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Dagnostaw Demski and Ildikó Sz. Kristóf a fortunate combination of the approaches of Aleida and Jan Assmann, Pierre Nora, and Susan Sontag, Kassabova discusses the emerging representation of Bulgarian national heroes—and acts of heroism—parallel to the emergence of the “ethnic Bulgarian”/rural characters as another of the visual topo of the late nineteenth century. The origins of a newly formed nation, the search for them, and their visual construction and representation also function as leading ideas in Ana Djordjevi¢’s “Social Differentiation and Construction of Elites in Belgrade Studio Photography at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Drawing on the methodological considerations of Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Edward W. Said, and many others, Djordjevié analyzes the ways in which the developing heterogeneous Serbian bourgeoisie used photographs in the formation of a common group identity at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She examines a selection of photographs taken by one of the most prominent Belgradian studio photographers of his time, Milan Jovanovié (1863-1944). According to her findings, studio photos played a crucial role in the formation and consolidation of local elites that often pursued their higher education at that time at western European universities. It was in such urban circles that ideas of the nation and the modern nation-state were brought forward and ideologies of a “proper Serbianness” and of “Serbian tradition” emerged gradually after having become independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1830 (officially only in 1878). While photographs contributed to a large extent to personal identity building, they reinforced feelings of social belonging by visually emphasizing the status and power of the Belgrade elites. As for the specific identities in the Balkans, the experience of the Self as the Other, which has been channeled through powerful Western narratives of the period (orientalisms, the Balkan as Other), seems relevant. As the last paper of the chapter testifies, visual representation had its role to play in the process of the unification of Latvia, too. Gundega Gailite’s “Mother Latvia’ in Constructing Self and Other: A Case of Latvian Caricature From the Nineteenth Century to 1920” demonstrates how the figure of Mate Latvija has become part of modern Latvian identity. The author has undertaken to highlight the origins of the image of “Mother Latvia” in Latvian caricature of the period in which the movement for independence was taking place. She investigates how this symbol acted as a means of unification for Latvians during the period, and also studies how it produced Otherness. Gailite’s sources are caricatures created by prominent Latvian artists, and the drawings analyzed were published in different Latvian satirical journals until 1920, According to the author’s approach, founded partly on the concepts of Benedict Anderson, limitedness is one of the essential characteristics of the nation as an “imagined political community.” This, as Gailite argues, invites one to study the ways in which the symbolic border between the Self and Other is imagined, and caricature functions exactly as a tool that allows one to draw this border very sharply and visibly. Relying on American scholar Craig Calhoun, Gailite suggests that nations have frequently been understood as being individuals, and that this perception has created the favorable conditions for female allegories—mothers and wives—too.
