Alina Bojčić’s dissertation examines how the multi-ethnic performers of the Zagreb cabaret and coffeehouse co-produced the culture of the city and the way in which these spaces became targets for cultural purification by the Ustaša. More specifically, she examines how the reconfiguration of cultural life in the urban centers of the Independent State of Croatia became inseparable from the severing and reformulation of the social relations between its multi-ethnic residents and the erasure of the Jewish population. By analyzing the Ustaša within a broader chronological framework beginning in the Habsburg period, and by following a broad constellation of popular performers, her project examines how culture transformed in the period between 1908 and 1946, ending in the immediate post-war period, to illuminate the absences created by the Holocaust. Her project also investigates how the regime sought to erase and rework the cabaret and coffeehouse to fit a fascist framework and how Zagreb and Sarajevo, along with their urban populations, became entangled through the regime’s cultural politics. Her project also thinks about the afterlives of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and brings these histories together by examining how the Ustaša engaged with these imperial pasts through the cabaret and coffeehouse.
Advisor: Frances Tanzer
Education:
- B.A., History, University of Oslo, 2019
- M.A., History, University of Oslo, 2021
Publications:
Fellowships:
- Louis and Ann Kulin Fellowship, 2023-2025
