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The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria | 
 enlarge | Author: Mary Neuburger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $36.52
You Save: $8.48 (19%)
New (14) Used (2) from $27.27
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 1121869
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 264
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0801441323
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.69709499
EAN: 9780801441325
ASIN: 0801441323
Publication Date: January 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Bulgaria is a Slavic nation, Orthodox in faith but with a sizable Muslim minority. That minority is divided into various ethnic groups, including the most numerically significant Turks and the so-called Pomaks, Bulgarian-speaking men and women who have converted to Islam. Mary Neuburger explores how Muslim minorities were integral to Bulgaria s struggle to extricate itself from its Ottoman past and develop a national identity, a process complicated by its geographic and historical positioning between evolving and imagined parameters of East and West. The Orient Within examines the Slavic majority s efforts to conceptualize and manage Turkish and Pomak identities and bodies through gendered dress practices, re-naming of people and places, and land reclamation projects. Neuburger shows that the relationship between Muslims and the Bulgarian majority has run the gamut from accommodation to forced removal to total assimilation from 1878, when Bulgaria acquired autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, to 1989 when Bulgaria s Communist dictatorship collapsed. Neuburger subjects the concept of Orientalism to an important critique, showing its relevance and complexity in the Bulgarian context, where national identity and modernity were brokered in the shadow of Western Europe, Russia/USSR, and Turkey.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Jargony August 29, 2006
book lover
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Disappointing. Bought this book hoping for a multi-facted picture of Bulgarian/Turkish relations and instead got a very jargony tome -- yet another to ride on the coat tails of Professor Said's "Orientalism." As Neuberger does state, Bulgaria is a complex case, but she then goes on to depict Bulgarian Turks/Pomaks/Muslims as the oppressed -- very rarely (only once -- and very briefly) making refernce to the shockingly recent centuries of Turkish rule and how that might affect the interplay of "native" vs "foreigner", muslim vs christian, monied vs dependant, a historical quagmire that is omnipresent in Bulgaria today. Bulgaria is a fascinating case study -- one that, sadly, Professor's Neuberger's book reduced to a simplistic, jargony thesis
Simplistic December 26, 2006
Maria Mandova (New York, NY)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I read this book two years ago hoping that it will give me an insight and an interesting frame of reference for my thesis. I was disappointed. The only aspect I found useful was the information on the different policies of assimilation of the Turkish minority during Communism.
 A well written and lucid study of the subject April 17, 2008
Alex Bueno-Edwards (New York, NY USA)
Prof. Neuburger examines the role that Bulgaria's Muslim minorities played in the emergence of a Bulgarian national identity. Her work does draw on Edward Said, but is hardly "another Orientalist book" as one reviewer would have it. Neither is her book "jargony," but instead is well written and eminently readable. I can only agree with the review posted in "The American Historical Review" v. 109, n. 5, p. 1674 - I hope that she will turn her keen intellect towards the treatment of Turkish and/or Muslim minorities in the wider Balkan region.
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