Innovative Paths of Albanology

Christian Voss,Lumnije Jusufi,Evelyn Reuter

Innovation is understood in the sense of new perspectives, methodological approaches and topics. The contributions cover several research areas that traditionally would not be considered as part of Albanian philology, but that are becoming extremely widespread – especially abroad. These areas include language contact studies, language technology and digitization, gender studies, migration studies and broader cultural studies. As Albanian is a small language and quite under-researched in many areas, even topics that are supposed to be more traditional have been considered because of the outstanding methods that are used for approaching.

This volume gathers thirteen contributions investigating different aspects of Albanian studies. Besides six chapters from Germany, the volume presents three articles from Kosovo, three from Albania and one from Italy. The contributions are gathered in three different panels in terms of methodologies and topics and seek to reflect the current research conducted by young academics in the field of Albanian studies. The contributions’ grade of innovation is not necessarily due to the coverage of new topics or an exclusion of diachronic and historic aspects. On the contrary, many contributions in fact deal with new ways of reading the “classics” of the Albanian “Rebirth” such as Naim Frashëri or Pashko Vasa.

The four contributions from literary studies cover the 19th to 21st centuries: Even though they cover canonical authors such as Migjeni and Kadare, what the contributions have in common is a fresh perspective on these writers – while Belfjore Zifla in a way brings the anti-canon into focus by concentrating on diasporic authors.

Eljon Doçe writes about one of the most fascinating authors of the inter-war period, Migjeni (Millosh Gjergj Nikolla, 1911–1938). He pleads for a new way of reading this author who was engrossed by communist literary criticism one-sidedly as a realistic and socially critical author – especially to discredit the monarchist inter-war period. In order to overcome this enormous constriction of Migjeni’s reception after 1945, Doçe emphasises the importance of working more on the text itself. This would clearly show that Migjeni is more than a “poet of misery” or an “atheist author”, but a producer of nationally indifferent, in part, fantastic and especially anti-heroic literature. The re-reading of Migjeni is thus part of the recanonization of Albanian literature after 1990.

Abdulla Rexhepi’s depiction of Persian influence in the oeuvre of Naim Frashëri (1846–1900) picks up a fundamental problem of Southeast European Area Studies and philology: the national-philological and monolingual constriction of perspectives that often block the view on interconnections and path dependencies outside of established language combinations. Rexhepi lays open the perspective onto the Persian dimension in Frashëri’s works who was brought up as a Bektashi and strongly influenced by Islamic and especially Persian literature. He shows this influence in some of his poems but goes beyond and has conditioned Albanian language culture on an epistemic, conceptual and thematic level.

Belfjore Zifla on the other hand takes our gaze away from the established canon and onto new authors writing transnational literature: As Albanian post-migrants in Western Europe or overseas who often no longer write in their native language, they challenge the criteria of ascription by others. Zifla shows hybridity and in-betweenness as typical attributes of this literature that positions itself between “both and” and “neither nor” in a post-national and globalized world. She presents authors such as Gazmend Kapllani, Ornela Vorpsi, Gëzim Hajdari, Ardian-Christian Kyçyku, Lindita Arapi, Ilir Ferra, Elvira Dones, Besa Myftiu, Agron Tufa, Fate Velaj and Lea Ypi and their most important works. Common topics of Albanian transnational literature are the non-acceptance in the host societies and the simultaneous estrangement from the home society that is often represented by the figure of the returnee.

The linguistic panel also consists of four contributions that complement each other methodologically. They have in common an attempt to address methodological intersections be it between syntax and semantics (Binaj), minority studies and contact and sociolinguistics (Gjata), cognitive linguistics, phrasemes and contrastive linguistics (Muco) or an overview of the status quo of Albanian digital corpora (Wasserscheidt).

Elona Gjata introduces us to the Gorani minority on the border of Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia as well as her results from a field trip in 2021: As speakers of Balkan–Slavic dialects they are claimed by both Bulgarian and Macedonian dialectology. In contrast to the Albanian Gorani, two additional options were introduced in the regions that belonged to Yugoslavia in the 20th century: On the one hand the Serbo-Croatian or Serbian umbrella, on the other hand the current Bosniakization of Goranis who are claimed as part of the Bosniak nation and language community since they are Slavic-speaking Muslims of Ex-Yugoslavia (just like the Sandžak-Muslims). In addition, Gjata discusses parameters of language vitality such as endogamy and mobility.

In an Albanian–German (and also pluricentric German–Austrian and Albanian–Kosovar) comparison, Albana Muco broaches the metaphoric meanings of colours. Based on an empiric survey, she examines the passive and active competence of phrasemes to do with colours in the four countries with extralinguistic variables such as age, gender, education and origin – also in a diatopic and diachronic variance. Finally, she describes comparative phrasemes contrastively and with a construction grammar approach. Muco regards her dissertation from 2021 at the University of Milan as groundwork for an Albanian–German/German–Albanian dictionary of phrasemes.

The third panel in a broader sense unites contributions from cultural studies and also covers the 19th to 21st centuries: We find very different approaches that reach from discourse analysis (Abazi) and culture of remembrance encompassing popular culture (Turóczy), as well as philology or more precisely the history of letterpress (Rugova), to the history of diplomacy and entangled histories (Seewald/Unkauf).

In the context of the Leipzig Collaborative Research Centre “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” Jeta Abazi develops a particular secular approach to Albanian national identity. She operationalizes her question as a discourse analysis on the recent and very current debates on Islamic or Christian/Catholic connotated symbolism: To be precise, she analyses the culture of remembrance of Skanderbeg and Mother Teresa. Both polarize in the debate and raise the question of how strongly religion should be visible within Albanian national identity – this question is posed differently for Kosovo that was dominated by Yugoslavia for 80 years than for Albania that was strongly shaped by Enver Hoxha’s order of atheism in 1967.

Yll Rugova offers a fascinating detailed study on letterpress in Albanian and focuses on the punchcutting of Albanian alphabets in the 18th and 19th centuries. Experiments were conducted with alphabets that can be positioned between the established writing systems such as Latin, Greek and Slavic Cyrillic and at the same time had to reproduce Albanian phonetics. Rugova leads us into the contemporary printing scene and deduces the context from Theodhor Haxhifilipi’s printing press in Elbasan from 1805: It was mainly the Habsburg intellectuals and diplomats such as the typographer Alois Auer or the Habsburg consulate in Ioannina Georg von Hahn who acted as middlemen and multipliers by collecting knowledge on Albanian script(s) and making them known.