The Banat of Timișoara: A European Melting Pot. Ed. Victor Neumann. London: Scala Arts and Heritage Publishers, 2019. xvi, 495 pp. Notes. Index. Plates. Figures. Tables. Maps. $40.00, hard bound.

the voices, for example, of those peasants whom Calic claims preferred nationalism over class solidarity in the early twentieth century? (43–44) The overall lack of human voices in this history—subaltern and others—flattens out what could have been a much more evocative history. A second issue concerns Calic’s regular use of specialized terms and names without adequate definition, which renders her history less accessible than it should be for students and general readers. When reading about the 1960s, to cite one instance, how many such readers will comprehend unexplained terms such as “Bogomoljci” (224), “Bosniak” (227), and “MASPOK” (236), as well as a long list of individuals associated with the journal Praxis (218–19)? This issue, along with the decision to place the book’s maps in an appendix rather than throughout the chapters, will leave non-specialist readers—who would seem to be the book’s intended audience—with a sense of disorientation. With regard to analysis, Calic undercuts her stated primary objective of determining how and why ethnic identity became a matter of contention by consistently using groupist language to tell Yugoslavia’s history. Too often, the main actors in this book are abstract groups; such as “the Serb people,” “the Slovenes,” or “the Croats.” Yet how can we effectively analyze the changing political and everyday salience of ethnic identification when all people in the region seem to automatically (and, in a sense, ahistorically) already be parts of monolithic “ethnic groups?” Recent pioneering research during the past five years (Hajdarpasic, 2015) has significantly enhanced our capacity to analyze the history of nationalism in the South Slavic lands by moving beyond simplistic notions of “groupism.” Although Calic cites much of this work in her bibliography and endnotes, she does not use its theoretical contributions to explain why ethnicity apparently matters in accounting for Yugoslavia’s rise and fall. As such, this history too often naturalizes rather than explains the presence and significance of ethnicity and nationalism. Calic’s book is certainly a useful addition to the English-language literature on Yugoslavia. Yet we are still waiting for a historian with the capacity to tell the country’s history as one of complex individuals and their changing sense (or lack thereof) of ethnicity, rather than retrospectively submerging them into “ethnic groups.”