with instruments), tamburaši engaged affective, embodied flights toward the destruction of dangerous performance. Through the musical deterritorialization of wartime milieus and their own minoritarian becomings (Yugoslavs were becoming Croats), they simultaneously reterritorialized themselves as citizens of the new nation and physically assembled these milieus into a sovereign state.
Dangerous Media
In 1991–1992 many prominent professional tambura bands released war-themed musical media, such as Škoro’s and Zlatni Dukati’s videos for “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu,” one of the period’s most iconic tambura songs (see the introduction). The tambura band Dike (The Glories) released a similar video for “Oj Hrvatska Mati” (Oh Mother Croatia). They paired lyrics telling Croatia to “grieve not” (for the “falcons” will sacrifice themselves for her) with war footage and shots of the band in camouflage fatigues.5 They reinforced their image as protective “falcons” by posing with helmets in a trench for a publicity photograph (reprinted in Ferić 2011, 259). Three of them hold their tamburas outstretched over the trench’s lip, aiming them like rifles, while one reaches an arm overhead as though throwing a grenade. Another holds a tank ammunition round raised upward from his pelvic area, which along with the butt of the round remains hidden behind his nearby tambura bass. This suggestive image of wartime virility responded to “Serbia’s ‘masculine’ and warlike [musical] self-representation,” defending Croatia, which was symbolized as a “mother figure [who] is proud but also worried for her son/defender” (Ceribašić 2000, 226, 230).
A number of tambura bands, including Agrameri, served in the war (Baker 2010, 36). Zlatni Dukati’s members also attempted to enlist (Bonifačić 1998, 138), reinforcing tamburaši’s perceived duty to protect and reclaim Croatian lands by any means at their disposal. The “rejection of their applications confirmed […] the powerful propaganda role of patriotic songs and the activities of the Zlatni Dukati in a war-time situation,” and the government instead had them perform “on the very front lines, and at numerous charity concerts” (138), mobilizing them as a political instrument, a territorializing machine of martial affect.
As numerous studies demonstrate, discursive and other symbolic practices concerning wartime musical performance significantly impacted Croatian ideologies and actions during this period (Bonifačić 1998; Pettan 1998; Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998; Ceribašić 2000; Bogojeva-Magzan 2005; Baker 2010). Catherine Baker in particular has privileged the discursive framing of the past and present in musical texts, devoting an entire chapter of her book to what she calls the Presidential narrative of the war (2010, 11). I examine here how musical affect and related material forces mobilized individual and social bodies in wartime and postwar territories, blocking and otherwise impinging on discourses (subalternating ubiquitous representations) and ultimately “circulating and transforming official and unofficial historical narratives” to render history “as a feeling” (Gray 2014, 9). I begin with discourses on danger, or opasnost, that emerged in popular music—and acutely in tambura music. I reexamine narratives and other discursive formulations cited by tamburaši (and earlier scholarship) through the lens of race and show how these contributed associatively to the affective capacities of playing dangerously and coalesced into narratives of territorial reclamation and heroism. Taking up Lila Ellen Gray’s observation that “tidy chronologies and official historical narratives are sometimes displaced, giving way to a version of history that is such because it feels so” (9), I examine the particular dynamic of affective block that allows such feelings to dominate.
Narratives of the Push toward the Front Lines
Popular music groups referenced “danger” frequently in both wartime lyrics and discursive framings of their work for the armed resistance. For example, the rock band Opća Opasnost (Common Danger, a reference to Yugoslavia’s shelling of Croatian cities) sang numerous songs about Croatia’s war heroes. The band began forming in 1992 when two members were serving in Croatia’s 131st Brigade, uniting poetic textual address with physical military action (Radio Našice 2011). Marko Perković “Thompson,” whose rock career also started while he was serving in the Croatian Army and who, like Opća Opasnost, has collaborated with tamburaši, was criticized for lyrics suggesting aggressive military retaliation in Serbia in his hit war anthem “Bojna Čavoglave” (Čavoglave Battalion). Catherine Baker quotes a Croatian journalist defending the song as “‘not giv[ing] off an atmosphere of malign aggressiveness’ but just reflect[ing] the reality that ‘life is dangerous’” (Kuzmanović 1992, translated in Baker 2010, 38). Aggression and atmosphere (see chapter 4) were already common descriptors of musical affect, suggesting the author’s awareness of music’s potential to move beyond representation to something more pernicious, even as she denied this particular song’s culpability.
Opasnost and opasno (“dangerously”) became closely associated with the war’s effects during this time. In a wartime ethnography of Croatian public culture, Maja Povrzanović deemed fear “one of the most basic and intensive emotions” that “arises as an accompaniment to actual or anticipated danger” (1993, 121). Fear’s intensity as a response to wartime dangers imbued musical performance in Croatia during this period with capacities for aesthetic and affective elaborations of trauma. In tambura and other popular music genres, opasno and opasnost registered as a theme for compositional response to the destruction of battle and bombardment, as one way in which “culture redefines objective situations of danger and threat” and “the terrifying become[s] domesticized, ‘tamed’, or, at least—familiar” (147). Yet even as fear and danger yielded some of their intensity through mediation, the musical vehicles for this redefinition simultaneously became less domesticized, tamed, and familiar, participating in an excitingly dangerous intimacy “formed around threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain” (Berlant 1998, 288).
Alongside invading Yugoslav forces, whose government and peoples they came to represent, neotraditional Serbian “folk” genres such as newly composed folk music (Novokomonovana narodna muzika) and turbo-folk became common targets. Croatian musicians, critics, and journalists denounced these musics’ encroachment on Croatian territories as dangerous. These genres have been popular among some Croats since before 1991. Yet as Catherine Baker demonstrates, Croatian media and society in general denigrated venues that played these musics as “dangerous places populated by gangsters, footballers, prostitutes and celebrities,” and journalists “employed various strategies to mark folk clubs as other and dangerous, such as the use of flood/invasion metaphors” (2010, 149, 153). The tamburaš Veljko Škorvaga restarted Požega’s “Golden Strings of Slavonia” tambura song festival in 1992 “to ‘create new Croatian music’ as ‘a substitute for folk music, especially the newly-composed music we were bombarded with for years,’” “warn[ing] of ‘a danger such a melos might return’” (Baker 2010, 67, citing Škorvaga in Topić 1992). “Pajo Kolarić’s” directors restored their own festival with specifically Catholic overtones, citing Marin Srakić, assistant bishop of the Đakovo-Srijem diocese, on this beloved music’s importance as an alternative to what he called the “racket” (buka) of the discotheques (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1995, 51).
This music’s perceived threat depended closely on its association with Serbs, whom official media often racialized as biologically foreign during this and earlier wars. Tomislav Longinović writes that the “abject position” of Serbs due to their historic colonial subjugation as “serfs” or “servants” (cognates of “Serb”) “makes them ‘black’ despite their genetic ‘whiteness’ in the eyes of the West” (2000, 642). Although “Serbian treatment of the Ottoman colonial heritage […] manifests European fear of contamination with an alien, ‘oriental’ civilization,” their “turbo folk features the ‘oriental’ sound as the essence of racial being and belonging, which it appropriates from the culture of Ottoman invaders as a metaphor of its own colonial power over other Yugoslav ethnic groups” (642). Associations of such invasive, destructive power with Serbian
