilderment taken a dozen steps into the darknessvaguely
hoping that information of some sort will be discoverable in any other spot than the one
where you are at the momentonly to be tripped up, floundering down into a squad of
now expostulating and quite perceptibly odorous soldiery when you have accosted a
dozen dim forms to find each one a new variant of exasperated and egoistic passenger;
when you have tried French, German, Serb, and blasphemy without getting answer good
or bad from anybody, you may be pardoned if you judge that you have arrived somewhere
near to the edge of civilization, or at least of civilization as we would understand it. Yet
Brod station is technically well within European soil lying west of the longitude of Budap-
est and north of the latitude of Genoa or Bordeaux. (12)

The passages mood of restrained exasperation (of panic bewilderment) was a typical
response to the loss of familiarity occasioned by Balkan travel. In this most westerly
extremity of the peninsula, the markers of European modernity are already petering
out, giving way to a symbolic antithesis of enlightened civilization: to chaos, back-
wardness, and all-pervading darkness. But the station is in Europe, as we are informed
by the topographical insistence of the final line and by the existence of what is, after all,
a recognizably European landscape. Indeed, as the narrator surveys the oddities
aroundstations with no platforms, soldiers with no manners, passengers with no
languagethe experience is not so much of a civilizational other, but of viewing the self
in a kind of distorted mirror. And it is in this process of self-derangement that the real
pertinence of the region lies. In Western imaginative geography, the Balkans represent
a Europe disfigured by the presence of the non-European, serving to illustrate the ease
with which the self can be subverted. Whereas orientalism establishes fixed boundaries
 206 A. Hammond
and categories, and helps Western Europe to gauge its superiority in the world, the
Balkans remind the West of the instability of those boundaries and of the need to
constantly maintain cultural hierarchies within the continent.
Linked to this hierarchical approach to European geography, a second feature that
distinguishes the two discourses is the absence in balkanism of the paradigm of antiq-
uity (Said, Orientalism Reconsidered 202) informing orientalist images of the
Middle East. Orientalism has traditionally constructed its object as an archaic and
venerable civilization, discovering in the East a linguistic, religious, and architectural
greatness that hints at momentous revelations for the Western observer. This is what
Ella Shohat, commenting on Western filmic representation, terms the orientalist
iconography of papyruses, sphinxes, and mummies (26). Before the eighteenth
century, this reputation for greatness was assisted by the might of the Ottoman Empire,
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whose dominions had extended from the Asian steppes to the gates of Vienna, and
whose power and opulence had drawn from the West both trepidation and begrudging
respect. As Maxime Rodinson writes, Europeans saw the Muslim East as a land of
wealth and prosperity: an advanced civilization of grand monuments and sumptuous
courts of unimagined splendor (3738). With the Ottoman decline during the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the greatness of the East was viewed as so
historically distant, and as so irrecoverable, that it also became disparaged as a decadent
culture, a realm of luxury, idleness, and desuetude. It was partly in opposition to this
sense of bygone grandeur that a very different image of the Balkans developed. Apart
from an intermittent interest in the ruins of Empire littering the peninsula, travel writ-
ing found little to recommend for the linguist, historian, or archaeologist. South-East
Europe was, as one traveller in Romania during the 1870s put it, a place of social and
economic wretchedness untouched by the refinements of Western civilisation
(Berger 45, 118). The fact that the indigenous peoples enjoyed significant cultural
achievements, or that much of the region was currently enduring imperial oppression,
was roundly ignored.
A travelogue that portrays the two contrasting versions of the East is A.W. Kinglakes
Eothen. This classic slice of Victorian travel writing describes a journey taken through
South-East Europe to Turkey and Syria (amongst other Ottoman-held lands) in the
1830s and illustrates the way in which contrasting representational strands can coexist
within a single text. Kinglakes image of the Orient, on the one hand, is based upon the
remnants of past glories to be found in the Ottoman territories, remnants which lead
him, a representative of one imperial power, to pay homage to the characteristics and
successes of another. He is particularly effusive about Turks of the proud old school,
who have the kind, gentle manner and the fierce, careless bearing of their once
victorious race (25, 27, 25). Yet Kinglakes awareness of the dwindling power of the
Porte produces an air of belatedness in the text, which constantly returns to the
waning power and fading splendour of this dead empire, whose desolate civil-
isation is built on crumbling soil and filled with the rubbish of centuries (44, 44,
44, 26, 26, 26). Such descriptions culminate in a contrast between a decaying Constan-
tinople and queenly London, which by this stage in the nineteenth century had
become the centre of the greatest and strongest amongst all earthy dominions (44).
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 207
For the Balkans, on the other hand, the lack of imperial culture produces not only an
absence of positive comment but also the sense that the region has nothing worth
commenting on at all. The point is crystallized when the Englishmans entourage
makes its way through central Serbia. There are a few descriptions of forests and
hamlets, and then, entering a stretch of country that reminds the author of the land-
scaped estate of some English lord, Kinglake descants on the disparity between travel
in Britain and travel through this Ottoman province:
There are few countries less infested by lions than the provinces on this part of your
route: you are not called upon to drop a tear over the tomb of the once brilliant
anybody, or to pay your tribute of respect to anything dead or alive; there are no Servian
or Bulgarian littrateurs with whom it would be positively disgraceful not to form an
acquaintance; you have no staring, no praising to get through. The only public building of
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any interest that lies on the road is of modern date, but is said to be a good specimen of
oriental architecture; it is of a pyramidical shape, and is made up of thirty thousand skulls
contributed by the rebellious Servians in the early part (I believe) of this century . I am
ashamed to say that, in the darkness of the early morning, we unknowingly went by the
neighbourhood of this triumph of art, and so basely got off from admiring the simple
grandeur of the architects conception and the exquisite beauty of the fretwork. (38)
The passage is partly a satire on the modes and expectations of travel writing, which by
the 1840s had established such a panoply of convention, especially regarding the seeing
of sights, that the genre itself became a target of irony. More importantly, however,
Kinglake uses the section to bluntly itemize South-East Europes primitive attributes.
The motif is initiated by the play on the term lion, signifying backwardness through
its allusion both to the jungle and to the jungles very opposite: the great house, with its
heraldry and armorial bearings. From this point on, the Balkans are defined solely by
lack, with the author remarking on the absence of the aristocratic hosts, public figures,
high culture, history, and architecture that define his homeland. Indeed, when an
object of interest is finally locatedthat of the Ottoman-built Tower of Skulls near
Nisit is a structure whose formal barbarity ironically subverts the architectural ideals
on
rac]s[

