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Books by Stijn Vervaet
Serbian translation by Adriana Zaharijević and Aleksandar Pavlović
Building upon recent developments in memory studies and transnational memory, this book offers a ... more Building upon recent developments in memory studies and transnational memory, this book offers a comparative analysis of Yugoslav Holocaust memory and its intersections with other forms of extreme violence, such as the suffering of the non-Jewish South-Slav population during World War II, the victims of Stalinist terror, and the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars. Drawing on a variety of sources, including (post-)Yugoslav Holocaust fiction, the author offers novel theoretical concepts that conceive of (traumatic) memory as non-competitive and foreground its capability to transcend the boundaries of the nation.
Papers by Stijn Vervaet
Ruthner, Clemens & Scheer, Tamara (Hsg.), Bosnien-Herzegowina und Österreich-Ungarn, 1878–1918. Annäherungen an eine Kolonie. Tübingen: Francke , 2018
Jan Gerber , Philipp Graf , Anna Pollmann (Hgg.) Geschichtsoptimismus und Katastrophenbewusstsein, 2022
Taking as a starting point the life and work of the Yugoslav Jewish legal expert Albert Vajs [Wei... more Taking as a starting point the life and work of the Yugoslav Jewish legal expert Albert Vajs [Weiss] (1905–1964), this paper focuses on three interconnected aspects of postwar Jewish life that together shed light on the ways in which Holocaust memory was articulated in the two first decades of socialist Yugo- slavia. As president of the Jewish Federation, Vajs played a crucial role and often took the lead in well-organized efforts to rebuild the Yugoslav Jewish community and to integrate it into the socialist state, to commemorate the country’s victims of the Holocaust in public space, to document war crimes conducted on Yugoslavia’s territory, including the genocide of its Jewish population, and to prosecute Nazi war criminals and perpetrators of the Holocaust. These efforts were defined by the dynamics and tensions between the necessity to articulate Jewish concerns within the dominant socialist par- adigm and the endeavor to carve out a space for Jewish specificity. The article argues that the relationship between the socialist state and its Jewish citizens cannot be reduced to top-down regulations, but was rather characterized by the active engagement of the Jewish community.
Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 2022
The essays in this thematic issue explore an important but often overlooked legacy of European mu... more The essays in this thematic issue explore an important but often overlooked legacy of European multilingualism and the various power asymmetries and ideological values that characterize it, namely the multilingual practices of ethno-linguistic groups on Europe's southeastern periphery. Although the European Union has in the past twenty years adopted legislation that explicitly celebrates and supports multilingualism, linguistic diversity and minority language rights, its language policy has received criticism for tending to rely on and embolden national standardizing language regimes (Gal 2006; Leech 2017; Mandić and Belić 2018). Indeed, the European focus on the protection of language diversity and language rights appears to reaffirm a static model of language in that it relies upon "the idea of a European polity based on the cooperation of distinct nation states" and upon related codified languages which can be traced back to ideologies of Romantic authenticity and Enlightenment universality (Leech 2017: 34-35; Gal 2011). Scholars of the EU's language and multilingualism policy found that the official discourses oscillate between highlighting traditional cultural values like diversity and the right to education in the speakers' first language on the one hand, and promoting economic values and ideologies on the other hand (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2011; Romaine 2013). Accordingly, the "ideal" European citizen is portrayed as a multilingual person whose linguistic repertoire comprises of at least one language intended "for business" (instrumental/universal value) and one language as mother tongue, used "for pleasure" (authenticity) (Gal 2011: 49). As such, EU language policy does not facilitate newly emerging in-between or
Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 2022
Most recent studies on multilingual writing deal with literature by first- or second-generation i... more Most recent studies on multilingual writing deal with literature by first- or second-generation immigrants. This article responds to debates about multilingual literature by examining the asymmetrical, historically-rooted multilingualism of minority groups in East-Central Europe. It does so by exploring linguistic diversity and its effects in the novels of the bilingual Serbian-Hungarian author Petar Milošević, novels that put the Serbian minority in Hungary centre stage. It is argued that Milošević’s prose fiction not only invites the reader to rethink the nature of script, standard language and cultural identity as historically contingent and multiply entangled, but also effectively refashions the cultural memory of the Serbian minority in Hungary. The novels’ broader relevance lies in their foregrounding of the minority’s cultural and linguistic doubleness, both in relation to the nation-state in which they live and to the external homeland. As such, they also potentially illuminate the position of other linguistic minorities in former Habsburg borderlands.
