Volume 1 / Athens 1999 by Ioulia Pentazou Review of Elli Skopetea, Orient's West: Last Images of the Ottoman Empire, Gnosi, Athens 1992 & Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, New York & -Oxford 1997 The starting point of Elli Skopetea's book, Orient's West: Last Images of the Ottoman Empire, is the representation of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of its decline. In her attempt she had to "confront what one confronts by trying to represent a fragmented subject, a subject that is definitely fragmented: neither to restore a non-existent unity nor to depict an non-existent discordance." The relation between the "East" - i.e. the Ottoman Empire - and the "West" is the axis around which her argument operates. Within this perspective, the book's title takes its twofold meaning, which derives from the ambiguity of the Greek word Äýóç (West): the narration of the decline of a system in relation to the West - the main factor of its dissolution. In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova observes that "the spectrum of the Balkans is haunting Western culture" and tries to explain "how could a geographical appellation [the Balkans] be transformed into one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science and nowadays, general intellectual discourse". She argues that the handling of Balkanism revolves around the terms "difference" and "Orientalism". The title situates the book in an ampler discussion around constructing, inventing or imagining communities and identities. The two books are focused on the relation between East and West: Skopetea's East is the Ottoman Empire and Todorova's the Balkans. Although the two historians choose a different name as a starting point, the two topoi converge. According to Maria Todorova, "the Balkans are the Ottoman legacy" due to the strong impact that the Ottoman past had in the postwar Balkans compared to other legacies in the area. The different naming - which I find indicative for the complex character of the region, not just in the particular case of the two studies - is related to the initial question and scope of each book: Skopetea raises questions about the 19th c., while Todorova's range is the 20th c. The emerging contradictions and convergence of the two books around a quite similar subject-analysis represent an interesting and stimulating comparison. Said's analysis of Orientalism as an institutionalised discourse on the Orient empowered the analytical categories of ´West', ´East' or ´Orient' and created a new hermeneutic framework for the interpretation of a variety of thematics in several intellectual and academic fields. In the framework of Orientalism, a plethora of research concerning the Middle East, India, China, and Iran has taken place. Recently, Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden's "Orientalist Variations on the Theme "Balkans": Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics" [Slavic Review (v. 51, Spring 1992, 1-15)], opened the discussion of the Balkans. In their article, the authors claim that Orientalism, as defined by Said, can effectively describe the Balkans in relation to the West. Such an analysis presents Balkanism as a variation of Orientalism. There is a crucial point which differentiates Skopetea's and Todorova's approaches from Said's analysis, as well as the Haydens': the former use the categories of East and West and their variants in a historical perspective, avoiding in this way the trap of creating a continuity from antiquity to nowadays. The two historians are far - though each in a different way - from the normative and oversimplified approaches that use the analytic category not as a tool but as an explanatory model. Such approaches reproduce a normative discourse through a tautology in which the initial observations are identified with their interpretations. I think Milica Bakic-Hayden's article, "Nesting Orientalisms: The case of former Yugoslavia" [Slavic Review, Winter 1995] constitutes a characteristic example of the above approach. Following the argumentation of her previous work, Bakic-Hayden claims that "Balkanism can indeed be seen as a 'variation on the orientalist theme'" and that "it would be difficult to understand it outside the overall orientalist context, since it shares an underlying logic and rhetoric with orientalism." However, as Todorova rightly observes, these rhetorical similarities could be traced in every discourse of power, such as the rhetoric of racism, modernisation, etc. On the contrary, Skopetea's and Todorova's approaches search equally for diversity and similarity. They both avoid generalisations and - what I find most important - their analysis of each particular case is far from creating models of interpretation, or a unified theory. In their interpretations, analytical categories such as East and West remain in a historical context without being transformed into normative categories. Todorova attempts to make a distinction between Balkanism and Orientalism by stressing the specific characteristics of the two topoi in Western discourses. Thus, dealing with a particularly rich textual material, Todorova explores the "Self-designation" of the Balkans and their "discovery" by Western travellers. Declaring that before World War II there was not a unified European identity, she focuses on the analysis of specific societies, taking 19th c. British society as a case study for exploring the representations of the Balkans; in this analysis, she accurately points out that "there was no common Western stereotype of the Balkans" as "there was no common West". Exploring this kind of critical question, she shows off the particular ´in-betweenness' of the Balkans as a concrete historical space in comparison to the vague notion of the 'Orient'. However, she develops her arguments in a continuous dialogue to Said's Orientalism. The treatment of the notion of the Balkans and the ´West' as a constant and rigid dichotomy - an analysis similar to the methodological preconditions of Said, among others - highlights her methodological approach and positions