TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Magical Lands
By Evan Kleiman
A breath of fresh air, a port
very
quaint, so charming, yet a city that has undergone a great deal of
devastation from the ugliness of war and battles over territory. Its
history paints a tragic story, but Dubrovnik today looks untouched and
precious. What I could make sense of was why so many neighboring
countries wanted to acquire this magical land. Its natural beauty and
very strong European influence almost makes it feel like one big movie
set. It was so clean, so beautiful and so untouched that it didn’t even
feel like an inhabited city. Large footprints come and go. Dubrovnik,
Croatia, its city walls are fragile yet powerful, its gentle and
endearing presence challenges my quest for piecing together the
historical significance of Croatia and Dubrovnik and how the city
turned into
the place it is today. Its economy flourishes from this rather constant
influx of tourists.
In the chapter "Poetics of
Resistance" from Fear,
Death, and
Resistance, the writing takes me the
reader on a thoughtful path in considering the complexity of describing
the devastation of war and all that is encompassed by it. One of the
more meaningful lines expresses the authors' views, “Scientific
language
often
seemed too cold and selective for this difficult and chaotic
reality...” and “there is a certain thread, morally questionable,
almost dubious in the incentive for the culturological
'scientification
of the war'." The consequences of the war were still fresh in the
psyche
and morale of the people, as seemed apparent through the
interactions
that felt much less open, rather more closed and protected. This
perception of the people could have also had to do with their
exhaustion of tourism.
Although there was still a great
deal of a
vernacular influence in Dubrovnik, post-war reconstruction resembled
many different
European influences and foreign ownership as a result of the
affordability of the land, post-war vulnerability and wealthier
entrepreneurs in Europe who took advantage of the opportunity to own
land. Thus aside from the old city, a great deal of Dubrovnik
displayed a mixture
of transnational influence.
The aspect of Dubrovnik that was
most refreshing to
me was that it has not yet been tainted by globalization, a great deal
of the economy was locally driven, which allowed me to compare more
deeply the role that global cities play in the world, and the
importance of
differentiating between the vernacular and the transnational. In their
process of acquiring membership in the EU it seems highly probable that
more and more transnational aspects will surface and take strong
presence in Dubrovnik, Croatia. It almost seems that they go hand in
hand.
(“The necessity to
think
and speak a language
which in wartime is totally useless and senseless…)
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