Friday, November 14, 2008

Beauty, Contrast and Independence

Beauty, Contrast and Independence: British and American Travel Guidebooks on Socialist Yugoslavia 1958-1969

In the 1950s and 1960s more and more foreigners visited Yugoslavia, especially the Croatian Adriatic where they came to spend their summer holidays. Democratization of travelling was a consequence of the growing affluence in the post-war Europe, the establishing of holidays with pay as an entitlement, and the development of consumer culture. On the other hand, the development of mass foreign tourism in Yugoslavia was planned by the state and welcomed as a source of hard currency. During the sixties the number of foreign visitors to Yugoslavia increased from one to nearly 5 millions per year, and the number of overnight stays from 4 to 22 millions per year. By the end of the decade there were four times more British and five times more American tourists. The post-war wave of British and American tourists got the information about the country from the travel guidebooks published in the UK and the United States in 1958-1969. The authors of the guidebooks described Yugoslavia as a touristically unspoiled best-buy destination, a country of great variety and contradiction, a place where East met West and old met new. They presented the history of the territory from the Illyrian tribes to the World War II, the current social and economical situation, the level of living standards, and explained the open borders policy, the experiences of self-management and non-alignment. Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrins and Macedonians were perceived as extremely different among themselves. A special character of every nation was described, as well as their supranational Yugoslav identity. However, the authors were not immune to generalizations, prejudices, stereotypes and imprecision. Taking into consideration the length of the coast and the number of visitors, the fact that the guides on Yugoslavia were mainly guides on Croatia seems reasonable. The popularity of the coast was used to attract more tourists and increase the interest in inland "real Yugoslavia", presented as mysterious, heroic and exotic.

C.V.
I was born in Pula, Croatia, in 1977. I got the B.A. degrees in history and Croatian language and literature (2000), and the M.A. degree in history (2004) at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. My master thesis was published as a book in Zagreb in 2005: U potrazi za blagostanjem. O povijesti dokolice i potrošačkog društva u Hrvatskoj 1950-ih i 1960-ih (In Pursuit of Well-being. On History of Leisure and Consumer Society in Croatia in the 1950s and 1960s). I have been publishing papers on the history of leisure, tourism and consumer culture in the socialist Croatia, as well as on other subjects. I spent the year 2002/2003 at the University of Oxford, UK, as a visiting student thanks to the OSI/FCO Chevening Scholarship. I am an assistant at the Department of History of the Faculty of Philosophy in Pula, Croatia, within the subject of the Croatian history of the 20th century. I have been teaching introductory courses to the Croatian history of the 20th century, as well as courses on the Croatian everyday life in socialism, and on the Croatian-Italian relations in the 20th century. I cooperated with the Lexicographic Institute Miroslav Krleža in Zagreb on the Croatian Encyclopaedia and The Encyclopaedia of Istria. I am working on the Ph.D. dissertation (Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Croatia in the 1970s and 1980s), and I am a researcher at the project Tourism and Leisure Cultures in Socialist Yugoslavia, based at the University of Graz, Austria.

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