Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen
tambura musicians displaced during the Yugoslavian wars resettled among long-established expatriate communities in more distant countries such as Austria and the United States. In Austrian and Hungarian Burgenland towns, South Slavic enclaves had survived since moving north twelve generations before to flee Ottoman forces and join Austria-Hungary in fighting them. In cases such as Parndorf (Pandrof in Croatian), Austria, communities that received Yugoslav war refugees had already had strong tambura traditions in place since the 1930s and had long interacted with music professionals in Yugoslavia (Schedl 2004, 39). The wars significantly affected expatriate communities, too, disrupting patterns of musical interaction with Yugoslavia and sending new waves of tambura musicians and audiences into the midst of older diasporas. However, the musicians’ long involvement in Yugoslav politics—through visits in which they fed separatist or federalist rhetoric, acted as political and cultural ambassadors for their countries of citizenship, and financially supported movements such as Croatian independence (Hockenos 2003, 84–85)—was almost completely reduced to sending moral and financial support. Fluent in the Croatian language and connected in their former hometowns, members of the new diaspora often led efforts to reconnect with communities in the newly established Republic of Croatia after the war. Tamburaši played a key role in reestablishing such intimate contacts following the amplification of physical distance through the militarization of Croatia’s borders. Rising stars such as Škoro and fellow Osijek singer/tamburaš Vjekoslav Dimter, who lived in Pittsburgh during the war, wrote some of their most successful patriotic songs in North America and subsequently helped to establish Grcevich as a much-sought-after performer in Croatia. Richard March (2013, 213) encapsulates these transatlantic tambura networks’ communal strengths with the phrase “My Little (Global) Village,” an adaptation of a Vjekoslav Dimter song (played by his and Kosovec’s Pennsylvania band Otrov at the 2003 festival in Požega, Croatia), and their reach does indeed span far more than the United States and Croatia. In 1993 Škoro, for instance, became general consul for the large Croatian refugee community in Pécs, Hungary. Many of the public tambura concerts now held in Croatia and within these diasporic communities have developed out of contacts forged or maintained by recent immigrants, and their experiences of war and emigration shaped these connections.
The historical depth and continuity of emigration from Croatia to its various diasporic communities differs tremendously; more distant continents received immigrants intensively but recently in comparison to closer territories. Other foreign Croat enclaves consider themselves not diasporas but simply the casualties of Southeast Europe’s balkanization. Croats in Hungarian Baranya (a region continuous with Croatian Baranja) have been national minorities for generations, relating to their perceived ethnic homeland from outside Croatia’s border but feeling very much in their own territory. Others in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia have a much shorter history as foreign nationals in the Croatian lands and feel perhaps even more strongly that their cities should be part of what some nationalists envision as “Greater Croatia.” Yugoslavia’s disintegration added not just more borders but also more kinds of border crossings, informed by different histories. It “deterritorialize[d]” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 269) more fully the lives and livelihoods of many tamburaši across varied, rhizomatic assemblages (263) of dispersion and settlement, even as it reterritorialized their tambura practices upon the states of Croatia, Serbia, and so forth.
The use of “diaspora” to designate a people displaced from a nominal homeland far predates the modern nation-state20 but has played an important role in theories of “long-distance nationalism” as they pertain to the broader relevance of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1998, 1983). As the nation-state has yielded some of its structuring capacity to processes of globalization in many parts of the world, scholars of migration have embraced more complex ideas of the relationship between displacement and place in studies of decentered diasporas (e.g., Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1997; Stephen 2007). The decentering trend is not irreversible, however, and music has frequently afforded an effective means of “claiming diaspora” within immigrant communities that formerly embraced assimilationist ideologies and rejected their “homelands” as premodern and traditional (Zheng 2010). Moreover, “balkanization” has frequently recentered discourses on nation and displacement for peoples either in diaspora or territorially excluded from new nominal “homelands.” Independent Macedonia, for example, became a more relevant homeland for Romani musician émigrés than their South Asian point of origin (India) or even their birth country (Yugoslavia) (Silverman 2012, 40). Displacement and attempts to reconnect through a central territory—particularly one surrounded by “foreign” lands imaginable within the “greater” national cartography—foster identification and commonality among peoples separated by more diverse degrees of time and space than “diaspora” connotes.
I employ the phrase “Croatia and its intimates” to account for the wide range of (musical) communities within and outside Croatia’s borders that relate to the Republic of Croatia as a national center (see MacMillen 2011a). These are not all diasporic communities, nor does the entire Croatian diaspora enjoy the same sort of intimate connections with musicians in Croatia as do the Parndorf and Pittsburgh tamburaši mentioned previously. To focus exclusively on the Croatian diaspora would ignore the broader array of displacements affecting the human geography of Croatian communities’ wartime and postwar transnational networks and the tambura music and other practices that bolster them.21
Since the mid-1990s, moreover, many scholars have questioned the “promiscuous” use of “diaspora,” protesting that it stands for too broad an array of migrations and displacements (Tölölyan 1996, 8). Silverman warns of three pitfalls: “essentializing diasporas by attaching them to particular places of origin,” “equating all diasporic subjects merely because they are related to a posited homeland,” and “diluting the concept so much as to equate it with all migration” (2012, 40). As Hariz Halilovich has shown, furthermore, many residents and recent emigrants of former Yugoslav republics reject “diaspora” due to its connotations of permanence, distance, and successful ethnic cleansing (of home districts) (2013, 120). Given the plurality and “trans-locality” (133) of migrations represented in most Croatian communities outside of Southeast Europe and their diverse practices of visiting and essentializing the “homeland,” I find it especially important to eschew utilizing, and thereby broadening, “diaspora.” I use “intimates” throughout this book to refer to communities rooted in localities yet continuously building and performing affective attachments to the homeland and, through it, to one another. Particularly through musical endeavors within and on behalf of “their” nominal homeland, Croatia’s intimates share in the physical, affective, ideological, and musical constitution of this state’s core territory and culture. The concept of “national intimates” accounts for an equalization of investment (though not of the mobilization of power) in this homeland’s music, people, and affective capacities across a continuum of displacements not encompassed by “diaspora.”
Music and National Intimates
Croatia’s intimates’ participation in the country’s cultural and political affairs also demonstrates more than the familiarity or nostalgic longing for the “old country” typical of many diasporas. Independent Croatia and its intimates keep their connections current through varied means of reciprocal influence and support in political campaigns, insurance networks, religious missions, accessing higher education, tourism, and tambura music (as did the CFU, the MIH, and affiliated ensembles before the war). While Croatia’s territory centers these networks, foreign communities function as powerful secondary nodes of attraction and dispersion, maintaining relations with one another (often with reference to Croatia rather than via its nuclear pull). Reverence for Peter Kosovec’s and Jerry Grcevich’s dangerous performance among musicians in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Hungary depends on appreciatively upholding (and cautiously transgressing) tambura music as a Croatian tradition but not in most cases on contact with Croatian American tamburaši within Croatian territory. Shared traditions, affective investments, and personal relationships connecting Croatia and its intimates are facilitated largely by recognition of common heritage that transcends territorial emplacement.
Such geographically dispersed nationalism can be found globally in many transnational musical cultures. As Jane Sugarman shows, the diasporic middle class played