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Tomislav Z. Longinovi?, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imagi- nary, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, x + 212 pp., US$22.95 (pb), ISBN 978-0-82235-039-2.
Published in 2011 as part of the Duke University Press series "The Cultures and Prac- tice of Violence," Tomislav Longinovic' s Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary is the author's most recent and elaborate work resulting from his long-time scholarly fascination with the rhetorical eminence of the vampire metaphor in defining the rela- tion between violence and culture in his native former Yugoslavia, as well as in the cultural and rhetorical construction of the Serbian nation from a Western perspective.11 Longinovic draws his theoretical approach from Benedict Anderson, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Larry Wolff, Maria Todorova, and Homi Bhabha, among others, eas- ily applying and interweaving different aspects of poststructuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and postcolonialism. Finding his central motivation for research in the pain- ful history of the western Balkans in the 1990s with the Wars of Yugoslav Succession in the early and mid-1990s, the NATO intervention in Kosovo in the late 1990s, the Hague trials of the former Yugoslav political and military leaders and their Gothic-like representation in the Western media and political discourses, and also the nationalist discourses within the former Yugoslavia, Longinovic analyzes a wide range of cultural practices, oral and written narratives, and visual culture artifacts involving elements of violence to go back...