(of grandeur and exquisite beauty) that Kinglake propounds, accentuating the
contrast between Britain and this semi-savage region. The fact that the only cultural
signifier along the route is built by the Ottomans further marks out indigenous culture
as a deficiency opposed to imperial plenitude (though Ottoman culture also appears to
be a matter of indifference to the author). It would be wrong to conclude, as Todorova
does, that the Balkans were unanimously dismissed in the nineteenth century as drab
and uninteresting (as what she terms unimaginative concreteness (14)); but even
those travellers who found picturesque beauty in the regions folk customs and land-
scape depreciated it against Western attainment.
The next point of divergence between balkanism and orientalism concerns the
respective gendering of the two regions: specifically, a propensity to feminize Middle
Eastern landscape and culture that one rarely finds in balkanism. Feminization was, it
should be said, a characteristic of colonial discourse on many of its subject territories,
not one unique to orientalism. David Spurr, in The Rhetoric of Empire, remarks on the
widespread process of assign[ing] to subject nations those qualities conventionally
assigned to the female body and details some of its common tropes (including
 208 A. Hammond
mistress, virgin land, a body to be penetrated and controlled) (17072).
Nevertheless, the Wests feminization of non-Western spheres was heightened in many
writings on the Orient. In each sphere of regional portraiture (history, landscape, char-
acter, metaphor) the Orient was formed in such a way as to set off the vigor and manli-
ness of the imperial West and to emphasize the potentialities of Western power. So it is
that Said, in an article from 1985, views Western discourse on the East as a praxis of
the same sort as male gender dominance, or patriarchy, in metropolitan societies,
with the region being routinely described as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main
symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and the despoticbut curiously attractive
ruler (Said, Orientalism Reconsidered 212).5 In the final phrase, Said makes impor-
tant reference to the fact that feminization could also mean a demasculinization of the
oriental male, a figure who was often constructed as passive, sensual, decadent, and
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exposed to what Dennis Porter calls the homoerotic tradition in British writing (158).
Considering how common the feminization of non-Western regions had been
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its wide-ranging absence from the
Balkan travelogue is a feature to be noted. South-East Europe was persistently viewed
as a male space, with its sporadic conflict, its rugged terrain, its lack of enervating
luxury, and its resolutely patriarchal social structures gaining it a reputation for noble
savagery. Todorovas point about how rarely the maleness of the Balkans received a
positive account is difficult to support (14). Positive accounts are particularly preva-
lent in British writings on Albania, a region that one Victorian writer termed a stern
and savage land populated by a proud, self-respecting, gentlemanly race (Brown
152, 66). Edith Durhams High Albania, detailing a trek around the northern moun-
tains, expands on the form this masculinization took. Durhams life was not untypical
for a middle-class Edwardian woman, having spent much of her early adulthood in
domestic drudgery and having been prevented from travel until well into her thirties.
It is no surprise, then, that her journeys into the patriarchal culture of Albania, where
she achieves considerable social and political status, are viewed as a liberation. To begin
with, she is happy to consort almost solely with Albanian men, who, with their lean
supple figures, their swagger, their splendid silver-mounted weapons, their
tight-fitting chakshir, into which they thrust great silver ramrods, and their noble
traits of courage and hospitality, are commended as the epitome of vigorous
malehood (50, 49, 307, 308). The landscape through which she journeys is equally
heroic: an ideal breeding-ground for these dignified warriors (146). Awestruck, she
describes the northern fastnesses as a wilderness of barren rock, where the sun
beats with cruel force and where an elemental struggle for existence [occurs],
carried out in relentless obedience to Natures law (4, 19, 294). Such wildness also
characterizes domestic space in Albania, as exemplified by a mountain home in which
she quarters. Its interior, she exclaims, was magnificent:
It was nothing more than a huge, rudely-built stone cattle-shedvast, cavernouslighted
only by a pile of blazing logs. Great curtains of cobweb hung from the smoke-blacked
rafters above. The walls and the posts that bore the roof glittered with cartridge-belts and
brand-new Mausers, the weapons of the four-and-twenty tribesmen gathered to meet us.
The ground was thickly strewn with heaps of newly-cut bracken. An Homeric meal was
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 209
served on many sofras. The twenty-four men-at-arms, brave, with heavy silver chains and
silver-mounted revolvers, couched like panthers in the ruddy glare, was a sight to remem-
ber. Two serving-men held flaming torches aloft, by the light of which we tore and worried
the seethed lamb. The roof rang with laughter, song, and the tamboora. (14546)

