beyond their state borders, and eliciting from their audiences an affective investment in a national becoming. As Martin Stokes argues in his work on Turkish popular music, postcolonial republics, “amongst which Turkey might be ambiguously counted”—as might post-Ottoman, post-Habsburg, and post-Yugoslav Croatia—have “deployed a sentimental language of affection and intimacy in the forging of independent national identities. This independence would often prove tenuous, provoking retrenchments into fantasies of racial purity and the (always threatened) authenticity of national cultural heritage” (2010, 30). Following Berlant, I might add that sentimental musical performance that effectively locates such a racially pure and independent nation draws its affective capacity from dangers to the very sonic world it seeks to create.
Moving from questions of threat to the realities of loss, Svetlana Boym refers to a “diasporic intimacy” that is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarization but is constituted by it (2001, 253). Spanning gaps of physical displacement and cultural estrangement, such intimacy “is rooted in the suspicion of a single home, in shared longing without belonging” (253). I qualify this only by suggesting that such longing and intimacy may also characterize peoples separated by processes other than migration. National intimates such as Croatia’s share an intimacy constituted through defamiliarization, dispersion, and separation from their second (symbolically primary) home, whether that separation results from resettlement or from the erection of national borders. This “intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection—no less deep, yet aware of its transience” (252), whether borne across histories of emigration or within homes that, though not lost, are now in the nominal homeland of another nation.
In his work on “dark intimacy” in Southeastern Europe, Alexander Kiossev notes that connection and identification “take place in an unstable field, where various identity models are in competition; […] such conditions could create a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety [or could afford] individuals more opportunities and more ‘free space’ for maneuvering” (2002, 178). Some Croats undoubtedly took advantage of separation, exploring alternative or plural models; maneuvering within freer spaces of identification accessible beyond Croatia’s borders; and aligning themselves with minority, regional, and broader European organizations. Others, however, readopted models of Croatian national identification from the 1980s, reestablishing physical contact with communities inside Croatia’s borders. These latter individuals are largely those who, working with their contacts in Croatia, have kept or made their own communities intimates of the young country.
As I argue elsewhere, however, such “connections are imbricated with conditions of significant economic inequality” (MacMillen 2011a, 107). Croatians’ experiences of domestic visitation and foreign concert sponsorship by relatively wealthy diasporic intimates feed narratives of Croatia’s geographical and developmental emplacement in between economically still weaker (former Yugoslav) and more robust (Western Europe/North America) countries (107). Moving beyond simplistic national frames to material relations that cause such inequalities, we can recognize that
while the creation of a sovereign ethnic homeland fed the demand for patriotic music that initially enabled the rise of many tamburaši to celebrity status and commercial success in Croatia, it also eventually fed into constructions both of Croatia’s “domestic” problems […] and of foreign enclaves […] as distant, independent sites for sidestepping Croatia’s economic policies and bureaucratic institutions. (107)
Intimacy, especially engendered across or within displacements, is neither utopian (as quickly proffered instances of familial, sexual, and spiritual intimacy might suggest) nor “solely a private matter,” for “intimacy can be protected, manipulated or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory or estranged by a critique” (Boym 2001, 253). Thus there also operates within these networks a codependent intimacy with the state’s embellishments and estrangements. This “cultural intimacy” internalizes not only national ambivalence over tambura bands but also tamburaši’s own “rueful self-recognition” of their complicity with gray economic practices that they see as a sign of the state’s inability or unwillingness to match “Western” developments (Herzfeld 1997, 4; MacMillen 2011a, 108).
Music and Public Intimacies
“Intimacy” in music typically conjures up the sights and sounds of physically proximate social or sexual interaction. Such interaction does pervade the musical lives and actions that I examine, yet the intimacies at play here do not merely elide distance; they are constituted through experiences of separation, danger, and even violence. Analyzing how musicians and audiences foster such “dark” relations of closeness at local, regional, and transnational levels, I contribute to a growing body of literature that posits music’s claim to intimate experience as persistently enabled through its mediations across physical and cultural spaces that connect but also separate people.
Byron Dueck argues that public space “occup[ies] a middle ground between publicity and intimacy” for Manitoba’s First Nations (2013, 8). While contrasting intimacies (“engagements between known and knowable persons”) with imaginaries (“acts of publication and performance oriented to an imagined public”), he notes that public space may afford an inclusive “civil twilight” in which strangers easily recruit one another from the “imagined public” into intimate “face-to-face engagement” (7–8). Essential to this capacity for intimacy and to its efficacy in pursuing meaningful musical interaction is an “orientation to a public of strangers” (5), which characterizes both First Nations’ indigenous imaginaries and nation-states’ “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983).
In Michelle Bigenho’s work on Bolivian music in Japan, intimacies depend upon far greater spatial and cultural separation. Bigenho’s “intimate distance” emerges through “desire across [geographical and national] boundaries” and maintains a “conceptual tension [in] experiences through which one feels like and unlike others” (2012, 25). Thus diverse nonnatives employ racialized imaginaries of shared genetic heritage but paradoxically do not identify with contemporary natives: a “move of both intimacy and distance […] made through the complicated historical hubris of race and indigeneity” (138).24
I situate musical intimacy’s spatialization betwixt and between the structures of closeness and distance that these studies model. On the one hand, this book considers how music bolsters intimacy within a community imagined singularly (within rather than spanning national and racial boundaries) but beyond the territorial bounds of the nation-state, on a geographic scale approaching that of Bigenho’s study. On the other hand, it analyzes a Croatian public space in which social imaginaries overlap with musical intimacies in ways that unexpectedly make porous the boundaries of race and gender that musicians mobilize from the country’s intimates. It thus joins Barry Shank’s examination of how such “boundaries of an intimate public are often charged with affective intensity, where different values or ways of being that can’t be ignored can spark a struggle between the ordinary and the unjust” (2014, 49). Roma are the objects of an unjust, essentializing discourse (sometimes self-perpetuated) of hereditary musicality. Their perceived ability to play dangerously solicits intimate distancing as Croatian musicians aspire to this skill as a potential source of national pride, yet channel its affective capacities toward affirming rather than destabilizing national intimacies and insular values. Roma, Serbs, and additional musical Others, such as African Americans in Pittsburgh, variously enjoy these musical intimacies, perceivably endanger them through territorializing presence, and elicit desire within Croatian communities for transgressing racialized musical sensibilities. Music’s claims on intimacy as interior affect, public sentiment, and (trans)national relation are bound to its enticing transgressions: “the danger of music,” the “suspicion” and “control” that it provokes among authorities, and the resistance to oppression that musicians have mobilized in the circum-Mediterranean for centuries (Taruskin 2008, 168).
SCALES OF SPACE, STRUCTURES OF ANALYSIS
This
