‘New face of Serbia’ at the Eurovision Song Contest: international media spectacle and national identity1  1. This paper is a part of the project Serbia in between traditionalism and modernisation: ethnological and anthropological studies of cultural processes 147020, financed by the Serbian Ministry of Science and Technological Development. View all notes

摘要

The aim of this paper is to examine the construction/recycling of national identities primarily through the participation of Serbia (and Montenegro) at the Eurovision Song Contests 2004-2008. First, the performances of this country's representatives at the Eurovision Song Contest will be examined, emphasising the aspects that contribute to the popularity of the songs chosen to represent the nation and the state. All those elements reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality, managing to reawaken the sense of the supposedly idyllic national past associated with them. In this manner of (re-)creating identity, the recycling of memory and imagined tradition, but also references to European cultural, media and political spheres, have great symbolic weight. The second part will offer a discourse analysis of media coverage of the performance of the country as a host of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is shown how the notion of ‘the new face of Serbia’ is supposed to balance different, sometimes even confronted cultural markers present in concurrent identity strategies in Serbia.View full textDownload full textKeywordsEurovision Song Contest, Serbia, Europe, national identityRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507481003660829