Journal articles on the topic 'Bosnian War stories'

The paper questions the construction of identity in the novels of Slovenian-Bosnian authoress Valerija Skrinjar-Tvrz: Na svojoj, na plemenitoj, Jutro u Bosni and Bosna i Soča, which were combined and published as a trilogy this year. Integrating the period of medieval Bosnia, the First World War, and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992-1995 into one whole, the trilogy achieves multiple coding. Although distant in time, driven by different motivations, and intersected by different ideologies, wars shape the lives of the heroes of this trilogy. In this unique poetic entity, the authoress managed to show the complexity of common life through individual destinies and “small stories” and to deconstruct the conception that history is made up of “big stories”. The identities of individuals in the novels represent the identities of communities whose borders are porous and threaten to destroy the established systems, while individual unfortunate destinies are a mirror of collective traumas from the Middle Ages to modern times. The Trilogy covers almost the entire Bosnian history, trying to include identity constructions and their associated identification features, which the authoress considers representative of contemporary identity re/configurations.

Previous research on victimhood during and after the Bosnian war has emphasized the importance of narratives but has not focused on narratives about victimhood or analyzed post-war interviews as a competition for victimhood. This article tries to fill this gap using stories told by survivors of the Bosnian war during the 1990s. In this analysis of the retold experiences of 27 survivors of the war in northwestern Bosnia, the aim is to describe the informants’ portrayal of “victimhood” as a social phenomenon as well as analyzing the discursive patterns that contribute to constructing the category “victim”. When, after the war, different categories claim a “victim” status, it sparks a competition for victimhood. All informants are eager to present themselves as victims while at the same time the other categories’ victim status are downplayed. In this reproduction of competition for the victim role, all demarcations that were played out so successfully during the war live on.

The article is an attempt to describe the specifics of the „new Bosnian narrative” as exemplified by Karim Zaimovic’s short stories collected in the book Tajna džema od malina. The text synthetically presents the new generation of prose writers clearly referring to the heritage of the so-called „narrative Bosnia” (J. Kršić). The generation of writers contemporary to Zaimovic, which dominated the literary scene in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last decade of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century, was united by a creative motivation generated by common experiences, which was a reaction to the tragedy of the homeland war. The article briefly characterizes the „new narrative Bosnia”, highlighting the great tradition of narrative (pripovijetka) in local literature. Narrative/Short story is considered to be the most important and valued genre, which in its meaning goes far beyond purely literary boundaries – it has played and still plays an important role in the cultural, social, political and ideological context. In the text, it is shown that Zaimović’s stories, compared with (anti)war writing, are distinguished by: the way of constructing scenes that make up the story adapted from comic art, the presence of fantastic elements known from the work of „Borges writers”, as well as a characteristic, humorous style –where the author deals with the absurdity of war by the use of grotesque and satire, and describes the Sarajevo apocalypse using numerous metaphors and allegories. Even though, Zaimović’s texts cannot be treated as a model or the most representative example of “the new Bosnian narrative“, their unconventional way of presentation of the main theme as well as structural and compositional innovation have earned them an iconic status. The circumstances of the stories, and above all the fate of the young writer, made him a tragic symbol of the drama of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Alija Nametak and Almin Kaplan are two writers of Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature. Their prose work is defined by two separate historical periods. Alija Nametak`s prose originated in the 1930s, retaining a realistic poetic framework of storytelling and thematically entering into historical strife, folklore, and social relations amalgamated into the patriarchal way of life of Bosniak rural communities in Herzegovina. On the other hand, Almin Kaplan creates in the cultural climate of the first decades of the 21st century, combining poetic and prose expression in his literary work. Kaplan's literary world built on post-war actuality realistically depicts Bosnian society and convincingly portrays a man sandwiched between the magma of dreams and harsh reality, at the crossroads of personal and collective values, in a time of economic transition, unemployment, broken ethical values, and new globalist movements, but still burdened by the war trauma of the 1990s. Although they are separated by almost the whole century, Alija Nametak and Almin Kaplan can be connected by certain similarities that will be the backbone of this research: woven into the Herzegovinian ambiance with all its geographical, historical, social, and cultural conditions, both draw their literary motifs from the socio-cultural landscape of Herzegovina, which is a stage for small human stories and universal truths. The research corpus of this paper will be based on the novel Meho (2019) and the collection of short stories Dubravske priče (2020) by Almin Kaplan and several short stories from the collection Trava zaboravka (1966/1998) by Alija Nametak.

