Introduction: The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State

With contributions from several of the Balkan countries that were united under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire, this special proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission the past through time. All of the articles in this issue explore to do with the transmission of collective memories of post-Ottoman formation and the malaise associated with a contemporary that, echoing late modernity, we might term ‘late nationalism’. introductory article examines the several manifestations of this phenomenon under the rubric of post-Ottoman topologies, that where history creates a fixed, empiricist record of the , topologies denote the flux of col