From Nowhere to Nowhere: Mapping Trajectories of Belonging within the Post Yugoslav Field

Abstract

This chapter is organized around two of the author’s childhood memories, both set in the immediate period following the disintegration of Yugoslavia. These memories are used as a blueprint for exploring memory practices of (non) belonging in a European context, focusing on the post-Yugoslav cultural and literary field. The chapter explores what it means to inhabit multiple marginal positions simultaneously and asks what there is to be gained from re-orienting these absences into a state of being multiply present. To do so, it draws on migrant and postcolonial literature, border studies, memory studies, post-socialist critique and, significantly, post-Yugoslav scholarly and literary discourses. It refers to examples of post-Yugoslav cultural production (art, literature, cultural critique) to explore how essentialist discourses are problematized precisely by invoking an essentialized (cartographic) image of Yugoslavia/the Balkans. In addition to this, the chapter explores the critical potential of displacement and peripherality by considering how existing at and within the borders of multiple spaces, histories and communities demands articulation and narration that might challenge hegemonic discourses of nationhood and belonging; it argues that these narratives perform opacity by way of fragmentation, repetition and non-linearity.