In the German camps during the Second World War, the aim was to kill from a distance, and the camps were highly efficient in their operations. Previous studies have thus analyzed the industrialized killing and the victims’ survival strategies. Researchers have emphasized the importance of narratives but they have not focused on narratives about camp rituals or analyzed postwar interviews as a continued resistance and defense of one’s self. This article tries to fill this gap by analyzing stories told by former detainees in concentration camps in the Bosnian war during the 1990s. This article aims to describe a set of recounted interaction rituals as well as to identify how these rituals are dramatized in interviews. The retold stories of humiliation and power in the camps indicate that there was little space for individuality and preservation of self. Nevertheless, the detainees seem to have been able to generate some room for resistance, and this seems to have granted them a sense of honor and self-esteem, not least after the war. Their narratives today represent a form of continued resistance.

The relationship between identity and national consciousness is one of the important issues, not only, of the sociology of identity but of the overall opinion of the social sciences. This scientific question has been insufficiently researched in the sociological thought of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and with this paper we are trying to actualize it. Aware of theoretical-methodological and conceptual-logical difficulties related to the research problem, we considered that in the first part of the paper we make some theoretical-methodological notes on the problems in studying this phenomenon, in order to, above all, eliminate conceptual-logical dilemmas. The use of terms and their meaning in sociology and other social sciences is a very important theoretical and methodological issue. The question justifiably arises whether we can adequately name and explain some of the “character traits” of the contemporary national identity of the Bosniak nation that we want to talk about in this paper with classical, generally accepted terms, identity, consciousness, self-awareness, shame or shame, self-shame. Another important theoretical issue of the relationship between identity and consciousness in our case, the relationship between the national consciousness of Bosniaks and their overall socio-historical identity is the dialectical relationship between individual and collective consciousness, ie. the extent to which the national consciousness of an individual or a particular national group, political, cultural, educational, age, etc., is contrary to generally accepted national values and norms. One of the important factors of national consciousness is the culture of remembrance. What does it look like for Bosniaks? More specifically, in this paper we problematize the influence of “prejudicial historiography” on the development of the culture of memory in the direction of oblivion or memory. What to remember, and why to remember. Memory is part of our identity. The phrase, not to deal with the past but to turn to the future, is impossible. How to project the future and not analyze the past. On the basis of what, what social facts? Why the world remembers the crimes of the Nazis, why the memory of the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews is being renewed. Which is why Bosniaks would not remember and renew the memory of the genocides committed against them. Due to the Bosniak memory of genocide, it is possible that the perpetrators of genocide are celebrated as national heroes and their atrocities as a national liberation struggle. Why is the history of literature and art, political history and all other histories studied in all nations and nations. Why don't European kingdoms give up their own, queens and kings, princesses and princes. These and other theoretical-methodological questions have served us to use comparative analysis to show specific forms of self-esteem among Bosniaks today. The concrete socio-historical examples we cite fully confirm our hypothesis. Here are a few of these examples. Our eastern neighbors invented their epic hero Marko Kraljevic (Ottoman vassal and soldier, killed as a “Turkish” soldier in the fight against Christian soldiers in Bulgaria) who killed the fictional Musa Kesedzija, invented victory on the field of Kosovo, and Bosniaks forgot the real Bosniak epic heroes , brothers Mujo and Halil Hrnjic, Tala od Orašac, Mustaj-beg Lički and others, who defended Bosniaks from persecution and ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian Krajina. Dozens of schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been named after the Serbian language reformer, the Serb Vuk Stefanović Karađić (1787-1864), who was born in the village of Tršić near Loznica, Republic of Serbia. Uskufije (1601 / 1602.-?), Born in Dobrinja near Tuzla. Two important guslars and narrators of epic folk songs, Filip Višnjić (1767-1834) and Avdo Medjedović (1875-1953), are unequally present in the memory and symbolic content of the national groups to which they belong, even if the difference in quality is on the side of the almost forgotten. Avdo Medjedovic, the “Balkan Homer”, is known at Harvard University, but very little is known in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And while we learned everything about the murderer Gavril Princip, enlightened by the “logic of an idea” (Hannah Arendt) symbolizing him as a “national hero”, we knew nothing, nor should we have known, about Muhamed Hadžijamaković, a Bosnian patriot and legal soldier, he did not kill a single pregnant woman , a fighter in the Bosnian Army who fought against the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878. When it comes to World War II and the fight against fascism are full of hero stories. For one example, we will take Srebrenica, the place of genocidal suffering of Bosniaks. Before the war against Bosnian society and the state 1992-1995. in Srebrenica, the elementary school was called Mihajlo Bjelakovic, a partisan, born in Vidrići near Sokolac. Died in Srebrenica in 1944. The high school in Srebrenica was named Midhat Hacam, a partisan born in the vicinity of Vares. It is not a problem that these two educational institutions were named after two anti-fascists, whose individual work is not known except that they died. None of them were from Srebrenica. That's not a problem either. Then what is it. In the collective memory of Bosniaks. Until recently, the name of the two Srebrenica benefactors and heroes who saved 3,500 Srebrenica Serbs from the Ustasha massacre in 1942, who were imprisoned by the Ustashas in the camp, has not been recorded. These are Ali (Jusuf) efendi Klančević (1888-1952) and his son Nazif Klančević (1910-1975). Nothing was said about them as anti-fascists, most likely that Alija eff. Klančević was an imam-hodža, his work is valued according to Andrić's “logic” as a work that cannot “be the subject of our work” In charity, humanitarian work, but also courage, sacrifice, direct participation in the fight for defense, the strongest Bosniaks do not lag behind Bosniaks, but just like Bosniaks, they are not symbolically represented in the public space of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We had the opportunity to learn about the partisan Marija Bursać and many others, but why the name Ifaket-hanuma Tuzlić-Salihagić (1908-1942), the daughter of Bakir-beg Tulić, was forgotten. In order to feed the muhadjers from eastern Bosnia, Ifaket-hanum, despite the warning not to go for food to Bosanska Dubica, she left. She bravely stood in front of the Ustashas who arrested her and took her to Jasenovac. She was tortured in the camp and eventually died in the greatest agony, watered and fried with hot oil. Nothing was known about that victim of Ustasha crimes. Is it because she is the daughter of Bakir-beg Tuzlić. Bey's children were not desirable in public as benefactors because they were “remnants of rotten feudalism”, belonging to the “sphere of another culture”. In this paper, we have mentioned other, concrete, examples of Bosniak monasticism, from the symbolic content of the entire public space to naming children.

