Croatia’s self-colonization: Intra-national nesting orientalisms in Renato Baretić’s Osmi povjerenik

Abstract

While Croatia is often classified as a Balkan nation, its citizens tend to reject this label for reinforcing an image of their country as different and ‘backward’. Croatians respond by emphasizing their belonging to Western Europe and projecting the Balkan stereotype onto adjacent spaces outside the nation-state. Literary critic Milica Bakić-Hayden calls this phenomenon ‘nesting orientalisms’. Moving away from the traditional displacement onto another nation or, as in the case of multinational Bosnia and Herzegovina, onto a different ethnic group, contemporary Croatian fiction displays what I call intra-national nesting orientalisms. Namely, in these texts, it is the rural spaces within the country itself that often serve as a stand-in for the Balkans. Croatian author Renato Baretić’s 2003 novel Osmi povjerenik (‘The eighth commissioner’) offers an exemplary image of intra-national nesting orientalisms. Set on the imaginary island of Trečić, it tells the story of the Croatian government’s attempts to colonize its own island. Through colonial and postcolonial tropes, including references to Dracula, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Heart of Darkness, the novel utilizes intra-national nesting orientalisms to explore Croatia’s relationship with the West and its own interior. I argue that the novel’s intra-national nesting orientalisms function to satirize Croatia’s never-ending and often failing efforts to displace the negative stereotype of being a Balkan nation onto another place.