Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia

by Jovana Babovic

Overview

Winner of theMihajlo Misa Djordjevic Book Prizeawarded by the North American Society for Serbian Studies

Metropolitan Belgrade presents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society.

As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade’s middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state.

Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisured indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of the Europeanization of the capital’s middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822965350
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	07/03/2018
Series:	Russian and East European Studies
Edition description:	1
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jovana Babović is a historian with a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 Entertainment and the Politics of Culture 14

2 Radio Belgrade and the Modern Urban Listener 41

3 Yugoslav Performers and Working-Class Entertainment 80

4 Belgrade's Downtown Leisure District 107

5 Accommodating Josephine Baker in Belgrade 140

6 The Strongman Dragoljub Aleksic and the Occupied City 174

Epilogue 197

Notes 201

Works Cited 233

Index 247

Editorial Reviews

“Metropolitan Belgrade is an engaging feat of urban history, in which entertainment is center stage. Babović’s textured descriptions of the city and its inhabitants often reveal the unexpected—such as the visit of Josephine Baker in 1929. Babovic’s captivating account is a superb lens to rethink some of the most important themes and tensions in Serbian, Yugoslav, and European history.” —Mary Neuburger, University of Texas at Austin


“A valuable contribution, not just to East European history and the history of the former Yugoslavia, but to the broader fields of urban history and European cultural history more generally. This book will sit very comfortably, and confidently, alongside some of the most interesting and impressive new additions to the field.” —Patrick Patterson, University of California-San Diego

"By reviewing social and cultural events—and the ensuing debates involved public institutions and cultural associations—the book shows how, despite nationalism and authoritarianism pushed by the monarchy, the determination of the high middle class to pursue its own interests and preferences derailed state authoritarianism and cultural nationalism into transforming Belgrade into a European capital." —Enika Abazi, Journal of Contemporary European Studies
 

"Jovana Babović has written an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Belgrade as a cultural center in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in the 1920s and '30s." —David A. Norris, Slavic Review

“Babović succeeds in telling a complementary history of the interwar period, one that differs from the better-known political narrative of the period and one in which class affiliations take precedence over those of nationality and in which the authoritarianism of the dictatorship years does not seem to be all-encompassing.” —The Hungarian Historical Review

From the Publisher