In the introduction to their bookSrebrenica: Record of a War Crime, political scientists Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both write: ‘“Srebrenica” has become synonymous with such an extraordinarily horrific crime that exceptional explanations have been proposed. Stories of conspiracy and betrayal abound. The most popular theory is that Srebrenica fell as the result of a plot involving senior UN personnel, the French government and the Serbian government. Others place the blame firmly on the Dutch UN soldiers, whom they accuse of cowardice during the Serb offensive against the safe area. We reject these explanations. Conspiracy theories tend to be neatly constructed so that every decision, or failure to decide, seems to stem from sinister ulterior motives. They leave no room for the dilemmas of real life, nor for miscommunication or outright failure. As such, they rarely bring us closer to the truth, and more often create a fertile breeding ground for dangerous stab-in-the-back myths’ Honig and Both claim that final culpability should, without a doubt, be attributed to the highest Serb officials and officers who organised the crime and gave the orders for its perpetration. The systematic manner in which the crime was committed, the evidence that detailed plans had been drawn up and that procedures established earlier had been painstakingly carried out — all this points to the direct responsibility of the Bosnian Serb leadership in Pale. Moreover, the Serbian leadership in Belgrade had given, if not the order, then still its tacit consent.

A comparative analysis of selected short stories in the Balkan countries, as well as contemporary short stories of the world, will show us that the key themes of those stories are very similar to the short stories written during the period of transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995-2010). For example, the story of the Soul Operation by an Iranian writer Mohsen Mahmalbafa, The Falcons by a Dutch writer Kader Abdolaha and On the Kitchen Stairs by a Polish writer Witold Gombrowic zinter connect with short stories by authors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as The Secret of Raspberry jam by Karim Zaimović or The Devilish work of Zoran Riđanović. A common thread manifests itself in the aforementioned stories, more specifically, a common theme which focuses on the need for eradication of the seeds of submission and compliance with the political system. Most authors focus on their domestic political systems; however, some portray and analyze systems in other countries as they see it, such as a Dutch narrator who focuses on a potential threat of infringement of human freedom. Moreover, Bellow Hubei by an Argentinian writer Anhelika Gorodis her underlines the importance of humanization within a political order. Faruk Šehić examines the political system in Bosnia and Herzegovina from a slightly different perspective. His collection of stories Under Pressure emphases the issue of pressure in the above war model of short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These stories are the product of pressure and anxiety, with intent to latently promote new ways of spiritual survival, directly relating to the concept and the theme of the story The Past Age Man by Christian Karlson Stead. Further analysis of the alienation theme singled out short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Plants are Something Else by Alma Lazarevska and Dialogues by Lamija Begagić, and pointed out their connection with some recent international short stories such as The Last Defence by Mahdi Šodžaija a contemporary Persian author who indicates the inappropriateness of spousal relations and the crisis of modern marriage. The alienation theme present in many short stories in Bosnia and Herzegovina also appears in a particularly impressive way in a short story Raggedy Africa by a Slovenian author Mark Švabič, which is clearly related to a short story The Seaside Fairy Tale by Miljenko Jergović from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Extremely interesting are the stories that suggest a crisis of legitimacy of culture and behavior, such as the story of Tito or Curriculum Vitae by a Slovenian writer Maja Novak, or Bankophobia by Ante Zirdum, demonstrating the individual culture of behavior and society in general in a regressive dimension manifested through addiction or phobia from banking institutions

Previous research on violence during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina has resulted in a one-sided presentation of the phenomenon of “war violence.” Researchers have emphasized the importance of narratives in general but have not analyzed stories on war violence that were the product of interpersonal interaction and meaning-making activity. The aim of this article is to fill this knowledge gap by analyzing survivor narratives of the 1990s war in northwestern Bosnia. The focus is on analyzing interviewees’ descriptions of wartime violence and the discursive patterns that contribute to constructing the phenomenon of “war violence.” My analysis reveals an intimate relationship between how an interviewee interprets the biographical consequences of war violence and the individual’s own war experiences. All interviewees described war violence as something that is morally reprehensible. These narratives, from both perpetrators of violence and those subjected to violence, recount violent situations that not only exist as mental constructions but also live on even after the war; thus, they have real consequences for the individuals and their society.

Nacionalna i univerzitetska biblioteka BiH pridružila se projektu Europeana 1914–1918 s ciljem obilježavanja stogodišnjice Prvog svjetskog rata. Projekat je podrazumijevao organizovanje Dana prikupljanja na koje su gra-đani BiH imali priliku donijeti priče, predmete, slike vezane za ove događaje i svojim uspomenama doprinijeti bogaćenju velikog panevropskog arhiva u svrhu očuvanja kulturno-historijskog naslijeđa. = National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the project Europeana 1914–1918 with the aim of celebration of the centenary from beginning of the World War I. The project implied the organization of Collection Days at which the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina had the opportunity to bring stories, objects, images related to World War I and with their memories contribute to enrichment of large pan-European archive for the preservation of cultural heritage.

Previous research on victimhood often presented a one-sided picture of the ?victim? and the ?perpetrator?. Researchers have emphasised the importance of narratives and they have focused on narratives about victimhood, but they have not analysed post-war interviews as an arena for the competition for gaining the status of victim. This paper tries to fill-in this gap through analysing stories of 27 survivors of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s. The paper aims at describing the interviewees? portrayal of ?victimhood? as a social phenomenon, as well as to analyse those discursive patterns, which contribute to constructing the categories of a ?victim? and a ?perpetrator?. The research question is: How do the interviewees describe victimhood after the war? Within the dynamics that constructs the status of a ?victim? and a ?perpetrator? a competition for the role of a victim is noticeable after the war. All interviewees are eager to present themselves as victims, while at the same time they diminish the victim status of other categories. This situation can produce and reproduce competition for gaining the status of a victim, and, in this way, to reinforce collective demarcations that were played out so successfully during the war.

AbstractPublic discourses about wars and mass violence are often dominated by questions of guilt and victimhood as well as a focus on the figures of ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’. This can also be observed concerning the public remembrance of the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, attempts were made here to promote the memory of another war-related figure: that of the rescuer who helped people ‘from the other side’. The author analyses these attempts at remembrance in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and places them within the context of global efforts to publicly acknowledge rescuers, in particular the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’.

