A Cultural History of the 1984 Winter Olympics: The Making of Olympic Sarajevo

by Zlatko Jovanovic

Overview

This book examines the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. It tells the story of the extensive infrastructural transformation of the city and its changing global image in relation to hosting of the Games. Reviewing different cultural representations of Sarajevo in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the book explores how the promotion of the city as a future global tourist centre resulted in an increased awareness among its populace of the city’s cultural particularities. The analysis reveals how the process of modernisation relating to hosting of the Olympics provided an opportunity to re-imagine the city as a particularly environmentally progressive city. Placed within the field of studies of late socialism, the book offers important insights into Yugoslav society during the period, including those relating to the country’s unique geopolitical position and its nationalities policies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030765989
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	08/19/2021
Series:	Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Zlatko Jovanovic is an affiliated researcher at the research centre The Many Roads in Modernity, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Sarajevo’s Olympic Spirit.- Chapter 2: Putting Sarajevo on the World Tourist Map.- Chapter 3: Fixing Sarajevo for the Olympics.- Chapter 4. Catching Up With the West with the Sarajevo Olympics.- Chapter 5: Inventing Sarajevo as an Ultimate Olympic City.- Chapter 6: Framing Olympic Sarajevo as a truly Yugoslav city.- Chapter 7: Sarajevo’s Olympic Benchmark. 

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This impressive monograph captures Sarajevo’s fleeting Olympic moment, when the city stood as a proud ‘Oasis’ in a divided Cold War world. Casting non-aligned, socialist Yugoslavia in the best possible light, a transformed Olympic Sarajevo revelled in its role as a bastion of peace and tolerance, and as a culturally, economically, and environmentally progressive cosmopolitan city. In conveying this rich history, Jovanović succeeds in challenging ingrained perceptions of the Cold War Olympics and of Yugoslavia’s final decade."

—Richard Mills, author of The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia.

Editorial Reviews

This compelling study of Sarajevo’s place in Yugoslavia during the 1980s sets the prevailing view of its history, characterized by the rise of ethnonationalism across the country, against an opposing trend that emerged in major Yugoslav cities and amongst the youth. The effect of Jovanović’s book, therefore, is to overturn all the easily-drawn links between the two (or three) events that made Sarajevo globally famous (or notorious), to expose them as tenuous, or even tendentious.” (Bojan Aleksov, Slavonic and East European Review SEER, Vol. 101 (1), January, 2023)

From the Publisher