The book was written during the Yugoslav Wars as a response to stigmatization of the region, stigmatization initiated from an Eurocentric position, that attributed to the Balkans a fatality of incomprehensible conflicts and barbarism, and therefore a non-European position. Also, she describes the Balkans as an actual place and space while Said's Orient is not defined in such a way. In her view, contrary to the Orient which serves as Europe's polar opposite, Balkan is Europe's " Other within" in an interstitial position of being neither here nor there. Her distinction is partially based on the "crucial" formal distinction between European colonialism abroad and subordination within. Todorova describes Balkanism not as a form of Orientalism but as an independent construction having to do with the representation of the Balkans. Privileging the study of texts and intertextuality, the author developed the concept of Balkanism inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism, yet the author also underlines how scholars of Orientalism essentialize the West as a homogeneous system. It was described as author's magnum opus. The book was published by Oxford University Press in United States on ( ISBN 0-19-508751-8), with the second and enlarged edition being published in 2009. Imagining the Balkans is a book by the Bulgarian academic Maria Todorova.
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