Abstract This paper explores the possibilities provided by narrative interviewing for critically assessing claims of success regarding reconciliation policies in Brčko District, Bosnia-Herzegovina. More specifically, the paper argues that such claims of success are based on claims to expertise. Certain understandings of the harm, i.e., the inter-ethnic violence committed during the 1992–1995 war, and of the policies designed to address it, i.e., reconciliation policies based on a logic of multi-ethnic living, gain credence based on the supposed expertise of particular actors. However, knowledge of harm and of the impact of policies designed to address it is produced through the subjectivity of different actors’ positionalities, and therefore assumptions about the figure of “the expert” need to be unsettled. This paper explores the possibilities offered by narrative interviewing and analysis for bringing to the fore the complicated ways in which expertise is produced in certain places at certain times.

The article is based on the analyses of two photo-texts by young Polish photographers, Paweł Starzec and Łukasz Gniadek. Both artists show cultural landscapes in a ‘new topography’ style to tell stories about the war trauma of inhabitants of displayed areas. Makeshift by Starzec is dedicated to victims of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Under the Surface by Gniadek refers to Polish Jews history in Warsaw. Photographers present no visual signs of the bygone tragedy, however – through focusing on landscapes – they direct attention of the viewer to the drama of human loss. Remembering that, according to the title of Susan Sontag’s book, in photography we ‘regard the pain of Others’, I state that a view of pain does not have to be the main means used in visual narration on suffering. Paradoxically, it is a ‘view’ that blocks the empathy for the Other. Thus we need a non-view to understand the experience of those who suffer.

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 4, no. 2, “East European Feminisms, Part 1: The History of East European Feminisms,” eds. Maria Bucur and Krassimira Daskalova, 2020.Maria Bucur, The Nation’s Gratitude: World War I and Citizenship Rights in Interwar Romania, London: Routledge, 2022, vi–viii, 231 pp., $160.00 (hardback), $48.95 (ebook), ISBN: 978-0-367-74978-1.Sanja Ćopić and Zorana Antonijević, eds., Feminizam, aktivizam, politike: Proizvodnja znanja na poluperiferiji. Zbornik radova u čast Marine Blagojević Hughson (Feminism, activism, politics: Knowledge production in the semiperiphery. Collection in honor of Marina Blagojević Hughson), Belgrade: Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research (IKSI), 2021, 621 pp., ISBN: 978-86-80756-42-4.Krassimira Daskalova, Zhorzheta Nazarska, and Reneta Roshkeva, eds., Ot siankata na istoriata: Zhenite v bulgarskoto obshtestvo i kultura, volume 2, Izvori za istoriana na zhenite: Dnevnitsi, spomeni, pisma, beletristika (From the shadows of history: Women in Bulgarian society and culture, volume 2, Sources of women’s history: diaries, memoirs, letters, fiction), Sofi a: Sofi a University Press, 2021, 621 pp., BGN 30 (paperback), ISBN: 978-954-07-5180-1.Melissa Feinberg, Communism in Eastern Europe, New York: Routledge, 2022, 229 pp., $44.75 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8133-4817-9.Fabio Giomi, Making Muslim Women European: Voluntary Associations, Gender, and Islam in Post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia (1878–1941), Budapest: CEU Press, 2021, 420 pp., €88.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-963-386-369-5.Yulia Gradskova, The Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Global South and the Cold War: Defending the Rights of Women of the “Whole World”? London: Routledge, 2020, 222 pp. £29.59 (e-book), ISBN: 9781003050032.Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl and Oana Hergenröther, eds., Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging, Aging Studies, vol. 19, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2021, 386 pp., €45 (paperback), ISBN: 978-3-8376-4554-5.Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front During World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 528 pp., $34.95 (hardback), ISBN: 9780190618414.Oksana Kis, Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021, 652 pp., 78 color photos, 10 photos, €84.50 (hardback), ISBN: 9780674258280.Yelena Lembersky and Galina Lembersky, Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour: Memories of Soviet Russia, Boston: Cherry Orchard Books, 2022, 247 pp., $17.19 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-64469-669-9.Mihaela Miroiu, Povestiri despre Cadmav (Stories about Cadmav), Bucharest: Rocart, 2021, 270 pp., RON 31.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-606-95093-0-2.Mie Nakachi, Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, 352 pp., $39.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0190635138.Olga Todorova, Domashnoto robstvo i robovladenie v osmanska Rumelia (Domestic slavery and slave ownership in Ottoman Rumelia), Sofia: Gutenberg, 2021, 444 pp., BGN 30 (paperback), ISBN: 978-619-176-195-1.