her within this criticial intellectual framework. This is not the only dichotomous approach in Todorova's study. Western discourses about Balkanism are interpreted as the counterpart of an existing Balkan ontology. She recognises as an essential difference between Balkanism and Orientalism the different geo-cultural entities that the two notions represent: the "historical and geographic concreteness of the Balkans as opposed to the intangible nature of the Orient". Thus, in her study, Balkans as a discourse is clearly distinguished from the Balkans as a reality. The starting point of her final chapter is the question: "qu' est-ce qu' il y a de hors text?" -a paraphrase of Derrida's phrase, "il n' y a pas de hors text"; in this chapter, claiming that discourses on the Balkans are distorted - a statement based on her previous analysis - she attempts to understand "what, then, are the Balkans?". I am not interested in this review to trace the implications of this approach in the intellectual framework of the linguistic turn in history. What I want to stress is the supposed incompatibility and the - scholarly - distinction of the two areas - discourse and historical reality - and their treatment as being concrete and different topoi. On the other hand, Skopetea explores the East and West focusing on their relations and their interaction. In order to reveal the "mutual images" of East and West, the author investigates the junctures of the two systems: the Western figures through which the East learns from the West (travellers, missionaries, journalists, committees, the Western - at last - discourse on cultural aspects of the East); the Eastern figures through which the West learns from the East (students in European universities, immigrants from Ottoman territories, the Greek diaspora, Western literature about the East, the Western scientific discourse on East). Skopetea is not interested in the autonomous investigation of these figures, but rather in their perception by the "other" system. In this perspective, East and West are not perceived as isolated cultural formations, but as continuously interconnected entities. This constantly redefined interaction does not allow any system to remain self-sufficient: aspects of the East appear to the West, and vice versa. Recognising that the West does not need to preserve any kind of reciprocal communication (i.e. dialogue), Skopetea argues that on the contrary, the East is obliged to develop dialogue with the West. This process is inevitable and Eastern identity is constructed in relation to it. This question is lodged in the space of the East, and its multiple - Christian and Muslim, Westerner and non-Westerner - subjects. Within the Ottoman Empire, in spite of the physical absence of the West, the dialogue concerning Western models was always present; participation in that dialogue constituted the inevitable precondition for the existence of the East itself. Even in this question, Skopetea focuses on the interaction among the different elements. This is not a matter of interpretation but rather of methodology. Seeking the relation between two continuously involved systems, Skopetea creates a broader framework which is defined -and can be described by the coexistent and interrelated categories of East and West. The strategies of writing constitute another interesting point of comparison between the two books. Two completely different narratives are embedded in a different way in the same intellectual field, after all. Todorova clearly states the hermeneutical and methodological premises that inform her textual analysis. Todorova's text is always open to contemporary literature and her theoretical perspective is very clearly outlined. The effect of this strategy is finally a very rich text -open to multiple readings and mainly addressed to experts. The author involves the reader in her problematic using keywords such as imagining, discovery, discourse, orientalism, in order to reveal her particular point of entry. Todorova's emplotment exemplifies in an excellent way the current trends of a radical professional historical writing, which constitute the wider arena of communication within the academic field. On the other hand, Skopetea's narration is articulated in a completely different way. The title of her book itself indicates the main characteristic of her choice: the allusion. What is striking in her textual analysis is the lack of any reference to contemporary literature, even in those cases where it is obvious that her arguments constitute an indirect response to some relevant theory. In addition, the author does not analyse her theoretical and methodological premises. Her emplotment is based on strong narrative forms characterised by the catalytic use of the "I" and the stylistic modes of "true literature". The form of narrativity constitutes the framework within which interpretation is produced. This kind of emplotment creates a coherent textual analysis which is characterised by abstraction in the selective use of a very rich material and of allusion which is chosen as a communicative practice. Thus, this strategy imposes a dynamic participation on the reader in order to decode the message, while discouraging the expert from a "professional" (i.e. diagonal) reading. If both historians remain critical in their use of Orientalism, there is a crucial difference in their methodology, which finally creates a completely different hermeneutic framework within which different interpretations are produced. Their distinct methodologies are relevant to their initial differences: a more academic approach versus a more political one; an introvert text versus a clearly extrovert one; Balkan origin but different geo-cultural area of production; and, at last, distinct audiences. Finally, the comparative reading of the two books, which in quite different ways are inscribed and differentiated in a common intellectual field, is a very stimulating example for the possibility of broadening a common dialogue based on the fruitful coexistence of both interpretative and narrative differences. Return to Top