engleski

Civic and Ethno-cultural Discourses of Identity in Renaissance Ragusa

The article seeks to address the complex interaction of two types of identity discourses in the culture of Renaissance Ragusa: the civic discourses, centered on the community of the city-state, and the ethnic discourses, focused on larger communities which were according to the contemporaries defined by factors such as language, territory, shared customs, common origin myth, etc. The first part of the article is an analysis of ways in which those two imagined communities – civic and ethnic – were distinguished from each other in Ragusan culture. It focuses on three main differences: their criteria of membership, their political relevance and their different representations in narrative sources. The second part is an attempt to analyze the relationship of those two types of discourse, leading to the conclusion about the absolute primacy of the civic and a largely „collateral“ nature of the ethnic one.

identity, ethnicity, Dubrovnik, Renaissance

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