Charles Ivan Armstrong & Unni Langås (eds): Terrorizing Images. Trauma and Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter , 2020
Marčetić, Adrijana; Bojana Stojanović-Pantović, Vladimir Zorić & Dunja Dušanić (eds): Jugoslovenska književnost: prošlost, sadašnjost i budućnost jednog spornog pojma/Yugoslav Literature: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Notion. Beograd: Čigoja, 2019, 109-123. , 2019
Šarić, Ljiljana, and Mateusz-Milan Stanojević (eds): Metaphor, Nation and Discourse. (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, Vol. 82). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019, pp. 101–126., 2019
This chapter explores the use of metaphors in the column "Let's Safeguard Serbian" in the Serbian... more This chapter explores the use of metaphors in the column "Let's Safeguard Serbian" in the Serbian newspaper Politika in 2015. In this column, adherents of the standard language ideology offered advice about spelling, loanwords, and syntax as well as regarding the name of the language and preferred alphabet. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and metaphor analysis, I examine the link between prescriptivism and contemporary discourses on Serbian national identity. I argue that most metaphors appearing in texts that fall into "the complaint tradition" (Milroy and Milroy) do not reveal a clear-cut link between prescriptivism and nationalism. However, the complaint tradition also reactivates a rich repository of conventional(ized) metaphors and metonymies that reach back to Romanticism and have much more far-reaching implications ideologically.
Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe Edited by Vladimir Biti, 2017
Serbia joined the ITF (Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembra... more Serbia joined the ITF (Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research) in 2011. This resulted in increased institutional efforts to pay more attention to Holocaust education and commemoration. However, critics have observed that many of these state-supported initiatives use the Holocaust to conceal the state’s role as perpetrator or accomplice in mass war crimes and genocide committed during the Second World War and during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Against this backdrop, I discuss two recent Serbian Holocaust novels, Ivan Ivanji’s Man of Ashes (2006) and Zoran Penevski’s Less Important Crimes (2005), and Goran Paskaljević’s film When Day Breaks (2012). I argue that Holocaust memory in these works does not function as a ‘screen memory’ – one memory that covers up or suppresses other, undesired memories – but as a prism through which memories of the recent Yugoslav past as well as stories of present injustice, which the dominant political elites and mainstream society would prefer to forget or not to see, are filtered and brought to light. Ivanji, who is well acquainted with the politics of memory both in Germany and Serbia, also reflects critically upon the current globalization of Holocaust remembrance, thus providing feedback on the possibilities and limits of the memorial culture stimulated by the ITF.
Recent developments in memory studies show a shift from a concept of cultural memory as bound to ... more Recent developments in memory studies show a shift from a concept of cultural memory as bound to specific, often institutionalized memory sites to an understanding of cultural memory as an active engagement of actors in the present with the past. This evolution also has brought about an increased interest in the role of and interaction between different media, including those associated with popular culture, in processes of cultural remembering.
This article investigates the way in which popular culture from (the former) Yugoslavia in the 1950s–1960s and today performs cultural memory. Specifically, I explore how and to what effect comics author Aleksandar Zograf and neo-avant-garde painter Leonid Šejka incorporate discarded objects into their artwork. I argue, firstly, that by interrogating the link between material traces of the past, the affect(s) generated by objects, and the possibility of a genuine experience of the past, both artists create unexpected constellations between past and present. Secondly, I demonstrate that both artists show a profound affinity with literature, which is illustrated by their use of the figure of the double as well as of abundant intertextual and intermedial references and eventually leads to their blurring of the boundaries between visual art and literature.
Zograf’s and Šejka’s work not only shows us that popular culture can articulate serious theoretical questions (about cultural remembering, the cultural tradition, aesthetic value, the artistic imagination), it also revives age-old practices of collecting, cataloguing, and re-assembling as primordial artistic activities, equating the work of the artist to that of a demiurge.
Compared to Yugoslav culture, post-Yugoslav literature is perceived as utterly provincial by many... more Compared to Yugoslav culture, post-Yugoslav literature is perceived as utterly provincial by many critics. Using the example of work by Dubravka Ugrešić and Aleksandar Hemon, this paper explores how certain works of post-Yugoslav literature can nevertheless be read as " cosmopolitan literature. " I argue that both authors contribute to the " worlding " of (post-)Yugoslav literature(s) in a double sense. Dealing with issues of displacement and trauma, their work not only puts life stories from the former Yugoslavia on the map of the world but also deconstructs Western stereotypes about the region. Through a web of intertextual references, their work includes the literary and cultural legacy of the former Yugoslavia in the imaginary space of world literature, thus reclaiming the common Yugoslav cultural space.
The Long Shots of Sarajevo 1914, eds Vahidin Preljević & Clemens Ruthner, 2016
Clemens Ruthner & Vahidin Preljević (ur) Sarajevski dugi pucnji 1914. Događaj – narativ – pamćenje. Zenica: Vrijeme, 2015, str. 467-484.
