Entertaining the Yugoslav capital: culture, urban space, and politics in Belgrade between the two wars

This dissertation examines entertainment in Belgrade during the 1920s and 1930s, a period when it was overwhelmingly foreign. Entertainment presented an everyday challenge to social hierarchies propped up by elites, conservatives, and reform-minded bourgeois and petit bourgeois residents. More importantly, its ubiquitous presence was yet another impeding force to the development of a unified Yugoslav culture, all the more detrimental in the state’s capital city. I argue that foreign entertainment destabilized the notions of class and gender that formed the fundamental pillars of Yugoslav society, just as it democratized both national and elite cultural hierarchies. At the same time, this dissertation situates the Yugoslav capital on the web of hegemonic urban culture originating in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin. Although Belgrade remained politically, economically, and socially peripheral to Europe’s metropolitan centers in the two decades after the Great War, I argue that foreign entertainment forged new links between the Yugoslav capital and Europe by privileging residents with access to the mainstream cultures of the continent’s metropolitan centers.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Babovic, Jovana

Contributors dc:contributor

• Todorova, Maria N.
• Steinberg, Mark D.
• Hitchins, Keith
• Lampe, John R.

• East Europe
• Balkans
• Yugoslavia
• Belgrade
• Popular Culture
• Entertainment
• Urban History

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2014 Jovana Babovic

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50412

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/50412