What is this ‘Balkan’ in Balkan Popular Culture?: Stuart Hall’s Sociology of Popular Culture, Identity and Race through Analogy and Connection

Baker, Catherine

Abstract

This chapter situates ‘Balkan’ popular music within a global politics of identity and difference and gives an example of how to use social and cultural theory to develop a research agenda, by reviewing how scholars of popular culture in the region have used Stuart Hall’s sociology to interpret questions of hegemony and ideology, relationships between cultural identity and diaspora and the meaning of ‘the popular’ itself. It then reflects more deeply on one of Hall’s early 1990s essays on identity, diaspora, ethnicity and race, ‘What is this “black” in black popular culture?'. Two readings of this essay illustrate the distinction between ‘analogy’ and ‘connection’ in relating theory on racialized difference in the West to ethnic and national identity in south-east Europe. Analogy can liken the hierarchical relationships between ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ to racialized hierarchies of domination elsewhere. Connection, meanwhile, can trace the transnational circulation of such imaginations of ‘race’ into (and out of) the Balkans, situating the region and its cultural phenomena within those global processes, opening up themes including the reception and creation of black popular culture in the Balkans, the significance of blackness in the racialization and activism of Roma and race’s role in imaginations of ‘Europe’ itself.

Citation

Baker, C. (2024). What is this ‘Balkan’ in Balkan Popular Culture?: Stuart Hall’s Sociology of Popular Culture, Identity and Race through Analogy and Connection. In C. Baker (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans (500-512). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003328162-39

• Online Publication Date: Jul 10, 2024
• Publication Date: Jul 10, 2024
• Deposit Date: Mar 26, 2024
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 500-512
• Series Title: Routledge Music Handbooks
• Book Title: The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans
• Chapter Number: 32
• ISBN: 9781032357157
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003328162-39
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4612729
• Publisher URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Popular-Music-and-Politics-of-the-Balkans/Baker/p/book/9781032357157