OF MUSIC SCENES
That nation-states forged from disintegrating republics and empires are messy affairs, always more complex and heterogeneous than their pretensions to homogeneity suggest, is neither novel nor surprising. Purity is an absolute ideal, while the forging of a nation involves not only juxtaposition with external Others but also internal identifications and becomings that are of necessity incomplete (and deterritorialized as much as reterritorialized).19 As James Ferguson demonstrates, however, analysts’ “national frame of reference” still oversimplifies such states’ structures and societies by assuming (economic) sovereignty and circumscription of heterogeneity within state borders (2006, 64). What an ethnography of a recent nation-state’s emergence can contribute to contemporary studies of territoriality and sovereignty, then, is an understanding of the aesthetic and affective attachments to external territories (including those whose most visible connections fall outside of economic relations) that bolster a state’s independence yet also thereby limit its sovereignty’s territorial boundedness. These attachments comprise a series of intimacies that stand not in opposition to danger but rather as its counterparts. They do not so much compensate for as absorb the threats (small and large, projected and experienced, felt and symbolized) of domestic heterogeneity and of borders’ inability to bound all the people and territories that the “nation” would claim.
States deal with such threats in diverse but almost always incomplete ways. Often noted of nation-states forged in the twentieth century are ethnically homogenizing population exchanges with neighboring countries, but these typically bring states new cultural (if not ethnic) diversity and new foreign territorial attachments. Anthropologist Jasna Čapo Žmegač writes that Croat wartime refugees from Srijem, Serbia, who exchanged property with Croatian Serbs saw the tambura as “a [longtime] marker of the Croatian identity of the Croats from Srijem” and compared “with irony [its inclusion] in the list of Croatian symbols in Croatia only in the 1990s” ([2002] 2007, 107). Croatian Croats working at Serbian institutions such as Novi Sad’s Radio Tambura Orchestra also returned suddenly to Croatia, where they significantly influenced the emerging neotraditional tambura scene (Benić 2010). Despite their shared ethnicity, dissatisfaction was common among both the displaced and those meant to welcome them, and these migrations were marked by great trauma, even as they jointly fostered the tambura’s adoption nationwide and later networked with Serbia’s remaining Croatian enclaves.
Other tambura musicians displaced during the Yugoslavian wars resettled among long-established expatriate communities in more distant countries such as Austria and the United States. In Austrian and Hungarian Burgenland towns, South Slavic enclaves had survived since moving north twelve generations before to flee Ottoman forces and join Austria-Hungary in fighting them. In cases such as Parndorf (Pandrof in Croatian), Austria, communities that received Yugoslav war refugees had already had strong tambura traditions in place since the 1930s and had long interacted with music professionals in Yugoslavia (Schedl 2004, 39). The wars significantly affected expatriate communities, too, disrupting patterns of musical interaction with Yugoslavia and sending new waves of tambura musicians and audiences into the midst of older diasporas. However, the musicians’ long involvement in Yugoslav politics—through visits in which they fed separatist or federalist rhetoric, acted as political and cultural ambassadors for their countries of citizenship, and financially supported movements such as Croatian independence (Hockenos 2003, 84–85)—was almost completely reduced to sending moral and financial support. Fluent in the Croatian language and connected in their former hometowns, members of the new diaspora often led efforts to reconnect with communities in the newly established Republic of Croatia after the war. Tamburaši played a key role in reestablishing such intimate contacts following the amplification of physical distance through the militarization of Croatia’s borders. Rising stars such as Škoro and fellow Osijek singer/tamburaš Vjekoslav Dimter, who lived in Pittsburgh during the war, wrote some of their most successful patriotic songs in North America and subsequently helped to establish Grcevich as a much-sought-after performer in Croatia. Richard March (2013, 213) encapsulates these transatlantic tambura networks’ communal strengths with the phrase “My Little (Global) Village,” an adaptation of a Vjekoslav Dimter song (played by his and Kosovec’s Pennsylvania band Otrov at the 2003 festival in Požega, Croatia), and their reach does indeed span far more than the United States and Croatia. In 1993 Škoro, for instance, became general consul for the large Croatian refugee community in Pécs, Hungary. Many of the public tambura concerts now held in Croatia and within these diasporic communities have developed out of contacts forged or maintained by recent immigrants, and their experiences of war and emigration shaped these connections.
The historical depth and continuity of emigration from Croatia to its various diasporic communities differs tremendously; more distant continents received immigrants intensively but recently in comparison to closer territories. Other foreign Croat enclaves consider themselves not diasporas but simply the casualties of Southeast Europe’s balkanization. Croats in Hungarian Baranya (a region continuous with Croatian Baranja) have been national minorities for generations, relating to their perceived ethnic homeland from outside Croatia’s border but feeling very much in their own territory. Others in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia have a much shorter history as foreign nationals in the Croatian lands and feel perhaps even more strongly that their cities should be part of what some nationalists envision as “Greater Croatia.” Yugoslavia’s disintegration added not just more borders but also more kinds of border crossings, informed by different histories. It “deterritorialize[d]” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 269) more fully the lives and livelihoods of many tamburaši across varied, rhizomatic assemblages (263) of dispersion and settlement, even as it reterritorialized their tambura practices upon the states of Croatia, Serbia, and so forth.
The use of “diaspora” to designate a people displaced from a nominal homeland far predates the modern nation-state20 but has played an important role in theories of “long-distance nationalism” as they pertain to the broader relevance of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1998, 1983). As the nation-state has yielded some of its structuring capacity to processes of globalization in many parts of the world, scholars of migration have embraced more complex ideas of the relationship between displacement and place in studies of decentered diasporas (e.g., Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1997; Stephen 2007). The decentering trend is not irreversible, however, and music has frequently afforded an effective means of “claiming diaspora” within immigrant communities that formerly embraced assimilationist ideologies and rejected their “homelands” as premodern and traditional (Zheng 2010). Moreover, “balkanization” has frequently recentered discourses on nation and displacement for peoples either in diaspora or territorially excluded from new nominal “homelands.” Independent Macedonia, for example, became a more relevant homeland for Romani musician émigrés than their South Asian point of origin (India) or even their birth country (Yugoslavia) (Silverman 2012, 40). Displacement and attempts to reconnect through a central territory—particularly one surrounded by “foreign” lands imaginable within the “greater” national cartography—foster identification and commonality among peoples separated by more diverse degrees of time and space than “diaspora” connotes.
I employ the phrase “Croatia and its intimates” to account for the wide range of (musical) communities within and outside Croatia’s borders that relate to the Republic of Croatia as a national center (see MacMillen 2011a). These are not all diasporic communities, nor does the entire Croatian diaspora enjoy the same sort of intimate connections with musicians in Croatia as do the Parndorf and Pittsburgh tamburaši mentioned previously. To focus exclusively on the Croatian diaspora would ignore the broader array of displacements affecting the human geography of Croatian communities’ wartime and postwar transnational networks and the tambura music and other practices that bolster them.21
Since the mid-1990s, moreover, many scholars have questioned the “promiscuous” use of “diaspora,” protesting that it stands for too broad an array of migrations and displacements (Tölölyan 1996, 8). Silverman warns of three pitfalls: “essentializing diasporas by attaching them to particular places of origin,” “equating all diasporic subjects merely because they are related to a posited
