Christian Voss (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Abstract
The lecture discusses the cultural contribution of the Albanian-speaking population in Tito’s Yugoslavia under the condition of its highly contradictory political treatment, oscillating between repression and discrimination in the periods 1944-1961 and 1981-1998, and overt promotion between 1966 and 1981. The biographies of “cultural defectors” like the poet Esad Mekuli, famous actors Behim Fehmiu and Faruk Begolli or sportsmen Fadil Vokrri clearly indicate that the riots in Kosovo in 1981 triggered the loss of Yugoslav loyalty among the Albanians. The limits of Yugoslav nation-building can also be shown in the representation of Albanians in Miroslav Krleža’s Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia, where Serbian nationalist intervention in 1981 insisted on the rewriting of the articles on Albania(ns) to reinstall the traditional hegemonic and paternalistic discourse.
Biografie
Christian Voss has been Head of the Department for South Slavic Studies at Humboldt University Berlin since 2006. He finished his PhD on Church Slavonic in 1996 and his habilitation on Slavic minorities in Greece in 2004 in Freiburg/Br. He has extensively published in the fields of sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and language policy in the Balkans. He is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Center “Crossing Borders” in Berlin, editor of the series “Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe” and co-editor of several journals.