History and Remembrance in Three Post-Yugoslav Authors: Dubravka Ugrešic, Daša Drndic, and Aleksandar Zograf.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the multimedia works of three post-Yugoslav authors—Dubravka Ugrešić, Daša Drndić, and Aleksandar Zograf—against the historical background of Yugoslavia’s violent dissolution and the emergence of hegemonic nationalist narratives in Serbia and Croatia based, in large part, on the practice of historical revisionism, selective remembering of the past, and politically motivated myth-making. It argues that these works disrupt the dominant grammars of national memory by foregrounding rupture, fragment, and discontinuity, thereby refusing to structure the nation as a unitary and homogeneous ethnic community with a stable history. In this sense, these works also reveal the inherently constructed and fragmentary nature of national traditions, and hence their potential for transformation. Through a series of close readings, this study reveals these text as spaces of intersecting historical legacies—such as fascism, communism, and ethnic nationalism—that are critically recollected in the space of the present, as well as of emergent, textually and visually mapped geographies of immigration, exile, and transnational existence, appearing in the wake of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Drawing on the work of the Jewish-German philosopher Walter Benjamin, I view these works as textual and visual spaces of remembrance that gather the past, present, and future into a critical constellation. By rejecting the unity inherent in epic narrative connected, in particular, to the historiography in service of nation-building, these works make visible both the radical historical breaks, losses, and uneasy continuities which, in turn, call for new cultural forms of memory. On the one hand, the aesthetic transformation of traumatic historical experiences in these works allows for mourning and working through a difficult and blocked past. On the other hand, the recuperated and reworked, albeit fragmentary and unstable past, becomes a ground for a critique of the exclusionary and nationalist status quo and the concomitant emergence of civic consciousness.