This paper examines the way in which the memory of Young Bosnia and Gavrilo Princip has been medi... more This paper examines the way in which the memory of Young Bosnia and Gavrilo Princip has been mediated by the recent theater play Mali mi je ovaj grob (This Tomb is Too Small for Me, 2013) by contemporary Serbian playwright Biljana Srbljanović. In his close reading of the play, the author demonstrates that the play contains some striking, interrelated historical inconsistencies and points at the implications they have for the cultural memory of Young Bosnia. The three major inconsistencies discussed are: (1) the relation between Young Bosnia and Serbian colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević Apis; (2) the way in which the play connects the assassination of Franz Ferdinand with the assassination of Zoran Đinđić; and (3) the way in which the play understands the 'young' in Young Bosnia. It is argued that the main reason for the play's weaknesses lies in Srbljanović's attempt to make Princip and Young Bosnia fit her own views on Serbia's recent past and political history. However, in order to create such a usable past, Srbljanović inevitably had to gloss over many of Young Bosnia's ideological contradictions and ambiguities, and, in addition, conflated two extremely different historical contexts. In this respect, the play seems to illustrate that the way in which the past is being remembered in the present often reveals more about the current political views and collective self-fashioning of the group or society that remembers than about the past itself. Uvod U selu Tovariševu, stotinak kilometra severoistočno od Beograda, slavni filmski reditelj Emir Kusturica otkrio je 22. aprila 2014. bistu posvećenu Gavrilu Principu. Lokalni stanovnici, od kojih su neki vukli korene iz Principovog rodnog sela Bosanskog Grahova i doselili se u opštinu Bačka Palanka odmah iza Drugog svetskog rata (krajem 1945-početkom 1946), podigli su spomenik i pozvali Kusturicu da ga otkrije. U svom prigodnom govoru, Kusturica se prisetio da se most nazvan po Principu u njegovom rodnom Sarajevu nalazio svega nekoliko koraka od ulice Vojvode Stepe u kojoj se on rodio, ali da su, nažalost, poslednjih 2 godina i most i ulica promenili ime. Dodao je da je to i u Srbiji i u Crnoj Gori slučaj: "svaki grad od Bara do Subotice ima ulicu druga Tita, a posle dolaska demokratije i petooktobarskih promena, u Gornjem Milanovcu, jedan demokrata je odlučio da ukine ulicu koja je nosila ime Gavrila Principa, uz objašnjenje kako može, on, terorista, da ima ulicu." 1 Zaključio je da je to sramota, jer "da nije Gavrila, ne bi ni bilo moderne srpske države" 2 , nakon čega se, preplavljen emocijama, prekrstio i poljubio Principov bronzani obraz. Frojdovska omaška, u kojoj je zamenio Jugoslaviju Srbijom? Bilo kako bilo, Kusturičine reči pokazuju da je Princip postao ikona koja se, i sto godina nakon atentata na Franju Ferdinanda, tumači na najrazličitije načine i koja se upotrebljava da bi se potkrepile i najkontradiktornije istorijske tvrdnje. U ovom radu ću analizirati kako pozorišni komad Mali mi je ovaj grob savremene dramske spisateljice Biljane Srbljanović, čiji se politički pogledi podosta razlikuju od Kustiričinih 3 , doprinosi oblikovanju kulturnog pamćenja Mlade Bosne i Gavrila Principa danas. Opisan kao terorista od strane jednih, a kovan u zvezde od strane drugih, Princip je istorijska ličnost koja izaziva najkontradiktornije asocijacije. Kao što je to Robert Donia pokazao, Principovo nasleđe u Bosni i Hercegovini, a naročito u Sarajevu, nepredkidno se menja i oblikuje od samog kraja Prvog svetskog rata, tako da se može govoriti o svojevrsnom palimpsestu kojem svaki novi politički režim dodaje još jedan ideološki sloj. 4 Mali mi je ovaj grob Biljane Srbljanović može se smatrati još jednim slojem, odnosno, još jednim akterom/čimbenikom koji doprinosi oblikovanju kulturnog pamćenja Mlade Bosne i Principa. Štaviše, njen komad pokazuje da Principovo mesto u kulturnom pamćenju nije vezano samo za statičke spomenike već je kulturno pamćenje nešto što se velikim delom, a u ovom slučaju to je i bukvalno tako, (pro)izvodi interakcijom različitih medija (spomenika, istorijskih čitanki i studija, književnih tekstova, fotografija, filmova, proizvoda popularne kulture itd.) i aktera 1 Preradović, Lj.: Spomenici Principu i solunskim dobrovoljcima. U: Večernje novosti (21. April 2014), videti http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/drustvo/aktuelno.290.html:488306-Spomenici-Principu-i-solunskimdobrovoljcima, Mitrović, Miloš: Kusturica Reveals Monument to Gavrilo Princip. U: Independent Balkan News Agency (22 April 2014), videti http://www.balkaneu.com/kusturica-reveals-monument-gavrilo-princip/. 2 Isto. 3 Od kada se trajno preselio u Srbiju, Kusturica igra na (srpsku) nacionalističku kartu. Dok je tokom 2000-ih u Srbiji otvoreno podržavao političare desne orijentacije poput Vojislava Koštunice, poslednjih se godina zbližio s Miloradom Dodikom, premijerom Republike Srpske, koji mu je zauzvrat pružio značajnu logističku i finansijsku podršku za megalomanski projekat Andrićgrad u Višegradu. Srbljanović, s druge strane, profilisala se kao antinacionalistkinja bliska urbanim liberalno-demokratskim krugovima a 2008. je čak bila kandidatkinja za gradonačelnika Beograda na listi Liberalno-demokratske stranke Čedomira Jovanovića.