These panther-like Albanians, characterized by their possession of weaponry (a

major source of light, as well as plenitude, in the passage), are constructed firmly in the
primitivist mould, an effect added to by Durhams evocation of domestic austerity.
Composed of stone, logs, and bracken, the room is a forbidding, ascetic space, a far cry
from the bourgeois Western interiors that Durham had fled and transgressive of the
Western boundaries between interior and exterior in the way it draws in, and thus
partakes in, the wild Albanian landscape itself. Adjectives such as rudely-built,
cavernous, and smoke-blacked are no longer balkanist pejoratives, but the epithets
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of a manly environment which the passages archaic tone and foregrounding of foreign
words serve to exoticize. It is her absorption into this Homeric male world that one
senses Durhams journeying is all about. The writers use of the first-person plural in
the phrase we tore and worried indicates an acceptance by the patriarchal commu-
nity, one that is highlighted by her later reference to how the women of the household
eat apart. Opposed to what Kinglake called the tamed milieu of England (112), the
Balkans are a recreational terrain in which even female travellers can achieve masculin-
ist adventure.
The specific gendering of South-East Europe is linked to another distinguishing
feature of balkanism, which is the lack of sexual allure that travellers found in the
region. As recent feminist criticism has shown, one of the major attributes of oriental-
ist discourse is the persistent eroticization of its object, with scholars like Rana
Kabbani, Reina Lewis, and Ella Shohat locating and deconstructing orientalisms
fantasies of veils, eunuchs, dancing girls, princesses, odalisques, and harems. As
Kabbani put it, the East was a place of lascivious sensuality, its inhabitants decadent
languishers in rich harems who are slothful, preoccupied with sex, the women not
only irrepressively lecherous, but devilish as well (6, 17, 6, 52).6 Such imagery clearly
opposed the Victorian ideals surrounding womanhood and domesticity, establishing
the East as a kind of id to the Wests ego. Naturally, in this imagined world, all the
repressed desires of Western malehood could find legitimized expression: in the texts
of Richard Burton, Edward William Lane, and Wilfred Blunt, amongst others, the East
facilitated discussion of sexuality and desire that was restricted in polite discourse, but
which here could be openly pursued under the sober guise of ethnological study. The
process would be repeated in twentieth-century popular culture, with cinema, for
example, able to use the East as a vehicle for quasi-pornographic imaginings of bare
skin and carnal delights without risking censorship (Shohat 24, 47, 23, 47).
Things could not have been more different in the Balkans. Here was a dearth of the
lavish seraglios that dominated the Easts sexual topography, and little of the leisure
and wealth that formed the source of Oriental glamour. When local harems were
entered by Western travellers, they were often those of provincial town families,
suffused with desolation and penury, and lacking the boundless pleasure and peren-
nial lasciviousness (Behdad 68) of the East. Indeed, throughout this remote outpost
 210 A. Hammond
of Empire, indigenous society was deemed a lowly, inferior affair by middle- and
upper-class Western travellers, who found the range of social possibilities narrow.
Adventuring in the Balkans, in other words, was limited to geographical exploration,
with sexual attraction, flirtation, or conquest very much proscribed. It was perhaps as
a result of this that male travel writers went out of their way to emphasize that no
impropriety with Balkan women had occurred, denouncing their lack of beauty and
even suggesting, on occasion, that their appearance violated physical norms. An exam-
ple appears in Percy Hendersons A British Officer in the Balkans, detailing a journey
through the western parts of what would later become Yugoslavia. An ex-major of
the Indian Army, Henderson declares himself used to the sight of veiled women, yet
has never got over the curiosity as to what might be behind the veil (103). An
opportunity to solve the mystery arises at Mostar, where some of his company are
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invited into the harem of a local official. Even before the unveiling takes place, however,
the appearance of the womens costumes produces repulsion. Figure to yourself, he
pronounces,

a long, very thick dark blue greatcoat furnished with an enormous collar standing up
nearly a foot in height. This garment is thrown over the wearer, whom it envelops, head
and all; the hook fastened, not over the throat, but just below the nose, leaving the high stiff
collar to project forwards, above and beyond the forehead, a huge beak. The cloak is
hooked closely all the way down, with the sleeves pinned back and flapping loosely, rather
like embryo wings. Huge black or bright yellow, clumsy, untanned boots complete the
costume.
The effect produced by these silent, muffled figures, waddling along in ones and twos
and sometimes rows, is that of monster extinct birdsa cross between a toucan and a
penguin, say; or they might be strayed inhabitants of some unknown planet, or weird
creations of Mr. Wellss fertile brainanything rather than human beings. (71)

