TURBO-FOLK – BALKANISM, ORIENTALISM AND OTHERNESS

Text topic: Tavern: That Magnificent Third Place

Text author: Вера Меворах

This paper analyses the turbo-folk music genre as one of the important elements of modern pop culture in Serbia as a significant representative of the Serbian cultural identity and politics, together with its many clashes and contradictions. By using a research of Edward Said and his basic assumptions of Orientalism as a dominant view of the West’s Others, we continue with regional applications of this theory by Marija Todorova, Milica Bakić-Hayden and others to question the development of internal identities developed in former Yugoslavia within these discourses and to attempt to provide an explanation for the contested values and positions of the turbo-folk phenomena to this day.