European peripheries Commonalities, continuities and conflicts in cultural stereotyping of Spain and the Balkans

This thesis examines the cultural representation of Spain and the Balkans, two analogous but rarely compared cases of the Periphery Problem – the hegemonic, normative discourse that presents European peripheries as different from and less European than the European centre. By applying the framework of imagology, this thesis explores not only how the centre portrays Spain and the Balkans, but also how these peripheries position themselves within Europe’s symbolic geography. The corpus consists of various forms of cultural production (literature, essays, plays, and films) from the 1820s to the present, with particular attention given to the paradigmatic works of Prosper Mérimée, Borisav Stanković, Carlos Saura, Fernando Trueba, Pedro Almodóvar, Emir Kusturica, Goran Stefanovski, and Dubravka Ugrešić. The analysis highlights structural similarities between Spain and the Balkans in terms of their respective temperamental characterisations and subaltern positions within the (counter)hegemonic symbolic geographies of Europe. Exemplified by Mérimée’s writings, the hegemonic discourse of the centre views both peripheries as semi-oriental, primitive spaces of passion and violence. The ways in which the peripheries position themselves within Europe’s symbolic geography are also structurally similar, encompassing strategies of internalisation and subversion of the hegemonic discourse. Subversion often involves direct responses to the centre, in particular by critically addressing the discrepancies between meta-image (a subject’s perception of how they are perceived by others) and self-image. Crucially, most peripheries’ representations are marked by varying gradations and combinations of internalisation and subversion, giving rise to ambivalence and ambiguity vis-à-vis the Periphery Problem. This thesis contributes to the imagological understanding of European peripherality as a transnational phenomenon.