In balkanist discourse, even the Balkan female is defeminized. Associated with great-
coats and clumsy boots, and described as enormous, high, huge, her monstrous
physique and dress clearly oppose the delicate standards of Edwardian womanhood. In
contrast to Durhams Balkan males, with their panther-like grace, and in contrast to
Hendersons Bosnian men, who are good-looking fellows (115), the womens
reputed unattractiveness is associated with a grotesque interbreeding (between a
toucan and a penguin) that at best implies absurdity, at worst a transgression of moral
codes. The authors emphasis on abnormality, particularly in the comparisons to aliens
and weird creations, dehumanizes the women to such an extent that the passage
finally withholds the sympathy that it might otherwise have shown them. Far from
offering a critique of male power (which the reference to a silent, muffled condition
might imply), Henderson distances himself from the womens plight, especially during
his later description of their unveiling, a description which is itself a fantasy of male
control.7 This reveals the womens faces to be pallid, seedy-looking, beaded with
perspiration, plain, marred by the most shocking teeth andas if such direct
contrast was necessarylacking the large, liquid, almond-shaped eyes of the East
(7172). Misled by tales of a libidinous East, travellers in the region were invariably
disappointed.8 This did not mean, of course, that the region was devoid of the exotic
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 211
or that Balkan realities were prosaic, as Todorova claims (1415). It was just that the
romance of Balkan travel was rarely connected to amorous pursuits.
The power that Hendersons gaze achieves over the veiled women (the power of the
seer over the seen) introduces another area in which Western discourse on the Balkans
gains distinctiveness. Although understudied by many analysts of balkanism, the desire
for personal or national power is fundamental to the formation of any cross-cultural
knowledge, with representational patterns such as balkanism and orientalism accom-
modating tangible forms of political and economic ambition. For Said, there was no
doubting the closeness between politics and Orientalism or the fact that Orientalism
can be put to political use, his research locating [a]n unbroken arc of knowledge and
power [that] connects the European or Western statesman and the Western Oriental-
ists (Said, Orientalism 96, 104).9 The most obvious manifestation in kind was the
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ascendancy that the British and French Empires achieved across the Middle East and
North Africa in the nineteenth century, a time when the motifs of discord, immorality,
and violence were confidently deployed in travel writing to justify Western interven-
tionism. Although the same level of justification could occur even when imperial activ-
ity was not directly mentioned, denigratory representation was typically accompanied
by ardent calls for territorial appropriation. There is something inevitable, for example,
in the way Kinglakes vilification of the Middle East leads to the claims that the
Englishman will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile and that the indigenous
populations looked forward to greeting some nation, France or England, as the
arriving sovereign of their region (190, 213). Alongside this vindication of expansion-
ism, a second function of colonial discourse is to entrench the mores and ideologies of
the homeland, as Said also examined. The construction of such a barbarous other as the
Orient has been used as a gauge for the sanctity and progressiveness of the home
culture: the greater the sense of iniquity that surrounds the other, the greater the
opportunity for idealizing the self.
The two functions of representation have also informed Western engagement with
the Balkans. On the one hand, the regions position within Europe has been as useful as
the Orients contiguity to Europe for gauging the Wests collective self-image. In the
above passage from Jan and Cora Gordon, for example, the backwardness, chaos, and
obfuscation projected onto Yugoslavia help to establish the two writersand their
home cultureas rational, enlightened, and progressive. During periods of upheaval
in South-East Europe, the representational motifs of violence and conflict have
produced a wider sense of a peaceful, harmonious West by evoking the terrifying prox-
imity of its radical opposite. At the same time, such extravagant representation serves
distinctly political ends. These might not have amounted to the overt colonialism that
the West harbored in the Orient, but were still concrete, far-reaching imperial inter-
ventions, and were assisted by the circulation of denigratory images as surely as the
political goals further East. There are two main strands of interventionism in the
Balkans that I would locate. On the one hand, there is the extensive economic penetra-
tion that Western financiers achieved during the late nineteenth century when, as L.S.
Stavrianos has described, government loans and infrastructural development resulted
in financial dependency for the emerging states and in the Wests increasing control of
 212 A. Hammond
local economies (41319). On the other hand, there is the powerful influence that the
West gained over the regions political structures. Fearing Russian ambitions in the
Balkans and Constantinople, and fearing the loss of British land routes to India should
Russian expansionism occur, Britain offered military and financial assistance to the
failing Ottoman Empire, propping up the Porte with little regard to the needs and
wishes of the indigenous populations. Indeed, so determined were many in the West
to see Russian ambition foiled that when the sick man of Europe finally proved
terminal this kind of colonialism-by-proxy was advocated for Austria, commentators
encouraging and supporting Austrian occupancy of a significant swathe of territory.
Such support could be as prominent as Kinglakes call for Western domination in the
Middle East. In Through Savage Europe, for example, Harry de Windt mentions what
he considers Austrias comprehensive improvements in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and
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goes on:
We in England can form no conception of the marvellous transformation effected here by
Austria nor even faintly realise the almost magical rapidity with which the recently
barbaric provinces of Herzegovina and Bosnia have been converted into growing centres
of commerce and civilisation. While travelling from Ragusa to the Servian frontier, I met,
in every town or village, with some fresh and wonderful proof that the Austrians (generally
regarded as a stay-at-home nation) are really the finest (and quickest) colonisers in the
world. For not only do they excel in the administration of state affairs under novel and
complicated conditions, but also in that close attention to details which affects even the
personal comfort of travellers. (8485)

