Book Description
Uses the history of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav border to examine how representations of difference have affected the politics of sovereignty during the twentieth century.
Back Cover copy
Focusing on the history of the "problem of Trieste" and the Italo-Yugoslav border, Glenda Sluga provides a framework for writing the history of places from a perspective sensitive to the politics of identity--whether national, ethnic, or gender. For most of this century, Trieste, a port city on the northeastern Adriatic, has been at the center of key European cultural and political questions. Scholars have commonly attributed Trieste's turbulent past to the intrinsic differences between local Italian and Slav populations. Ways of knowing Trieste and Triestines, and the ways in which that population could know itself, have been couched in narratives that reiterate the antithetical differences between Slav Eastern/Balkan Europeans and Italian Western Europeans, and constitute the East as the West's lesser "other."