Comparative Critical Studies, 2011
Serbian translation by Adriana Zaharijević and Aleksandar Pavlović
Building upon recent developments in memory studies and transnational memory, this book offers a ... more Building upon recent developments in memory studies and transnational memory, this book offers a comparative analysis of Yugoslav Holocaust memory and its intersections with other forms of extreme violence, such as the suffering of the non-Jewish South-Slav population during World War II, the victims of Stalinist terror, and the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars. Drawing on a variety of sources, including (post-)Yugoslav Holocaust fiction, the author offers novel theoretical concepts that conceive of (traumatic) memory as non-competitive and foreground its capability to transcend the boundaries of the nation.
Ruthner, Clemens & Scheer, Tamara (Hsg.), Bosnien-Herzegowina und Österreich-Ungarn, 1878–1918. Annäherungen an eine Kolonie. Tübingen: Francke , 2018
Jan Gerber , Philipp Graf , Anna Pollmann (Hgg.) Geschichtsoptimismus und Katastrophenbewusstsein, 2022
Taking as a starting point the life and work of the Yugoslav Jewish legal expert Albert Vajs [Wei... more Taking as a starting point the life and work of the Yugoslav Jewish legal expert Albert Vajs [Weiss] (1905–1964), this paper focuses on three interconnected aspects of postwar Jewish life that together shed light on the ways in which Holocaust memory was articulated in the two first decades of socialist Yugo- slavia. As president of the Jewish Federation, Vajs played a crucial role and often took the lead in well-organized efforts to rebuild the Yugoslav Jewish community and to integrate it into the socialist state, to commemorate the country’s victims of the Holocaust in public space, to document war crimes conducted on Yugoslavia’s territory, including the genocide of its Jewish population, and to prosecute Nazi war criminals and perpetrators of the Holocaust. These efforts were defined by the dynamics and tensions between the necessity to articulate Jewish concerns within the dominant socialist par- adigm and the endeavor to carve out a space for Jewish specificity. The article argues that the relationship between the socialist state and its Jewish citizens cannot be reduced to top-down regulations, but was rather characterized by the active engagement of the Jewish community.
Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 2022
The essays in this thematic issue explore an important but often overlooked legacy of European mu... more The essays in this thematic issue explore an important but often overlooked legacy of European multilingualism and the various power asymmetries and ideological values that characterize it, namely the multilingual practices of ethno-linguistic groups on Europe's southeastern periphery. Although the European Union has in the past twenty years adopted legislation that explicitly celebrates and supports multilingualism, linguistic diversity and minority language rights, its language policy has received criticism for tending to rely on and embolden national standardizing language regimes (Gal 2006; Leech 2017; Mandić and Belić 2018). Indeed, the European focus on the protection of language diversity and language rights appears to reaffirm a static model of language in that it relies upon "the idea of a European polity based on the cooperation of distinct nation states" and upon related codified languages which can be traced back to ideologies of Romantic authenticity and Enlightenment universality (Leech 2017: 34-35; Gal 2011). Scholars of the EU's language and multilingualism policy found that the official discourses oscillate between highlighting traditional cultural values like diversity and the right to education in the speakers' first language on the one hand, and promoting economic values and ideologies on the other hand (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2011; Romaine 2013). Accordingly, the "ideal" European citizen is portrayed as a multilingual person whose linguistic repertoire comprises of at least one language intended "for business" (instrumental/universal value) and one language as mother tongue, used "for pleasure" (authenticity) (Gal 2011: 49). As such, EU language policy does not facilitate newly emerging in-between or
Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 2022
Most recent studies on multilingual writing deal with literature by first- or second-generation i... more Most recent studies on multilingual writing deal with literature by first- or second-generation immigrants. This article responds to debates about multilingual literature by examining the asymmetrical, historically-rooted multilingualism of minority groups in East-Central Europe. It does so by exploring linguistic diversity and its effects in the novels of the bilingual Serbian-Hungarian author Petar Milošević, novels that put the Serbian minority in Hungary centre stage. It is argued that Milošević’s prose fiction not only invites the reader to rethink the nature of script, standard language and cultural identity as historically contingent and multiply entangled, but also effectively refashions the cultural memory of the Serbian minority in Hungary. The novels’ broader relevance lies in their foregrounding of the minority’s cultural and linguistic doubleness, both in relation to the nation-state in which they live and to the external homeland. As such, they also potentially illuminate the position of other linguistic minorities in former Habsburg borderlands.