The passages sincerity of tone and appeal to empirical evidence build a persuasive
argument for Austrian occupation in the Western Balkans (despite de Windts claim
to objectivity being subverted by the vested interests he reveals in the closing line).10
For concealing the ruinous effects of Austrian rule on indigenous populations, deni-
gratory representation (seen here in the phrase barbaric provinces) was highly effec-
tive. Accusations of discord, backwardness, and savagery not only made a case for
Great Power colonialism in Europe, as Norris has argued (11), but also redirected
blame for external administration from the ambitions of the imperial power to the
supposed indiscipline and inertia of the indigenes themselves, a displacement that also
occurred in writings on the Ottoman-held Balkans. It is a very short step from this
style of advocacy to the manner in which orientalist commentaries supported British
rule in the Middle East. If orientalist texts can be considered an invigorating counter-
point to the economic and political machinery of imperialism (Said, Yeats and
Decolonization 72), then balkanist texts need to be explored in similar terms,
however much their complicity with power differs.
As with other subject territories, the Arabic Middle East and the Balkans were deemed
to constitute a threat to the West whenever they appeared to reject Western authority.
This is clearly evident in orientalist discourse, whose tropes of fanaticism, tyranny, and
unpredictable savagery have remained virtually unchanged over the centuries. As Said
comments, the Orient has been a lasting trauma for both the traveller and the wider
homeland, signifying terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians
(Said, Orientalism 59). With regard to balkanism, there were long periods during the
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 213
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the peninsula appeared to travellers more
ridiculous than dangerous, its comic backwardness, hapless peasants, Ruritanian
monarchs, and exceedingly funny sight[s] (Knight 77) treated with amused tolerance
rather than the gravitas awarded to Middle Eastern phenomena. One traveller of the
1840s, J.J. Best, claims that the British tendency to view the Balkans as a kind of low
comedy is so established that even the indigenes had got to hear about it. You write a
great deal about all you see, Best is told by one local interlocutor, and every thing is
to laugh at; and when you get home, and find yourself in a bad humour, you read over
all you have written to get into a good humour again (120).11 Occasionally, however,
when the region was in the process of revolt against imperial rule, absurdity and comic
inconsequentiality gave way to a far more fearsome evaluation, one suggestive of immi-
nent danger to the Western traveller and Western civilization.12
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It is when contemplating the specific threats which the West discerned in South-
East Europe that a further distinction emerges between balkanism and orientalism.
Examining the texts written during the long nineteenth century, it seems to me that
the kind of danger that the Balkans posed diverges significantly from that of the
Orient, and revolves around a final, distinct set of discursive tropes. The threat of the
Middle East has always lain in its reputation for tyranny and imperial conquest, a
reputation captured in the notion of Oriental despotism (Said, Orientalism 4).
Marked out as a civilization bent on collision with Christendom, the Arab world has
gained in the Western imagination a certain bulk, regularity, and singularity of
purpose, forming a unified cultural adversary. The Western image of the Balkans,
conversely, has been characterized by chaos and fragmentation, an image that is best
displayed in the neologisms to balkanise, balkanised, and balkanisation, which signify
the process of dividing a unified entity into radically smaller and mutually hostile
units. As the terms suggest, this was not just a different regional reputation, pitting