The breakup of Yugoslavia turned into a violent civil war in Bosnia in the summer of 1991. The war did not begin as ethnic conflict, but ethnic traits were defined and collective memories were manipulated to mobilize people and to justify the violence between groups. In the case of Bosnian refugees, the questions concerning ethnicity and identity are especially important. The objective of this paper is to discuss the constitution ofthe refugee identity of an adolescent Bosnian girl in the context of exile. The research methods used were collection of refugee stories and participant observation. By collecting refugee stories, it is possible to examine the processes of identity constitution and the flexibility of identities.

There is a vivid interest in so-called epimilitary narratives of war that depart from heroic themes and zoom out from the armed forces. This article joins this direction by analyzing two variants of cultural narratives of the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina during the 1990s and the siege of Sarajevo: the videogame This War of Mine and Bosnian citizens’ personal stories told in qualitative interviews. Both variants portray war as an uncontrollable condition devoid of grand meanings, as an arena for survival skills and moral work rather than heroic deeds or moral tests, and as an object for detailed analysis rather than categorical positioning. To highlight this type of narrative across diverse manifestations may sensitize researchers to capture how the mundane and emotional content of war is articulated outside political scripts.

Reminiscences of the past and melancholic feelings have often been present in the literature of the diaspora, which illustrates the fact that the life of an immigrant has never been easy since s/he has to deal with many unfavourable circumstances. Immigrant identity cannot remain exactly the same after arrival in a new cultural milieu. Elements of the original identity may be lost or transformed into new forms. Old selves cannot be completely assimilated into the new cultural pattern. Apart from this, there are other obstacles, which are presented in a symbolic way in Goran Simić’s collection of short stories Yesterday’s People. This Canadian author of Serbian origin has compiled a dossier of Yugoslavian immigrants in Canada who left the country in the last decade of the twentieth century due to the horrors of the war in Bosnia. Since they emigrated in a tumultuous social climate when the foundations of the old cultural identity had been destabilized and called into question, they cannot deal in a productive way with a new phase of their life in the diaspora and find their purpose at the moment . Similarly, to his protagonists, Goran Simić was affected by the Bosnian conflict, but he has succeeded in reshaping himself in his new surroundings, reworking his memories in a creative way and integrating into Canadian literature as a writer. However, scarred and traumatized yesterday’s people in his stories cannot grapple successfully with the existential problems and their identity crises, and they are constantly wedged between the haunting past and the elusively better future. The aim of this paper is to discuss the possible problems at the “meeting point” between the discourses and practices which shaped immigrants’ identity in their native land and the processes which construct them as subjects in the present, by relying on Stuart Hall’s theoretical views in “Who needs an Identity”.

