and recent emigrants of former Yugoslav republics reject “diaspora” due to its connotations of permanence, distance, and successful ethnic cleansing (of home districts) (2013, 120). Given the plurality and “trans-locality” (133) of migrations represented in most Croatian communities outside of Southeast Europe and their diverse practices of visiting and essentializing the “homeland,” I find it especially important to eschew utilizing, and thereby broadening, “diaspora.” I use “intimates” throughout this book to refer to communities rooted in localities yet continuously building and performing affective attachments to the homeland and, through it, to one another. Particularly through musical endeavors within and on behalf of “their” nominal homeland, Croatia’s intimates share in the physical, affective, ideological, and musical constitution of this state’s core territory and culture. The concept of “national intimates” accounts for an equalization of investment (though not of the mobilization of power) in this homeland’s music, people, and affective capacities across a continuum of displacements not encompassed by “diaspora.”
Music and National Intimates
Croatia’s intimates’ participation in the country’s cultural and political affairs also demonstrates more than the familiarity or nostalgic longing for the “old country” typical of many diasporas. Independent Croatia and its intimates keep their connections current through varied means of reciprocal influence and support in political campaigns, insurance networks, religious missions, accessing higher education, tourism, and tambura music (as did the CFU, the MIH, and affiliated ensembles before the war). While Croatia’s territory centers these networks, foreign communities function as powerful secondary nodes of attraction and dispersion, maintaining relations with one another (often with reference to Croatia rather than via its nuclear pull). Reverence for Peter Kosovec’s and Jerry Grcevich’s dangerous performance among musicians in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Hungary depends on appreciatively upholding (and cautiously transgressing) tambura music as a Croatian tradition but not in most cases on contact with Croatian American tamburaši within Croatian territory. Shared traditions, affective investments, and personal relationships connecting Croatia and its intimates are facilitated largely by recognition of common heritage that transcends territorial emplacement.
Such geographically dispersed nationalism can be found globally in many transnational musical cultures. As Jane Sugarman shows, the diasporic middle class played an essential role in constructing nineteenth-century Albania’s national culture, providing the ideological scaffolding for Albanian musical nationalism in present-day Macedonia (1999, 444). Amnon Shiloah similarly demonstrates the importance of the Jewish diaspora’s artistic intelligentsia and of Jewish communities in nearby countries for constructing an Israeli folk music and dance repertoire (1992, 217–218). Christopher Waterman (1990) and Thomas Turino (2000) identify comparable trends within and beyond the borders of Nigeria and Zimbabwe, respectively.22 Tambura musicians’ international nationalist networks are not solely diasporic but are also recognizably transnational and cosmopolitan, contributing to reifications of the nation-state that come into focus across varying gradations of proximity: affective, geographical, temporal, cultural, economic, and bureaucratic.
Contemporary nationalisms owe much of their complexity to migrations and societal changes during the fall of imperial and colonial governing structures. In stable periods, they succeeded in subjecting and organizing populations into diversely mixed societies; Rogers Brubaker argues that subsequently, during imperial dissolution into nation-states, the “unmixing of peoples” was particularly tumultuous and formative (1995). This certainly was true of post–Austro-Hungarian Croatia and post-Ottoman Albania and Israel. Čapo Žmegač extends Brubaker’s observation to multinational republican (Yugoslav and Soviet) dissolutions and resultant “ethnic unmixing of hitherto mixed, multiethnic societies” ([2002] 2007, 27).
Yet the teleology of unmixing mixed societies once again assumes the ontological certainty of the nation, overlooking those who do not hold a (single) national frame of reference, including antinationalists, ethnically mixed individuals, and “nationless peoples.” For the latter, such as Roma, it is possible to trace, in Philip Bohlman’s words, “the alternative historical paths articulated by their music, which are no less political and crucial to the history of European nationalism if indeed they lie beyond the borders fixed by those with the political power and nationalist motivation” (2004, 213). Croatia still has both “nationless” and “nationed” minority communities and still avails itself of Croat minorities in other states. Furthermore, Croats’ affective relations to such groups and to one another are not static identifications but ever-emergent “minoritarian” becomings (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 291) whose musical flux and embodiments extend back nearly two centuries (MacMillen 2013). “National intimates” encapsulates complexities of nationally charged transnational connections that persist despite governmental, nationalistic, and even scholarly tendencies to reduce these networks to ethnically homogeneous homelands with geographically disparate diasporas.
Tambura music remains a diverse practice and site of contact across racial, ethnic/religious, and geopolitical divides. In playing dangerously, Serbian, Romani, and other non-Croat musicians have greatly impacted tambura music within Croatia, its intimates, and the greater international scene. A closely related study might well consider “Serbia and its intimates” as an overlapping and equally significant, albeit differently structured, zone of tambura performance. Professional and amateur Serb musicians have upheld the tambura as their own folkloric and national tradition in both the socialist and postsocialist periods. The few Serbian tambura ensembles active in Croatia in the 2000s entered the public folklore sphere cautiously (see chapter 3) but participated regularly in semipublic events for Serbs outside of Serbia that celebrate tambura music for rooting them in their territories of residence (Prosvjeta 2010, 3–5). In such cases, Serbia often constituted an “empty” center for its intimates, who solidify Serbian connections outside of—rather than with—their nominal homeland, where the tambura has never achieved true national symbolic status.23 Yet Croatia, too, remains merely a noncentral locus for music and networking to Serb performers there. In my fieldwork, Croatian ethnicity has surfaced as the single prominent precipitating factor for the intense intimacy examined here between tambura bands and autonomous Croatia.
Intimate Communities
In employing “intimate,” I avail myself of the noun’s connotation of a close personal friend as a metaphor or metonym that stands for a supportive, closely connected foreign community. In addition, I invoke its many adjectival nuances, expanding the concept’s resonance beyond a set of concrete actors to an array of processes and becomings. These communities are intimate with Croatia and its citizens in several respects: in sharing personal relationships; in recognizing closeness through mutual influence; and even through sexual relationships, as young men and women continue to find spouses and raise families in Croatian communities beyond their birth countries.
“Intimates” as an analytic also invokes recent scholarship theorizing these various sorts of intimacy in the close ties of people with shared investments and obligations, as well as at levels beyond personal relationships. Especially important here is Lauren Berlant’s examination of the “tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations” that people bring to intimate relationships (1998, 287). Although these tacit understandings often propagate “optimism” about the way things should be, Berlant notes that intimacy “is also formed around threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain” (288; emphasis added). The war that accompanied Croatia’s split with Yugoslavia simultaneously assured its status as an autonomous center and threatened its accessibility to Croat communities outside of its borders; the sense of connection that formed or intensified across the new borders between these communities is key to their designation as Croatia’s intimates.
The sense of threat that Croats and other peoples experienced, particularly in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, is also key for understanding the intense feeling that musicians invest through