heterogeneity against singleness, but a set of attributes hostile to the totalizing ambi-
tions of imperial despotism. The political opposition between fragmentation and
totalization is underlined by the fact that these neologisms were emerging in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the constituent nations of South-East
Europe fought against Ottoman rule to achieve their independence. What one saw
here was a literal breaking up of political blocs as a venerable imperial power began to
weaken and to cede territorial control to indigenous populations. For Britain, whose
global prestige lay in the maintenance of Empire, fragmentation was a process to be
feared as much as imperial rivalry, especially in a Europe where the balance of power
between imperial nations was growing increasingly precarious. Consequently, the
Balkan struggle against tyranny (which foreshadowed the later anti-colonial successes
in Africa and Asia) was viewed not as a libertarian triumph, but as a descent into
barbarism and tribalism. With its position lying so close to the imperial center, it is
no surprise that the region developed into such a poignant symbol of colonial insub-
ordination.
The fear of the Balkans ability to unsettle fixed orders became so profound, in fact,
that anxiety soon transposed itself from the geopolitical realm to those of semantics,
race, and religion. As the passage from the Gordons goes some way to exemplify, this
 214 A. Hammond
was a region that upset all norms, essences, boundaries, and conventions, breaking
down cultural and linguistic categories and consequently challenging the systems of
power that underlie those categories. For example, Henry Tozer comments exasperat-
edly on an Albania whose ethnicities are torn by rival tendencies, whose dominant
ethnicity is plagued by internecine conflict (the vendetta being universally rife)
and whose toponymical designations are an endless source of confusion (1: 395, 220,
23233). A similar frustration is expressed in the work of Henry Barkley, a British civil
engineer who, along with an elder brother, spent some twelve years engaged in railway
construction in eastern Bulgaria. For Barkley, this province of the Ottoman Empire
comprises a heterogeneous mass of races who all seem to backbite, slander, and
intrigue, making the country so chaotic that After living in Turkey (sic) ten months
a man thinks that he knows the people thoroughly. After living there for ten years he
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begins to find out that he knows nothing (Between the Danube and Black Sea 174;
Bulgaria before the War xiii, xiiixiv). The confusion of ethnicities is felt particularly
strongly at those moments when Barkley enters or leaves the region, which he does on
the steamer down the Danube. On one journey from Central Europe, for example, he
is forced to retreat to his private cabin away from the dirty, garlic-smelling, unwashed
crowd of Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, to say nothing of Greeks, Wallachs, Serbs,
Croats, Montenegrins, and Bulgars, all jabbering, eating, drinking, smoking, spitting,
swearing (Bulgaria before the War 222). On one journey home, a similar episode
occurs when Barkley, his brother, and some British co-travellers are seated civilly for
breakfast, only to find themselves beset by Eastern Europeans. As he writes,
I found myself placed next to a gentleman-like-looking man, who introduced himself as a
Mr. Steele, and with whom we soon made great friends. There was also a newly-married
English couple at our end of the long table, who proved most amusing and agreeable trav-
elling companions. Besides these, there was the usual ruck of Jews, Wallacks, Greeks and
Russians, talking eighteen to the dozen with both tongues and hands, and at the same time
performing the most marvellous juggling tricks with their knives, which they thrust so far
down their throats that one looked at the backs of their necks to see if the point had come
through. In and out they went like lightening, and yet when our party broke up at the end
of three days no one had been killed . (Between the Danube and Black Sea 303)