In July 2005, while European heads of state attended memorials to mark the ten year anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and court trials continued in The Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Bosnian-American artist Aida Sehovic presented the aftermath of this genocide on a day-to-day level through her art installation in memory of the victims of Srebrenica. Drawing on the Bosnian tradition of coming together for coffee, this installation, ‘Što te Nema?’ (Why are you not here?), comprised a collection of tiny white porcelain cups (‘fildzans’ in Bosnian) arranged in the geographic shape of Srebrenica in the lobby of the United Nations building in New York. It was to represent Europe’s worst mass killing since the Second World War, which took place in July 1995 in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys were killed when Bosnian Serb troops overran the internationally protected enclave (The Guardian). The cups were gathered from Bosnian families in the United States of America and Bosnia & Herzegovina, and in particular from members of ‘Zene Srebrenice’ (‘the women of Srebrenica’). Each of the 1,705 cups represented one exhumed, identified and re-buried victim of the Srebrenica genocide (1,705 at July 2005). The cups were filled either with coffee or, in the case of victims not yet 18 and therefore not old enough at the time of their death to have participated in the coffee tradition, with sugar cubes. The names and birth dates of the victims were recited on an audio loop. Genocide is the methodical destruction of the existence of a people. It is noted through the ‘UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ that genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity throughout history (UNHCHR). Tribunals, such as the ICTY, with their focus on justice, are formal and responsibility-based modes of responding to genocide. Society seeks justice, but raising awareness around genocide through the telling and hearing of the individual story is also required. Responding to genocide and communicating its existence through artistic expression has been a valuable way of bearing witness to such a horrendous and immense crime against humanity. Art can address the gaps in healing and understanding that cannot be addressed through tribunals. From Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, to the children’s pictures triggered by the Rwandan genocide, to the ‘War Rugs’ of Afghanistan and to vast installations such as Peter Eisenman’s recently opened Holocaust memorial in Berlin; art has proved a powerful medium for representing such atrocities and attempting to find healing after genocide. Artworks such as Sehovic’s ‘Što te Nema?’ give insight into the personal experience of genocide while challenging indifference and maintaining memory. For the affected communities, this addresses the impact on individuals; the human cost and the loss of everyday experiences. As Srebrenica survivor Emir Suljagic comments, “when you tell someone that 10,000 people died, they cannot understand or imagine that. What I want to say is that these people were peasants, car mechanics or masons. That they had daughters, mothers, that they leave someone behind; that a lot of people are hurt by this person’s death” (qtd. in Vulliamy). ‘Što te Nema?’ transmits this personal dimension of genocide by using an everyday situation of showing hospitality with family and friends, which is familiar and practised in most cultural experiences, juxtaposed with the loss of a family member who is missing as a result of genocide. This transmits the notion of genocide into the sphere of common experience, attachment and emotion. It acts as an invitation to explore the impact of genocide beyond the impersonal statistics and the aloof legalese of the courtroom drama. Beyond providing a representation of the facts or emotions around genocide, art provides a way of responding to a crime, which, by its nature, is generally difficult to comprehend. Art can offer a mode of giving testimony and providing catharsis about events which are not easily approached or discussed. As Sehovic says of ‘Što te Nema?’ (it) is a way of healing for Bosnians, coming to terms with this terrible thing that happened to us … it is building a bridge of understanding where Bosnian people are coming from, because it is very hard to talk about these things (qtd. in Vermont Quarterly Magazine). For its receiver, genocide art, with all its capacity to arouse our emotions and empathy, transmits something that we cannot see or engage with in the factual reporting of genocide or in a political analysis of the topic. Through art, it is possible to encounter genocide at an individual, personal level. As Mödersheim points out, we seem to need symbolic expressions to help us understand, and deal with the complex nature of events so horrific that reason and emotion fail to grasp their magnitude. To the intellect, many aspects of these experiences are unfathomable, and yet to keep our humanity we need to understand them … where words and explanations fail, we look for images (Mödersheim 18). An artist’s responses to genocide can vary from the need of survivors to create actual depictions of the atrocities, to more abstract portrayals of the emotional response to acts of genocide. Art that is created by survivors or witnesses to the genocide demonstrates a documentation and testament to what has occurred – a symbolic act of transmitting the personal experience of genocide. Artistic responses to genocide by those, such as Sehovic, who did not witness the