Metropolitan Belgrade

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Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and it appears in the Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. The table of contents and the introduction are available for preview. The book can be purchased from the publisher or from Amazon.

Metropolitan Belgrade presents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society.

As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade’s middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state.

Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisure indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of the Europeanization of the capital’s middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.

Metropolitan Belgrade was awarded the Mihajlo Miša Djordjević Book Prize by the North American Society for Serbian Studies in 2018.

 Praise for the book

Palas Theater program cover from the late 1920s
Palas Theater program cover from the late 1920s

Metropolitan Belgrade is an engaging feat of urban history, in which entertainment is center stage. Babovic’s textured descriptions of the city and its inhabitants often reveal the unexpected—such as the visit of Josephine Baker in 1929. Babovic’s captivating account is a superb lens to rethink some of the most important themes and tensions in Serbian, Yugoslav, and European history.” —Mary Neuburger, University of Texas at Austin

“A valuable contribution, not just to East European history and the history of the former Yugoslavia, but to the broader fields of urban history and European cultural history more generally. This book will sit very comfortably, and confidently, alongside some of the most interesting and impressive new additions to the field.” —Patrick Patterson, University of California-San Diego

“Building on a broad and interesting array of archival, newspaper, and other sources, Babović dexterously integrates her analysis of culture in interwar Belgrade both within the newer historiography on Serbia and with leading works from both European and U.S. historiography … Babović has made a noteworthy and highly readable contribution to both Balkan and European historiography. Her book compares well with some of the best works in culture in major European cities in the twentieth century.” —Christian Axboe Nielsen in American Historical Review

“Jovana Babović has written an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Belgrade as a cultural center in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in the 1920s and 30s … Her analysis, amply illustrated by reference to specific cases of certain individuals and the clubs and kafane in which they performed, is contextualized in a broader discussion to demonstrate the appropriation of the means of cultural production by the city’s middle class and their aim to dominate the institutional processes underpinning that production.” —David A. Norris in Slavic Review 

“Babović succeeds in telling a complementary history of the interwar period, one that differs from the better-known political narrative of the period and one in which class affiliations take precedence over those of nationality and in which the authoritarianism of the dictatorship years does not seem to be all-encompassing… Babović’s book is a piquant and persuasive study which asks and answers many important questions.” —John Paul Newman in The Hungarian Historical Review

“The book critically recovers new accounts from historical oblivion. While at no point in Babovic’s book does theoretical analyses speak louder than historical narratives, the book seems well fitting with a history from below approach that focuses on actors rather than states … The book is easy to read and it takes into account many facts and remarks of the time, providing information for a wide range of readership, from regional experts to cultural scholars and social scientists, as well as to travelers interested in discovering the culture history of Belgrade.” —Enika Abazi in Journal of Contemporary European Studies

“L’ouvrage de Jovana Babović est une importante contribution à l’historiographie yougoslave… cette recherche permet aussi de montrer les apports de l’histoire culturelle qui, en redonnant une place à des phénomènes et à des acteurs trop souvent perçus comme marginaux et impuissants, permet de mettre en lumière des processus jusque-là restés invisibles.” —Jovana Papović in Balkanologie 

The book in the media

I discussed the book with Vladislav Lilić on the New Books in Eastern European Studies channel of the New Books Network. Our conversation can be found here.

An article about a book talk I gave at SUNY Genseo can be found here.  A short interview (in BCS) about this project at its early stage can be found here.

Support of research and writing

My research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, the Fulbright Institute of International Education, the Henson Anderson Bunch Fellowship, the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and two Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships from the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center.

Presenting at a roundtable at SUNY Geneseo

Several articles have emerged from this project. “National Capital, Transnational Culture: Foreign Entertainment in Interwar Belgrade” appeared in 2015 in a special issue of East Central Europe edited by John Lampe and devoted to Belgrade during the interwar years. Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju published my article “Re-Contextualizing Entertainment in Interwar Culture in Belgrade” in 2014. I was awarded the Joseph Ward Swain Publication Prize for “Municipal Regulation of Entertainment in Interwar Belgrade,” published in Istraživanja in 2013.

I’ve presented portions of this project at meetings of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, American Historical Association, Urban History Association, and Berkshire Conference on Women Historians, as well as at the Pleasures of Backwardness: Consumer Desire and Modernity in Eastern Europe conference hosted by the University of California – Berkeley, the North Louisiana Collegium of Historical Studies, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the Wilson Center‘s (now sadly defunct) Junior Scholars’ Training Seminar, and the Mid-Size City Colloquium at the University of Ghent.