The breakfast table becomes an emblem of Western imaginative geography and of the
distribution of power within Europe. Predictably, the British take a central place at the
feast, and are awarded the qualities of wit, friendship, and refinement, as well as of indi-
viduality (as seen in the designation Mr. Steele). At the fringes of the table, individ-
uality yields to a ruck of subordinate ethnicities, given over to violent, chaotic
practices and more intent on placing knives into the body than food. Their tricks may
well be marvellous, an exotic feature of European space, but they are finally a menace
to continental security, so much so that Barkleys concluding line fails to offset the
impression that death could easily result from the Eastern European presence. It is with
this deviance in mind that, in their engineering work, the Barkleys keep a strong rein
on the indigenous population: with a native workforce composed of some thirty-two
different languages and dialects, the two brothers choose to maintain [their] author-
ity with a stout whip (Between the Danube and Black Sea 174, 102, 104), a typically
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 215
imperialistic response to the unruly, fractious populations of South-East Europe. In
charting such representational patterns, I do not wish to suggest that the motifs of
chaos and fragmentation are absent from orientalism, but simply that they have been
more fundamental to balkanist discourse, where they respond to very specific geo-
political realities and economic ambitions.
To conclude, it should be said that the deplorable stereotypes that governed Western
conceptualization of the Balkans in the nineteenth century remain today. One only has
to look at the Wests response to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, or the wave of racism
that has greeted Eastern European asylum seekers over the last few years, to discern the
persistence of a prejudice that has debilitated the region for centuries. Indeed, Saids
Orientalism has much to teach students and critics of balkanism about the tenacity of
discursive structures and about the diligence necessary to combat them. His work is
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also illustrative of the power and potential of adversarial scholarship. Although Orien-
talism was not the only text in the 1970s to attack Western ethnocentrism, it brought
the analysis of cultural prejudice a permanent, even central, place in the humanities,
and has done more than any other publication to challenge the ongoing vilification of
the Islamic world. For Balkan Studies, there is much here to hearten those who seek a
similar demystification of balkanism. For the latter project to be successful, however,
any usage of the Saidian approach to orientalism needs to be pursued with care. While
an understanding of the links between the two conceptual structures is needed, the
emphasis should now be on furthering knowledge of the specificities of balkanism and
of its intricate relationship to both the changing realities of the peninsula and the
vicissitudes of Western diplomacy. If this is achieved, then the study of this particular
area of intra-European representation might not only expand within Slavic and East
European Studies, but could also gain attention in the wider realms of literary and
cultural studies.