Charles Ivan Armstrong & Unni Langås (eds): Terrorizing Images. Trauma and Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter , 2020
Marčetić, Adrijana; Bojana Stojanović-Pantović, Vladimir Zorić & Dunja Dušanić (eds): Jugoslovenska književnost: prošlost, sadašnjost i budućnost jednog spornog pojma/Yugoslav Literature: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Notion. Beograd: Čigoja, 2019, 109-123. , 2019
Šarić, Ljiljana, and Mateusz-Milan Stanojević (eds): Metaphor, Nation and Discourse. (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, Vol. 82). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019, pp. 101–126., 2019
This chapter explores the use of metaphors in the column "Let's Safeguard Serbian" in the Serbian... more This chapter explores the use of metaphors in the column "Let's Safeguard Serbian" in the Serbian newspaper Politika in 2015. In this column, adherents of the standard language ideology offered advice about spelling, loanwords, and syntax as well as regarding the name of the language and preferred alphabet. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and metaphor analysis, I examine the link between prescriptivism and contemporary discourses on Serbian national identity. I argue that most metaphors appearing in texts that fall into "the complaint tradition" (Milroy and Milroy) do not reveal a clear-cut link between prescriptivism and nationalism. However, the complaint tradition also reactivates a rich repository of conventional(ized) metaphors and metonymies that reach back to Romanticism and have much more far-reaching implications ideologically.
Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe Edited by Vladimir Biti, 2017
Serbia joined the ITF (Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembra... more Serbia joined the ITF (Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research) in 2011. This resulted in increased institutional efforts to pay more attention to Holocaust education and commemoration. However, critics have observed that many of these state-supported initiatives use the Holocaust to conceal the state’s role as perpetrator or accomplice in mass war crimes and genocide committed during the Second World War and during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Against this backdrop, I discuss two recent Serbian Holocaust novels, Ivan Ivanji’s Man of Ashes (2006) and Zoran Penevski’s Less Important Crimes (2005), and Goran Paskaljević’s film When Day Breaks (2012). I argue that Holocaust memory in these works does not function as a ‘screen memory’ – one memory that covers up or suppresses other, undesired memories – but as a prism through which memories of the recent Yugoslav past as well as stories of present injustice, which the dominant political elites and mainstream society would prefer to forget or not to see, are filtered and brought to light. Ivanji, who is well acquainted with the politics of memory both in Germany and Serbia, also reflects critically upon the current globalization of Holocaust remembrance, thus providing feedback on the possibilities and limits of the memorial culture stimulated by the ITF.
Recent developments in memory studies show a shift from a concept of cultural memory as bound to ... more Recent developments in memory studies show a shift from a concept of cultural memory as bound to specific, often institutionalized memory sites to an understanding of cultural memory as an active engagement of actors in the present with the past. This evolution also has brought about an increased interest in the role of and interaction between different media, including those associated with popular culture, in processes of cultural remembering.
This article investigates the way in which popular culture from (the former) Yugoslavia in the 1950s–1960s and today performs cultural memory. Specifically, I explore how and to what effect comics author Aleksandar Zograf and neo-avant-garde painter Leonid Šejka incorporate discarded objects into their artwork. I argue, firstly, that by interrogating the link between material traces of the past, the affect(s) generated by objects, and the possibility of a genuine experience of the past, both artists create unexpected constellations between past and present. Secondly, I demonstrate that both artists show a profound affinity with literature, which is illustrated by their use of the figure of the double as well as of abundant intertextual and intermedial references and eventually leads to their blurring of the boundaries between visual art and literature.
Zograf’s and Šejka’s work not only shows us that popular culture can articulate serious theoretical questions (about cultural remembering, the cultural tradition, aesthetic value, the artistic imagination), it also revives age-old practices of collecting, cataloguing, and re-assembling as primordial artistic activities, equating the work of the artist to that of a demiurge.
Compared to Yugoslav culture, post-Yugoslav literature is perceived as utterly provincial by many... more Compared to Yugoslav culture, post-Yugoslav literature is perceived as utterly provincial by many critics. Using the example of work by Dubravka Ugrešić and Aleksandar Hemon, this paper explores how certain works of post-Yugoslav literature can nevertheless be read as " cosmopolitan literature. " I argue that both authors contribute to the " worlding " of (post-)Yugoslav literature(s) in a double sense. Dealing with issues of displacement and trauma, their work not only puts life stories from the former Yugoslavia on the map of the world but also deconstructs Western stereotypes about the region. Through a web of intertextual references, their work includes the literary and cultural legacy of the former Yugoslavia in the imaginary space of world literature, thus reclaiming the common Yugoslav cultural space.
