When we consider the shifting of boundaries among empires that seemed stable for a few generations, the seismic shifts had started already in the seventeenth century. For my purposes, however, the chronology needs to be pushed backward in time to an era before the emergence of national, political projects. There could not have been a better last-minute assist to this Ottomanist than was delivered by the duo of a Habsburg and a Balkan historian. Arnautović’s taunt makes race seem relevant the complex family history that his name evokes, however, is itself a powerful symbol of the mutability of identity.” 2 His name is entangled in, and mirrors, complex layers of Balkan history, a region where political boundaries have shifted repeatedly over the past two hundred years, and where people have often held multiple, hybrid identities, just as both men involved in this incident do.
By using an anti-Albanian taunt without ironic intention, Arnautović signaled both the crass behavior for which he is already known, but also, in some sense, his complete disregard for the antiquity of ancestral notions of race. “Does Marko Arnautović know what his last name means? Does he know when and why his family came to have it? Perhaps it does not matter: it would be a fool’s errand to speculate on how the Arnautović family came by their surname. The ensuing controversy was analyzed with profound historical insight by the two coauthors, who wrote: 1 My ears were perked, so to speak, since the incident was charged with the politics of Blut und Boden in a competition between two nation-states whose lands mark the two ends of that intricate puzzle of human and physical geography that constitutes the heartland of the “classical vampire.” The Austrian player Marko Arnautović, whose last name includes one of the common words for “Albanian,” namely “Arnaut,” was heard uttering a racial slur against an Albanian-Macedonian player. Just as I was putting the final touches on this essay and still tinkering with my opening, I read an engaging discussion of an incident that took place in a football match between Austria and North Macedonia during the 2021 European Cup.
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