Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen
assemblages are neither geographically static nor culturally monolithic, despite discourses of racial difference that suggest otherwise. In order to demonstrate these discourses’ spatializing power over and simultaneous susceptibility to material processes of physical urban relation and the tactility of tambura technique, these chapters examine discursive responses to the sensational knowledge (Hahn 2007) of racialized becoming. Chapter 2 analyzes Pittsburgh’s semiprofessional bands in relation to local Croatian Homes’ junior tamburitzans ensembles and to professional musicians from the former Yugoslavia. Taking up questions of sincere feeling, it examines bands’ staging of jokes and humorous musico-textual translations as an anti-affective strategy. It shows how this block to affect privileges meanings of racial difference but also produces residual feelings of Otherness, shoring up whiteness as a form of limitative minoritarian becoming in the face of intimate contact and even conflict among Croatian, Serbian, Romani, and African American residents. In contrast, chapter 3 examines limitations of discursive strategies in staving off such feelings. Turning to Roma bands in Croatia and how they delimit practices among Croat bands and the orchestras and folklore ensembles with which they train, it argues that bands and orchestras that play dangerously risk transgressing a postwar Croatian aesthetic for the musically “clean” and adopting the “dirty” technique of Romani musicians. The inaccessibility of this feat both blocks (delimits) affective states that Croatian musicians might otherwise hold in common with racialized others and blocks (delimits) discursive counters to constructs of Roma as nonthreatening nomads and of Serbian presence as a dangerous incursion on East Croatian territory.
Two final chapters consider ideologies of belonging and intimacy and their co-delimitation of physical human relations as felt and embodied in the space and time of musical ritual. They build upon previous chapters by addressing tensions that emerge within racialized groups (thus narrowing the scope) but that concretize around distinctions of gender and religion, which themselves often intersect with race-thinking and -feeling. They thus bring into focus the internalization of power structures that at times contradict dominant orders of inclusion and exclusion, demonstrating new possibilities for blocking chauvinistic ideologies in delimitation through socially, intercorporeally, and even supersensorially distributed affect. Turning to the all-women band Garavuše and to both male and female fans of male (semi)professional groups, chapter 4 examines the particular gendered relations of (semi)professional bands25 and their audiences. It demonstrates how physical blocks (of both affect and assembled human bodies) can successfully mobilize to counter restrictive ideologies, arguing that performances have their own structures of power that draw on racialized dynamics of performative interaction. These structures simultaneously threaten musical intimacy with a block of intense aggression and build affectively on the intimate nature of threat itself. Chapter 5 returns to questions of faith introduced in chapter 1, analyzing supposedly fixed hierarchies among the officiators of Catholic-oriented tambura services (typically priests), the mostly adult orchestras/folklore ensembles that perform for them, and those in attendance. It also returns to affect and meaning’s cogenerative dialectic, examining how the slippage and potential blockage between sensorial and ideological understandings of space allow musical worshippers a flexibility to move beyond structures of architecture and dogma. The chapter thus delineates the ways in which hierarchies are jeopardized or reinforced through musical performance, the affective intensity of which often relies on a para-Christian metaphysics of space and energy and on participants’ mutual physical constitution of Croatia as a racially musicked nation and core territory.
ONE
Tamburaši and “Sacral Buildings” on a Balkanizing Peninsula
The tambura is silent now, the rifle tells the tale.
Radovan Milanov and Antun Nikolić, “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja”
Spring 2010: Drinking tea in a moderately lit, below-ground café in Osijek, I mentioned to Antun (president of the STD “Pajo Kolarić”) the existence of a youth Farkaš tambura orchestra in Ruse, Bulgaria.1 I knew from visiting Ruse in 2009 that its leaders were seeking additional international collaborations, and Antun suggested the possibility of the “Pajo Kolarić” children’s orchestra traveling to Bulgaria. Several parents, however, expressed “fear” at the prospect of sending their children to Bulgaria. Antun attributed this reaction to concern about the musicians’ young age. Yet one of the orchestra’s directors told me that she, too, felt “fear” at the thought of leaving Croatia for unknown countries. All were happy to welcome the Bulgarians if they came to Osijek. However, anxiety over travel to proximate foreign territories among this generation of young adults (who had been children or youths during the war) was strong enough to prevent a trip to Bulgaria, despite the “Pajo Kolarić” orchestras having recently traveled to such destinations as Hungary, Austria, Serbia, and the Netherlands.2
The orchestra’s director, furthermore, had grown up in the nearby Croatian region of Baranja before being evacuated to the country’s interior during the war. She thus had witnessed firsthand the fact that living within Croatian territory did not guarantee a secure, fearless existence; intermittent ethnic tensions and problems with untripped landmines and buildings weakened by shellfire keep the threat of further destruction alive even today. Under what conditions, then, would this director and the parents travel to foreign territories that presented no such physical threats? Nearly two decades after the war, how did experiences and narratives of daring movement into war-torn territories interact with the affect of a fear that has persisted despite attempts to rationalize it into insignificance?
Such a dissonance between thought and feeling is affective block at its most basic: the ability of feeling to block (in delimitation) a conscious, rationalizing, and contradictory understanding of the world. It does so through an accrual of embodied intensity that in its generation is “disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration” (Massumi 1996, 219). Yet this chapter also examines the “interanimation” (Gray 2014, 9) in musical spheres between affective and narrative registers of security and risk. Probing under what wartime and postwar conditions affective attachments, tales, and eventually traveling musicians themselves reached beyond the boundaries of secured Croatian lands, it shows how a nation-state’s core territory emerges physically and discursively through the common site of the body. It argues ultimately for a new way of understanding the emergence of terms of becoming and of Otherness (a national “we,” a racialized distinction of “us” and “them”) through intimate, musical relationships with dangerous areas and presence. It thus demonstrates how this affective block is also an aggregation of feeling, a building of intense intimacy as individuals begin to feel like a “we.”
One of the first dangerous areas abandoned was Baranja, whose refugees saw both themselves and tambura traditions as passive wartime victims and did not immediately hear in this music the potential for responding physically to the realities of warfare. The particular poignancy of this northeast Croatian region’s capture for its residents instead often inspired tambura music composition as a form of communication from afar. Ballads such as “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja” (“Istinu svijetu o Baranji reci”) connected narratives of threat, endangered traditions, and calls to armed engagement. Released in 1992 by Slavonski Bećari, it tells of the peaceful village life of food, wine, family, and tamburaši that the Šokci, one of the easternmost groups of Croats, had enjoyed in Baranja before its occupation by an “evildoer” (the Yugoslav People’s Army).
A resonant song for Croatians during Baranja’s 1991–1998 occupation, it was, however, only partially accurate in its claim that the tambura had fallen silent while the rifle narrated (and caused) the falling of “cold steel” and other wartime dangers. Certainly from the perspective of Croats such as the “Pajo Kolarić” director (then a child), who had fled from Baranja, the rifle and not the tambura was sounding in their home villages. This likely rang true despite the fact that their