The Long Shots of Sarajevo 1914, eds Vahidin Preljević & Clemens Ruthner, 2016
Clemens Ruthner & Vahidin Preljević (ur) Sarajevski dugi pucnji 1914. Događaj – narativ – pamćenje. Zenica: Vrijeme, 2015, str. 467-484.
This paper examines the way in which the memory of Young Bosnia and Gavrilo Princip has been medi... more This paper examines the way in which the memory of Young Bosnia and Gavrilo Princip has been mediated by the recent theater play Mali mi je ovaj grob (This Tomb is Too Small for Me, 2013) by contemporary Serbian playwright Biljana Srbljanović. In his close reading of the play, the author demonstrates that the play contains some striking, interrelated historical inconsistencies and points at the implications they have for the cultural memory of Young Bosnia. The three major inconsistencies discussed are: (1) the relation between Young Bosnia and Serbian colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević Apis; (2) the way in which the play connects the assassination of Franz Ferdinand with the assassination of Zoran Đinđić; and (3) the way in which the play understands the 'young' in Young Bosnia. It is argued that the main reason for the play's weaknesses lies in Srbljanović's attempt to make Princip and Young Bosnia fit her own views on Serbia's recent past and political history. However, in order to create such a usable past, Srbljanović inevitably had to gloss over many of Young Bosnia's ideological contradictions and ambiguities, and, in addition, conflated two extremely different historical contexts. In this respect, the play seems to illustrate that the way in which the past is being remembered in the present often reveals more about the current political views and collective self-fashioning of the group or society that remembers than about the past itself. Uvod U selu Tovariševu, stotinak kilometra severoistočno od Beograda, slavni filmski reditelj Emir Kusturica otkrio je 22. aprila 2014. bistu posvećenu Gavrilu Principu. Lokalni stanovnici, od kojih su neki vukli korene iz Principovog rodnog sela Bosanskog Grahova i doselili se u opštinu Bačka Palanka odmah iza Drugog svetskog rata (krajem 1945-početkom 1946), podigli su spomenik i pozvali Kusturicu da ga otkrije. U svom prigodnom govoru, Kusturica se prisetio da se most nazvan po Principu u njegovom rodnom Sarajevu nalazio svega nekoliko koraka od ulice Vojvode Stepe u kojoj se on rodio, ali da su, nažalost, poslednjih 2 godina i most i ulica promenili ime. Dodao je da je to i u Srbiji i u Crnoj Gori slučaj: "svaki grad od Bara do Subotice ima ulicu druga Tita, a posle dolaska demokratije i petooktobarskih promena, u Gornjem Milanovcu, jedan demokrata je odlučio da ukine ulicu koja je nosila ime Gavrila Principa, uz objašnjenje kako može, on, terorista, da ima ulicu." 1 Zaključio je da je to sramota, jer "da nije Gavrila, ne bi ni bilo moderne srpske države" 2 , nakon čega se, preplavljen emocijama, prekrstio i poljubio Principov bronzani obraz. Frojdovska omaška, u kojoj je zamenio Jugoslaviju Srbijom? Bilo kako bilo, Kusturičine reči pokazuju da je Princip postao ikona koja se, i sto godina nakon atentata na Franju Ferdinanda, tumači na najrazličitije načine i koja se upotrebljava da bi se potkrepile i najkontradiktornije istorijske tvrdnje. U ovom radu ću analizirati kako pozorišni komad Mali mi je ovaj grob savremene dramske spisateljice Biljane Srbljanović, čiji se politički pogledi podosta razlikuju od Kustiričinih 3 , doprinosi oblikovanju kulturnog pamćenja Mlade Bosne i Gavrila Principa danas. Opisan kao terorista od strane jednih, a kovan u zvezde od strane drugih, Princip je istorijska ličnost koja izaziva najkontradiktornije asocijacije. Kao što je to Robert Donia pokazao, Principovo nasleđe u Bosni i Hercegovini, a naročito u Sarajevu, nepredkidno se menja i oblikuje od samog kraja Prvog svetskog rata, tako da se može govoriti o svojevrsnom palimpsestu kojem svaki novi politički režim dodaje još jedan ideološki sloj. 4 Mali mi je ovaj grob Biljane Srbljanović može se smatrati još jednim slojem, odnosno, još jednim akterom/čimbenikom koji doprinosi oblikovanju kulturnog pamćenja Mlade Bosne i Principa. Štaviše, njen komad pokazuje da Principovo mesto u kulturnom pamćenju nije vezano samo za statičke spomenike već je kulturno pamćenje nešto što se velikim delom, a u ovom slučaju to je i bukvalno tako, (pro)izvodi interakcijom različitih medija (spomenika, istorijskih čitanki i studija, književnih tekstova, fotografija, filmova, proizvoda popularne kulture itd.) i aktera 1 Preradović, Lj.: Spomenici Principu i solunskim dobrovoljcima. U: Večernje novosti (21. April 2014), videti http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/drustvo/aktuelno.290.html:488306-Spomenici-Principu-i-solunskimdobrovoljcima, Mitrović, Miloš: Kusturica Reveals Monument to Gavrilo Princip. U: Independent Balkan News Agency (22 April 2014), videti http://www.balkaneu.com/kusturica-reveals-monument-gavrilo-princip/. 2 Isto. 3 Od kada se trajno preselio u Srbiju, Kusturica igra na (srpsku) nacionalističku kartu. Dok je tokom 2000-ih u Srbiji otvoreno podržavao političare desne orijentacije poput Vojislava Koštunice, poslednjih se godina zbližio s Miloradom Dodikom, premijerom Republike Srpske, koji mu je zauzvrat pružio značajnu logističku i finansijsku podršku za megalomanski projekat Andrićgrad u Višegradu. Srbljanović, s druge strane, profilisala se kao antinacionalistkinja bliska urbanim liberalno-demokratskim krugovima a 2008. je čak bila kandidatkinja za gradonačelnika Beograda na listi Liberalno-demokratske stranke Čedomira Jovanovića.
