The Central European Imaginary

Polish Sociol. Rev, 1994

Anthropology of Europe: identity and boundaries in …, 1994

Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, 2002

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

The Journal of Modern History, 2018

Nationalities Papers, 2018

Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2020

Starting with the 1990s a myriad of literary texts that tackle the Yugoslav wars have been published worldwide. Despite the wide variety of texts, scholars (Obradović, Pisac, Vervaet, Wachtel) have focused mainly on those written by ex-Yugoslav writers and on the representation of the former country in these books. This paper focuses on the aforementioned literary phenomenon – the representation of ex-Yugoslavia – from a broader perspective. My selection includes texts that originate in different geo-cultural areas. In this respect, the aim of this paper is to show that former Yugoslavia is not the only space represented in this cluster of texts. Other countries and cities, such as Germany, Ukraine, Amsterdam, or Shanghai, also play a significant role. I argue that the occurrence of these various spaces reveals a paradoxical pattern: the closer to ex-Yugoslavia the writer is or was, the more diverse the fictional spaces are, as well as vice versa. However, this geo-cultural diversity that defines post-Yugoslav migrant writers is constantly disregarded by critics, cultural journalists, and scholars, which is an indication of the hegemonic character of world literature.

Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees

Europeanisation as violence: Souths and Easts as method, 2025

Since the end of the Cold War, the post-Yugoslav region has figured prominently in international politics and research as a space of international intervention. Framed as a space in transition from socialism to market economy, from war to peace, and from non-alignment to Europeanisation, the region has been a target for a wide array of material and ideological interventions. These interventions have, essentially, cemented the region as both a pivotal and a marginal site in the so-called European geopolitical imagination. To varying degrees across the post-Yugoslav space, the EU has been at the forefront of such projects involving state-building and peace-building initiatives, support for civil society building and gender equality, cultural diplomacy, market deregulation and different forms of border security and cross-border cooperation. Critical scholars have long questioned the aggressive promotion of the EU mission civilisatrice that projects the EU as normative political trajectory and ideal of community for the post-Yugoslav space and South East Europe (SEE) more broadly (e.g. Horvat and Štiks, 2012; Majstorović, Vučkovac and Pepić, 2015; Kušić, Lottholz and Manolova, 2019). Crucially, this literature spotlights the different forms of epistemic violence through which Europeanisation proceeds in different, yet interconnected, ways: as a part of 'transition' narratives, as a never-ending return to Europe and in the making of region as a 'case study' and/ or testing ground for theories and policies made elsewhere. In this chapter, we propose to think about these processes as forms of slow violence intrinsic to Europeanisation, and we highlight how this literature can be useful for understanding processes and building solidarities in the many spaces where Europeanisation as violence unfolds. We are inspired by the work of Rob Nixon (2011) who coined the term 'slow violence' to understand the environmental harm of invisible and extended processed. In the context of East Europe, Alexander Vorbrugg (2022) expanded it to capture the slow deterioration and abandonment that, instead of spectacular dispossession, marks the postsocialist transition