![Sample our Geography journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5937/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Geography.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Relying on the biographical narrative Leila, a girl from Bosnia and the recorded narratives by adolescents born of wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina we illustrate the difficulties and symbolic implications associated with negotiating hybrid identities in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina against the dominant post-conflict discourse based on ‘pure’ ethnicities. We argue that in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, hybrid identities are marginalized by official politics and societal structures as a legacy of the war. However, they simultaneously embody the symbolic tools through which ethnic divisions could be overcome, envisioning and recalling a multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina as a supra-national designation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Tatjana Takševa is Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature and the Women and Gender Studies Program at Saint Mary’s University, Canada. She is a co-investigator on a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, ‘Children of the Enemy’: Narrative Constructions of Identity Following Wartime Rape and Transgenerational Trauma in Post-WWII Germany and Post-Conflict Bosnia. Her own ongoing research focuses on the rape camps on the territories of the former Yugoslavia during the recent war, enforced impregnation of women in the camps, children born of war rape and the mothering practices of women who are raising children born of rape on the territories of the former Yugoslavia. She has written on raising children born of wartime rape in post-conflict Bosnia and discourses of national identity on the Balkans. She is the editor of Mothers under fire: Mothers and mothering in conflict zones, with Arlene Sgoutas (Toronto: Demeter Press, 2015).
Agatha Schwartz is Full Professor of German literature and culture and world literatures and cultures at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests are nineteen to twenty-first-century Central European literature and culture, women's and gender studies and narratives of trauma. She is principal investigator on the project ‘Children of the Enemy’: Narrative Constructions of Identity Following Wartime Rape and Transgenerational Trauma in Post-WWII Germany and Post-Conflict Bosnia. Her publications include Shaking the empire, shaking patriarchy: The growth of a feminist consciousness across the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (with Helga Thorson; Ariadne Press, 2014); Gender and nation in Hungary since 1919 (special volume of the Hungarian Studies Review, co-edited with Judith Szapor, 2014), Gender and modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its legacy (University of Ottawa Press, 2010) and Shifting voices: Feminist thought and women’s writing in Fin-de-Siècle Austria and Hungary (Mcgill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). Her article ‘Narrating wartime rapes and trauma in a woman in Berlin’ was published in 2015 in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. The article ‘Creating a “vocabulary of rupture” following WWII sexual violence in Hungarian women writers’ narratives’ is forthcoming in Hungarian Cultural Studies in 2017.
Notes
1 League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez Komunista Jugoslavije) was the official name of the only political party in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
2 All translations from the German original by Agatha Schwartz.
3 Leila had also consented to be a witness at the Sarajevo trial of Iuvuz Begić, one of Fikret Abdić's henchmen in charge of a concentration camp in which Leila was held a prisoner and sexually assaulted for months at the age of 16.
4 Translated by Tatjana Takševa.
5 The overall unemployment rate in Bosnia and Herzegovina is over 40%, whereas the youth unemployment rate nears 60%.