Comparative Critical Studies, 2011
Slavic and East European Journal, 55.2 (Summer 2011), pp. 161-187
In: Ben Dhooge & Thomas Langerak (eds): Belgian Contributions to the XV International Congress of Slavists. Minsk 2013. Amsterdam: Pegasus Oost-Europese Studies, 2013, pp. 191-208.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Vervaet Stijn, Mandić Marija, eds.] Thematic issue: Mapping Minority Multilingualism: Perspectives from Central and South-Eastern European Borderlands](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/95480722/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 67 (4) / Journal of Slavic Studies , 2022
The essays in this thematic issue explore an important but often overlooked legacy of European mu... more The essays in this thematic issue explore an important but often overlooked legacy of European multilingualism and the various power asymmetries and ideological values that characterize it, namely the multilingual practices of ethno-linguistic groups on Europe’s south-eastern periphery.
© Academia Press E e k h o u t 2 B -9 0 0 0 G e n t T ( + 3 2 ) ( 0 ) 9 2 3 3 8 0 8 8 F ( + 3 2 )... more © Academia Press E e k h o u t 2 B -9 0 0 0 G e n t T ( + 3 2 ) ( 0 ) 9 2 3 3 8 0 8 8 F ( + 3 2 ) ( 0 ) 9 2 3 3 1 4 0 9 i n f o @ a c a d e m i a p r e s s . b e w w w . a c a d e m i a p r e s s . b e Cover design: Gitte Callaert (Mis)Understanding the Balkans. Essays in Honour of Raymond Detrez Michel De Dobbeleer & Stijn Vervaet (eds.) Gent, Academia Press, 2013, 456 pp. ISBN 978 90 382 2267 7 D/2013/4804/275 U 2125
Memory in the Balkans has often been described as binding, authoritative, and non-negotiable, fun... more Memory in the Balkans has often been described as binding, authoritative, and non-negotiable, functioning as a banner of war. This book challenges such a one-dimensional representation and offers a more nuanced analysis that accommodates frequently ignored instances of transnational solidarity, dialogue, communal mourning and working through a difficult past. Exploring a broad range of memorial practices, the book focuses on the ways in which cultural memory is mediated, performed and critically reworked by literature and the arts in the former Yugoslavia. Against the methodological nationalism of works that study Serbian, Croatian, or Bosniak culture as self-contained, this book examines post-Yugoslav literature, film, visual culture, and politicized art practices from a supranational angle. Not solely focusing on traumatic memories, but also exploring how post-Yugoslav cultural practices mobilize memory for a politics of hope, this volume moves beyond the trauma paradigm that still dominates memory studies. In its scope and approach, the book shows the relevance of the cultural memory of Eastern European citizens and the contribution they can offer to the building of Europe’s shared cultural memory and transnational identity.
The material turn in the philologies has made us aware that a main characteristic in manuscript c... more The material turn in the philologies has made us aware that a main characteristic in manuscript cultures is variance in almost any aspect of a text, spanning from language and orthography to structure and content, as well as production and reception processes. Both in historically oriented disciplines (new philology) and in literary studies (genetic criticism), these insights have led to a reevaluation of the manuscript as a fluid text. Cognitive theory, on the other hand, reminds us that the mind is embedded, embodied, enactive and extended (4E cognition), giving us conceptual tools to link the materiality of a manuscript to the creative minds of the agents engaging in various types of writing and reading processes.
In this workshop, we invite speakers to discuss textual and material variations in manuscripts, in connection to creativity and cognition.
