Cultural identity in Balkan drama: Self-perceptions and representations in Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian plays from the 1970s through the 1990s

Through analysis of contemporary Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian dramas, this thesis develops a model of transitional national and heterogeneous Balkan self-representation. The discussed works by the foremost Balkan playwrights Goran Stefanovski (Macedonia); Dusan Kovacevic and Slobodan Selenic (Serbia); and Yordan Radichkov, Ivan Radoev, Stanislav Stratiev, and Konstantin Iliev (Bulgaria) fall into two distinct literary and social discourses: communist (1970s and 1980s) and post-communist (1990s). Employing the analytical strategies of postcolonial criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction, this study reveals a wide intertextuality of historical, literary, folkloric, and performance representations communicated through stereotypes, cultural iconography, and dramatic conventions.; Chapter One examines the postcolonial/postcommunist images of national space and time constructed through pre-communist histories and collective characters. Chapter Two discusses early (pre-national) and modern (national) myths. Recreated images from the Ottoman past illustrate how Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian playwrights envisioned and judged the symbolic "birth" of their nations. The following chapters' study of archetypal transformations shows how Serbian and Macedonian (Chapter Three), along with Bulgarian (Chapter Four) theaters reflected the displacements in the traditional cultures and criticized the austere social reality of communism in the early 1970s. The 1970s' satire is compared to three plays from the 1990s, which indicate the critical faltering in the post-communist perception of a cohesive cultural identity. Chapters Five and Six focus on the representation of the politicized Yugoslav individual, who perceives his postcolonial space as "prison" and geo-culturally designates it as "Balkan." The space of the Balkans is read in stigmatizing stereotypes of cold-war "Orientalism," as well as in notions of deferring historical time and anti-globalization. Chapter Seven traces the formation of larger cultural signifiers of "Balkanness" and their agent---homo balkanicus---as evolving from the nineteenth-century Balkan literary traditions and engaging the stark political reality of the 1980s. A concluding chapter summarizes the historio-cultural and perceptional characteristics of the Balkan postcolonial and postmodern discourse manifested in Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian dramas.