event first hand, express how genocide “remains deeply felt to the point where we could not say it has ended” (Morris 329). Such art represents the continuation and global repercussions of genocide. The question of what ‘genocide art’ means to the neutral or removed viewer or society is also significant. Art is often associated with pleasure. Issues of mass killing and war are often not the types of topics one wishes to view on a trip to an art gallery. However, art has a more crucial function as a social reflector. It is often the reaction of non-acceptance of such artworks which indicates how society wishes to consider questions of genocide or of war in general. For example, Rayner Hoff’s 1932 war memorial ‘The Crucifixion of Civilisation 1914’ was rejected for display because it was considered too confronting and controversial in its depiction of a naked, tortured female victim of war in a Christ-like pose. As Picasso commented, “painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy” (qtd. in Mödersheim 15). In discussing the art that emerged from the Sierra Leone Civil War, Ross notes, “as our stomachs and hearts turn over at such sights, we get a small taste of what the artists felt. Even as we look at the images and experience the horror, disgust and anger that comes with knowing that they really happened, we realise that if these images are to be understood as reports from the field, serving the same function as photojournalism, it means that we have been sheltered from this type of reporting from our own news sources” (Ross 39). Here, art can address the often cursory acknowledgment given to ‘events which happen in faraway places’ and lend an insight into the personal. As Adorno notes, “history in artworks is not something made, and history alone frees the work from being merely something posited or manufactured” (133). Here we see the indivisibility of the genocide (the ‘history’) from the artwork – that what is seen is not mere ‘depiction’ but art’s ability to turn the anonymous statistics or the unknown genocide into the realisation of a brutal annihilation of individual human beings – to bring history to life as it were. What the viewer does after viewing such art is perhaps immaterial; the important thing is that they now know. But why is it important to know and important to remember? It has been argued that genocides which occurred in places like Srebrenica and Rwanda happened because the international community did not know or refused to recognise the events to the point of initially declining to apply the term ‘genocide’ to Srebrenica and settling for the more sanitised term ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Bringa 196). It would be nave and even condescending to argue that ‘Što te Nema?’ or any of the myriad other artistic responses to genocide have the possibility of undoing a genocide such as that which took place in Srebrenica, or even the hope of preventing another genocide. However, it is in transporting genocide into the personal realm that the message is transmitted and ignorance to the event can no longer be claimed. The concept of genocide can be too horrendous and vast to take in; art, whilst making it no less horrific, transmits the message to and confronts the viewer at a more direct and personal level. Such art provokes and provides a starting point for comment and debate. Art also stands as a lasting memorial to those who have lost their lives as a result of genocide and as a reminder to humanity that to ignore, underestimate or forget genocide makes possible its recurrence. References Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Bringa, Tone. “Averted Gaze: Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1995.” Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Ed: Alexander Hinton Laban. London: University of California Press, 2002. 194-225. Kohn, Rachael. “War Memorials, Sublime & Scandalous.” Radio National 14 August 2005. 12 December 2005 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/ark/stories/s1433477.htm>. Mödersheim, Sabine. “Art and War.” Representations of Violence: Art about the Sierra Leone Civil War. Ed. Chris Corcoran, Abu-Hassan Koroma, P.K. Muana. Chicago, 2004. 15-20. Morris, Daniel. “Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years.” American Jewish History 90.3 (September 2002): 329-331. Ross, Mariama. “Bearing Witness.” Representations of Violence: Art about the Sierra Leone Civil War. Ed. Chris Corcoran, Abu-Hassan Koroma, P.K. Muana. Chicago, 2004. 37-40. The Guardian. “Massacre at Srebrenica: Interactive Guide.” May 2005. 5 November 2005 http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,474564,00.html>. United Nations. “International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.” 10 January 2006 http://www.un.org/icty/>. UNHCHR. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” 1951. 3 January 2006 http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm>. Vermont Quarterly Magazine. “Cups of Memory.” Winter 2005. 1 December 2005 http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/vq/vqwinter05/aidasehovic.html>. Vulliamy, Ed. “Srebrenica Ten Years On.” June 2005. 10 February 2006 http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-yugoslavia/srebrenica_2651.jsp>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hawkes, Martine. "Transmitting Genocide: Genocide and Art." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/09-hawkes.php>. APA Style Hawkes, M. (Mar. 2006) "Transmitting Genocide: Genocide and Art," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/09-hawkes.php>.

