songs’ (as in the familiar news image of bearded Četnik paramilitaries occupying Vukovar) and ‘destroyed my city’” (Baker 2010, 44, citing Pilas 1997, 102–103).
Allusions to beards drew on reinvigorated constructions of ethnic difference. These harkened back to stylistic and military opposition between World War II–era Ustašas (extreme Croat nationalists with clean-cut visages who resembled their Nazi allies and Catholic clergy) and Četniks (extreme Serb nationalists sporting beards styled after Ottoman-era Serbian hajduk bandits and Orthodox priests) (Hayden 2013, 7–8). Emphasis on Serbs’ distinct physical features, including facial hair, dates back to the Ustašas’ “aggressive, militant language […] permeated by biological (and, therefore, materialistic) concepts, such as blood, race, and instinct” (Djilas 1991, 114). Though never formalized into a coherent racist theory, such language racialized Serbian enemies “in the same way in which the Nazis treated people they considered both racially inferior and racially dangerous” (119).
In Croatia in the early 1990s, similar sentiments registered beyond neo-Ustaša circles in popular songs about Četniks’ physical, biological, and therefore racial or even taxonomic difference. “[P]rimitives, non-humans, savages, hoofs are common denotations in [sung] statements about the enemy, whose behavior is explained as an animalistic or demonic nature” (Prica 1993, 53). The cover of Zlatni Dukati’s 1995 EP Nema više suživota (There’s no more coexistence) similarly represented Serbs as horned demons whose long, pointed teeth merge into beards as the monsters writhe upward from a can bearing a Serbian banner and resting on a map of Croatia. In turn, Serbian sources sometimes demonized returning Croats as “vampires” who, for instance, reentered Vukovar “like a dance macabre” with “horns, songs and provocations” (Berić 1998, 92). In challenging what they perceived as the combined encroachment of Serbian propaganda, turbo-folk, and neo-Četniks, several tambura bands working within official media advanced a particularly effective discourse: the narrative reclaiming of Croatian lands from Serbia’s physically dangerous army, politically dangerous media, and culturally dangerous music. As these and amateur ensembles confronted their fears and faced such external(ized) threats, feelings of intimacy and otherness also began to accrue around state media narratives of resisting Serbia as a racially dangerous people.
MUSICAL NARRATIVE AND AUTHORITY
To what extent, then, did such narratives also arise from the bottom up? Julia Kristeva notes that in much of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, she distinguished from the ideological tyranny of the thinker-cum-politician an important form of “authority no longer based on the notion of domination but on that of a nature composed of differences” (2000, 67). Kristeva reminds us that “the discourse proper to this other authority […] is, quite simply, narrative” (67). Narrative arises in service not of a sovereign singularity but of a unity of disparate subjects whose authority rests on a commonly analyzed and projected historical trajectory. As I argue here, the narrative of overcoming dangerous Others and their music using both rifles and tamburas resonated with Croat citizens for the authority and responsibility that it recognized and demanded at lower (nongovernmental) levels across the new country.
Philip Bohlman argues that “music intersects with nationalism not simply to narrate the past, but rather to contribute profoundly to the ways we perceive and understand the history of the present” (2008, 261). Michael Largey similarly writes that each of several “modes of cultural memory—recombinant mythology, vulgarization and classicization, diasporic cosmopolitanism, and music ideology—produces narratives that connect the present with an idealized past” (2006, 19). In 1990s Croatia, musicians’, ideologues’, and diasporic communities’ narratives of reclaiming territories recognized internationally as Croatian, and of pushing beyond to proximate intimates constituting a projected “Greater Croatia,” connected back to several periods embedded in nationalist cultural memory, each more idealized than the one succeeding it (see March 2013). In reverse chronological order, these include the short-lived, Axis-aligned Independent State of Croatia, formed in 1941; the Party of Rights’s mid-nineteenth-century self-determination project, which inspired later, Nazi-aligned separatists; and the medieval reign of King Tomislav, whose territories the Party of Rights sought to reconstitute as a sovereign state (Gow 2003, 229n8). The authority and responsibility vested in Croats through such narratives in the 1990s were rooted in reflections upon this succession of actions and near-successes.
Bohlman also argues that music “expressed national aspirations even before the rise of the modern nation-state” and “charted the landscape of struggles and great events that would inscribe the fate of the nation on its history” (2008, 253). Croatia’s past national movements were commemorated in nationalist musics long before it achieved independence. “[M]usical genres become narrative the moment they are enlisted in the service of the nation,” and such service rather than the realization of national aspirations enables this inscription of fate (250). With the advent of nation-states, however, national music, in which “reinforcing borders is not a primary theme,” shifted to nationalist music, which “often mobilises the cultural, even political, defence of borders” (250). The concern with territory and borders has certainly been a primary stake in Croatian musical nationalism and its engagement with the past. Yet Bohlman’s own narrative of evolving deployments of musical national narratives warrants an additional observation that I proffer throughout this chapter: narration of (and via) musical events inscribes the nation’s fate not only on its history but also on its present, which in war is lived and felt in service of the future (when the nation expects to fulfill its promised territorial defense or expansion). As suggested in Dubravka Ugrešić’s evaluation of Croatian wartime ideology, this required narrative as well as physical violence: “In the name of the present, a war was waged for the past; in the name of the future, a war against the present. In the name of a new future, the war devoured the future” ([1995] 1998, 6).
The emphasis on futurity in both pushing through occupied territories toward Croatia’s borders and narrating attempts and successes at realizing territorial sovereignty responded to physically proximate dangers and perceived threats. The fearsome, bearded, turbo-folk-driven, and sometimes racialized Četniks whom many Croatians perceived as threats certainly had their counterparts in actual Serb militiamen encountered in person or in official media. Their existence, however, frequently took on mythic qualities as racialization developed into animalization and demonization, paralleling the projection of a lack of human life onto Baranja and Eastern Slavonia (where only dangerous creatures were conceivable). The “fear of small numbers” provoked by minority Serb militias was all the greater for their perceived “cellular,” nonvertebral organization, which “destabilizes [society’s] two most cherished assumptions—that peace is the natural marker of social order and that the nation-state is natural guarantor and container of such order” (Appadurai 2006, 32–33). Narrations of musical and militaristic counters to perceived threats from within the nation-state, as well as actual armed attacks from the much larger Yugoslav army invasion, drew their force from the increasing intensity of experiences of fear (Povrzanović 1993). As Brian Massumi writes, “fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future. It is the felt reality of the nonexistent, loomingly present as the affective fact of the matter” (2010, 54). Feeling the affective fact of threat as fear lent urgency to the actions (and their narration) through which musicians and other agents sought to create a future alternative to that which loomed in the presence of bearded Četniks. While actual histories of Četnik and Ustaša violence inflect narratives of future security, musical affect affords alternative moments of historical listening that block the rationalizable constructedness of cultural truths. This simultaneously makes cultural truths an aggregate of experience and understanding separate from (even subaltern to) affective fact and obstructs such truths’ surfacing for conscious deconstruction.
The abundance of narratives of Croatia’s push to reclaim and move beyond borderlands should not suggest a dwindling role for spatiality and materiality. Rather, discourse became imbricated with physical endeavors that must be considered simultaneously in order to ascertain their combined affective work in Croatian tambura music. As Michel