See final program.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the layering of different, usually conflicting political maps on e... more In Central and Eastern Europe, the layering of different, usually conflicting political maps on each other often led to the re-framing of geographical space and to the traumatic displacement of its inhabitants. This political re-mapping not only created various exchanges between languages and cultures, accompanied by different power asymmetries and implicit or explicit hierarchies, it also produced bilingual authors with a specific multilingual self-awareness. This seminar will look into literary multilingualism as a historically rooted phenomenon in Central and Eastern Europe, explore its politics and poetics, and ask how the study of this literature can generate new theoretical and methodological insights relevant to current debates about world literature, literariness, and translatability.
We invite papers on:
-Philology and multilingualism; sociolinguistic approaches to multilingual literature
-Multilingual literature and transnationalism, histories and legacies of empire
-Multilingualism and literary modernism
- Multilingual literature and debates about world literature; the tension between multilingual works and monolingual national literary canons; notions of (un)translatability
-The bilingualism of minority literatures
-The poetics of accents, dialects, regionalisms in literature
-Gender and ethnic aspects of the production, circulation, and interpretation of multilingual literature
-The bilingual author and cognition: bilingualism and emotions, self-translation
Please submit your abstract through the ACLA web portal by 31 October: https://www.acla.org/ annual-meeting
If you would have any questions, do not hesitate to contact monika.danel@ilos.uio.no and stijn.vervaet@ilos.uio.no.
In Habsburg-ruled SouthEastern Europe, multilingual and multiethnic societies were a historical r... more In Habsburg-ruled SouthEastern Europe, multilingual and multiethnic societies were a historical reality for centuries, due to the diverse ethnic and linguistic composition of the region and the language policy of the Habsburg Monarchy. However, by the end of the 19th century, the rich formal and informal practices of multilingualism that had existed until then came under pressure of monolingual tendencies promoted by national movements. These tendencies became only stronger after the collapse of the Monarchy in 1918 and the creation of new national borders. Many multilingual practices either ceased to exist or were transformed and re-emerged in different guises, resisting the homogenizing and segregating policy of the nation-states. This panel aims to investigate multilingualism as imperial legacy in SouthEastern Europe in its diachronic and synchronic dimension, with particular emphasis on the Imperial border regions, e.g. Istria, the Italian-Slovene-Austrian region, Slavonia, Vojvodina, and Transylvania. We also welcome papers on minority communities situated in the central parts of the Monarchy which established transnational networks with co-ethnics in the borderlands. The panel will consider, among other things, multilingual policies, how multilingual practices were situated in everyday experience, as well as perceptions and cultural expressions of multilingualism among local communities in the region since 1918. We invite papers exploring one or more of the following issues: (1) Diachronic developments: language policy in the Habsburg Empire and in its SouthEastern European successor states; memories of multilingual practices in the region (approaches from oral history, anthropology, cultural memory studies) (2) Synchronic developments in post-Habsburg borderlands and communities: lived practices of multilingualism today as related to current legislation, language rights and minority rights, multilingualism in education, discourses of multilingualism in the region (3) Literary works and journals from the post-Habsburg borderlands that challenge the dominant monocultural and monolingual paradigm of the nation-state; forms of bilingual writing; representations of multilingualism in the work of minority writers or migrant writers from the region Please send your abstract and brief cv to stijn.vervaet@ilos.uio.no and marija.mandic@bi.sanu.ac.rs by 22 September.
Workshop “Memories of Empire: Continuities and Discontinuities of the Habsburg Monarchy’s Transna... more Workshop “Memories of Empire: Continuities and Discontinuities of the Habsburg Monarchy’s Transnational and Multilingual Legacy”
17-18 September 2018, University of Oslo (UiO)
organized by Prof. Stijn Vervaet and Dr. Marija Mandic
Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 2019
This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies, symbols, cultural mo... more This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies, symbols, cultural models, stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical, monomodal and multimodal discourses, including politicians’ discourse, presidential speeches, newspapers, TV series, Catholic homilies, colonialist discourse, and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science, international relations, cultural studies, and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor, with clear sociocultural grounding, and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, metaphor studies, media studies, nationalism studies, and political science.
Bosnien-Herzegowina und Österreich-Ungarn: Annäherungen an eine Kolonie (Hrsg.), 2018
The material turn in the philologies has made us aware that a main characteristic of manuscript c... more The material turn in the philologies has made us aware that a main characteristic of manuscript culture is the book's materiality and visuality. Such material and visual aspects may range from illuminations and drawings to colored, decorated or illuminated initials, from titles and rubrics to marginal annotations, remarks, doodles and scribbles, from various fonts, sizes and colors of the writing, to abbreviation signs and punctuation, among others. The relationship between image and text varies in manuscripts produced in different cultures and periods, but this interplay is always central and illustrative of both the production process and meaning-making reception of the text. In this workshop, we invite speakers to discuss the relationship between image and text in manuscripts from various periods and cultures, in connection to production and cognitive engineering, and meaningmaking and interpretation.