Notes
[1] See, for example, Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains, Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys, James
1.

Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, and Ali Behdads Belated Travelers. A study which
includes analysis of more positive strains of Western representation (which Said omits) is
Maxime Rodinsons Europe and the Mystique of Islam. For an excellent overview of the major
critiques of Saids work, see Ashcroft and Ahluwalia (7484).
[2] The phrase variations on the orientalist theme refers to Bakics earlier article in the Slavic
2.

]eu
ac[t

Review, co-written with Robert Hayden, entitled Orientalist Variations on the Theme
Balkans: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics.
[3] As David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto write on the pre-modern period, orientalism
3.

created an image of the Saracen, Moor, or Turk that was wholly alien and wholly evil. In both
popular and learned literature Muslims were portrayed as cowardly, duplicitous, lustful, self-
indulgent pagans who worshipped idols and a trinity of false gods. The creation of such
blatantly false stereotype enabled Western Christians to define themselves as brave, virtu-
ous believers in the one true God (3).
[4] Liminality has been addressed by a number of critics: see Fleming (1231) and particularly
4.

Todorova (1519).
[5] Critics have lamented the general lack of psychoanalytic or feminist approaches in Orientalism;
5.

see Lewis (1718) and Yegenog lu (2526).

g[bevr] g[bevr]
 216 A. Hammond
[6] The veiled woman and the harem have been particularly prevalent symbols; see Shohat
6.

(3233), Lewis (11113) and Said (Orientalism 167, 190, 20708).

[7] Behdad talks of the orientalists epistemophilic desire to expose what he finds hidden, a desire
7.

that is coupled with an erotic urge to see the imaginary nakedness behind the veil (22).
[8] There are few who have not repeated the complaint of one female traveller that the beauty of
8.

the veiled women failed to come up to what I had been led to expect (Holbach 163).
[9] As he says in Covering Islam: it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that all discourse on
9.

Islam has an interest in some authority or power (xvii).

[10] The approach is typical of the period; see also Henderson (83, 85, 216) and Dunkin (19295).
10.

[11] An example would be the writings that resulted from Edward Lears painting tour through
11.

Macedonia and Albania in the mid-nineteenth century. Here, his love of the uncanny and
surreal appears to have been continually nurtured, with local absurdity sending him into
convulsions of laughter (55).
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[12] Comedy and threat are the two poles between which representation shifted, comedy giving
12.

way to threat during times of insubordination to empire. In the sense that they were one of
the first regions to break away from the imperial formations of the nineteenth century, the
blackness of their reputation is understandable. It is this presumption that minority
cultures should fit in with Great Power plans that informed the second major period of
balkanist denigration, the 1990s, when the region once again resisted Western European
instruction.

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