CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | McKelvey, Dana |
|---|---|
| Title | Turbofolk and Narratives of Local and Cosmopolitan Identity in Contemporary Banja Luka |
| Summary | Turbofolk is a style of popular music popularized in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia that incorporates traditional instrumentation with beats commonly employed in EDM or Electronic Dance Music. Although turbofolk originated within Serbia, Banja Luka, the Serb-dominated capital of Republika Sprska (The Republic of Serbia), Bosnia and Herzegovina, offers a productive space for observing post 1990s turbofolk consumption as a powerful constructor of contested identities. Several interviews held in Banja Luka, especially with young people who attend turbofolk spaces and consume an entirely postwar popular culture, led to the finding that turbofolk serves as a source of authenticity and resistance in a space that has serves as a cultural bridge, historically contested between empires, and now by the U.S. and the E.U. to the West, and Russia, its Slavic counterpart, to the East. Informants frequently expressed the psychological release of performing identities in bars and clubs, especially in turbofolk spaces that serve as a carnivalesque extolling of a unique “Balkan spirit.” While much literature focuses on turbofolk as historically associated with nationalism and war, this paper focus upon the contemporary experience of turbofolk in Banja Luka in relation to theories of cosmopolitan/local divides, and seeks to evaluate turbofolk’s potential as resistance to orientalist representations of the region and the pervasive influence of Western culture. |
| Supervisor | Kowalski, Alexandra; Rajaram, Prem Kumar |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/mckelvey_dana.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University