How the Silence Sounded: Writing Trauma in Albanian and Post-Yugoslav Literatures

Abstract

This dissertation argues that trauma has become the primary lens for framing, reading, and understanding the literatures of Albania and the Yugoslav successor states after the collapse of state socialism. Focusing on writers from Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, and Croatia, I show that a diverse set of actors, operating at both the local and transnational level, produce and reproduce the hegemonic narrative that these countries’ past was uniquely violent and traumatic. By untangling the different ways writers were asked to testify to personal, collective and historical trauma, and the ways they refused to do so, I historicize this process and show that it depended on the mutually constitutive relationship of postsocialist national and collective memory construction in Albania and the former Yugoslavia, and on the introduction of each country’s contemporary literature to the international literary market.

At the end of the Cold War, a network of local and Western writers, translators, editors, publishers, and academics, together with memory institutions, politicians, and supranational entities like the European Union, perpetuated the idea that Albania and the Yugoslav successor states were nations fully traumatized by socialism and war. For local political and cultural elites, the narrative of trauma and victimhood—what I call traumatic exceptionalism—helped to disavow the socialist past, strengthen their power, and appeal to the West. For Western Europe and North America, the traumatic framework was effective in discrediting socialism and exerting political influence on these states during their transitional period. As a result, Albanian and post-Yugoslav writers faced intense pressures to testify to their trauma and perform a passive, apolitical victimhood.

My dissertation theorizes the subversive strategies that writers used to resist the traumatic framework and the generalization, ethnonationalism, and historical revisionism it promotes. I examine the multiple manifestations of refusals to testify in Ali Podrimja (1942-2012), Daša Drndić (1946-2018), David Albahari (1948-2023), and Luljeta Lleshanaku (1968 -). Their writing deals with systematic, large-scale violence, including the Second World War and the Holocaust, the repression of the Albanian population in Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav wars, and the authoritarianism of the Albanian dictatorship. The central method of resistance that I explore, which shapes the entire dissertation, is the use of silence as a strategy of subversion against the imperative to testify. My sustained engagement with silence illuminates other, related forms of resistance: the rejection of conventional narrative structures, the refusal to provide reconciliatory conclusions that redeem suffering, and a distinct move away from stories that function on a binary of victim and perpetrator.

I attend to the subversive silences and other forms of narrative disruption employed by these authors, and show that they do not adhere to the norms of victimhood that the traumatic framework designates for them. By resisting the externally imposed imperative to testify, these writers subvert the instrumentalization of trauma in service of homogenizing ethnonational narratives of history; challenge the memory standards imposed by world literature and the European Union; and through a lack of narrative reconciliation, prevent the overidentification of the reader with the victim, instead proposing a relation of implicated subjecthood. By making a claim for silence’s subversive possibilities, I model a method of reading postsocialist writers, and narratives of violence, that does not rely on the traumatic framework.