Bulgarian Studies in the Mirror of Emerging Black Sea Studies: A Plea for Relocation

Abstract

The paper argues that Bulgarian studies should be divorced from the paradigms of Slavic, Balkan and European studies and be relocated, in order to let the discipline articulate suppressed historical perspectives and achieve better standing within a global distribution of academic labour. The author analyses a recent collective volume in Black Sea studies (‘The Black Sea as a Literary and Cultural Space’, 2019) and discerns some research perspectives that are worth adopting for the mentioned relocation. The article’s overall intention is to juxtapose and partly merge the research agendas of Bulgarian studies and Black Sea studies, or at least to provoke a relevant interest in the academia. Such an intention can be primarily grounded in a macrohistorical generalisation: three, out of altogether only four, centres of worldling for Bulgarians from the 9th century onwards were located in, or at least gravitated to, the Black Sea basin (Constantinople, Istanbul, and Imperial Petersburg / Soviet Moscow), and were for the most time Black Sea (co)hegemons.

Keywords

• studies in eastern christianity
• postcolonial studies
• post-ottoman studies
• post-byzantine studies
• post-imperial studies
• self-colonisation
• black sea studies
• bulgarian studies