From Xenophobic Fortress to Dystopian Supermarket, or How Balkan Playwrights Imagine Europe.

In this paper we examine the imagining of Europe as manifest in several plays written in the late 1990s and early 2000s by two prominent Balkan dramatists - Goran Stefanovski and Biljana Srbljanović. Specific attention is paid to two tropes: Fortress Europe, and Europe as a dystopian society. The analysis signals an emerging agency of the local subject who has moved from frustration with imputed Balkanness and exalting in view of the European project to an attitude of scorn for western hollowness and critical deliberation on a common future for Europe and the world. The conclusion is that at the core of this vision lies a Balkan discontent with the enforced acculturation within the western paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]