In this article, we draw on feminist trauma studies with the aim of deconstructing the theoretical and methodological binary between individual and collective trauma. Based on first-hand interviews with Bosnian survivors of rape, we attempt to ‘think against’ the private/public split that trauma studies work often unintentionally reifies. We draw upon recent methodological innovations that have been influenced by thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Specifically, we work with what Jackson and Mazzei call rhizomatic and trace readings in the threshold. Through a rhizomatic and trace reading of narrative pieces extracted from the interviews, we engage with the following questions: 1) How do we theorise what Davoine and Gaudilliere call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines’ between collective/public accounts of trauma and those traditionally constructed as private/personal? 2) How do accounts of war rape, which narrate the eruption of the past into the present, elucidate the myriad links between the private and public in a number of ways; among others, the echoes or traces of the everyday ‘before’ in subjects’ stories of the monstrous ‘after’? And 3) What is the relationship between the ‘unspeakable’ in the traumatic memories of the survivors and the ‘speakable’ collective memories of traumatic humanmade events? How does the collective desire ‘not to know’ or ‘to forget’ impact on the individual survivor’s ability to reconstitute their post-trauma identity in a personal as well as a social context? The aim of the analysis is to show that the multifaceted nature of the traumatic reality demands a multifaceted approach that resists binary constructions relating to self/other, private/public, individual/collective.

Constructive stories of coexistence during protracted interethnic conflict are rare; however, they have important implications for interethnic reconciliation and peacemaking (Senehi, 2002). The events that took place in the village of Bavljinje highlight the humanity displayed by neighbors in the midst of ethnic cleansing. Such stories illustrate that positive relationships can prevail in interethnic warfare and can be an important source of healing form the trauma of violent ethnic conflict. The story of Bavljinje also indicates the complexity of intergroup conflict and the need of such powerful metaphors in the postconflict peacebuilding process.