Download or read book Dispensations of Partition written by Ivan Babanovski and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the overlapping set of economic, political and cultural legacies of West Africa and Yugoslavia in the 20th century through the lens of the 19th century territorial partitions enacted in imperial Europe. As a result of the Berlin Congress of 1878, which capriciously partitioned the Balkan territories into various states and imperial holdings, and the Berlin Conference of 1884, which incited the bloodthirsty "Scramble for Africa" and the colonial occupation required to sustain it, the culturally and geographically disparate entities of West Africa and the Balkans confront an expansionist and imperially aggressive Europe at nearly the same time. Seeking to properly provincialize Europe in this discussion by focusing on the spaces of partition themselves, compared on the basis of this historical encounter, this dissertation theorizes a multi-disciplinary concept of balkanization: a system of techniques of imperial control that precipitated a cultural response of resistance in the spaces of partition in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on postcolonial, African and Slavic studies, world literature, political science and history, the theory of balkanization responds to the global remapping of two annihilative world wars and explains the subsequent ethnic and nationalist violence that characterized the waning years of the century in these disparate places. The literary extension of balkanization is explored through comparisons of two narrative genres, the travelogue and the chronicle novel, that encode the spatial and temporal dimensions of partition before and after WWII. Rebecca West's travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) is analyzed next to Ivo Andrić's chronicle-novel Bridge on the Drina (1945) to discuss the pre-WWII cultural and political dynamics of balkanization in Yugoslavia. Next, an investigation of In Black and White (1962), a travelogue by Oskar Davičo written at the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement, is juxtaposed with with Ayi Kwei Armah's apocalyptic chronicle Two Thousand Seasons (1973). These texts elaborate the limits of unity in a balkanized world in terms of culture, economics, race, and ultimately history, whose nearly monolithic violence beckons the end of time and the need for renewal or regeneration, such that balkanization forms the basis of historical inquiry into the very conditions of the present.