The novel "The World and All That it Holds" was published in its English original in 2023. As in other stories of his, the transnational author Aleksandar Hemon lets his protagonist travel to and ...between Sarajevo and Chicago: Starting from "The Question with Bruno" and "Nowhere Man" to "The Lazarus Project", that all work with bricolage techniques and mix docufiction with migration, up to one-dimensional autobiographical depictions such as "My Parents: An Introduction/This Docs Not Belong to You", Hemon's novels are always set along the Sarajevo-Chicago axis and in their own world of experience." However, there are some surprising topics in Hemon's newest novel, including the global route and the hero's intense mullilingualism. Here, VoB describes Hemon's technique of reproducing the premodern multilingualism of Sarajevo before 1914 and try to open up its literary field.
This essay encounters Aleksander Hemon’s Nowhere Man (2002) in light of Bosnian War refugee Jozef Pronek’s geocorporeality: the extent to which issues of geopolitical consequence are inscribed onto ...his body as well as the bodies of those who desire him. In evoking Peter Brooks as a precedent for reading erotic desire alongside narrative desire, I argue that Nowhere Man’s fraught representations of sexuality function as a critique of teleological literary genres as an untenable means of telling Pronek’s story. For example, in conflating the nostalgia of the Bildungsroman with masturbatory nationalism, the novel suggests that the narrative desires of the genre are proto-fascistic. Likewise, in adopting the voyeuristic gaze of the American travel writer, the novel exposes the reader’s potential to orientalize Pronek. To conclude, I demonstrate how the narrator achieves a level of narrative-sexual intimacy with Pronek that mirrors the intersubjective suspension of the self that occurs while reading.
Letters to nowhere Tanović, Una
Language and dialogue,
03/2022, Volume:
12, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
In her study of epistolarity and world literature,
Bower (2017)
observes that letters “travel easily” and so are an obvious form for writing about migration and transnational dialogue. From ...another perspective, however, the epistolary may contain an empty promise: letters, after all, are sometimes waylaid or mislaid, unsent or undeliverable. This paper investigates the epistle and epistolary conventions in two short stories by US migrant writers – Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” (1993) and Aleksandar Hemon’s “A Coin” (1997) – in which dialogue across national borders is made impossible under extreme political circumstances. I argue that Danticat and Hemon undermine the dialogic writing that is a basic generic epistolary convention to caution against ignoring asymmetries of power in situations of forced migration.
Introduction Hicks, Jim
The Massachusetts review,
04/2017, Volume:
58, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
On the one hand, from the early origins of Ayurvedic medicine to today, some psychologists have believed that basic temperament tends to remain unchanged, even in the worst of times: optimists in ...concentration camps still look on the sunny side, sour-minded cynics winning Nobel Prizes doubt their efforts have done any good, etc., etc. ...in 1944, H. G. Wells penned a paper on the "illusion of personality," arguing that the very idea of individuality (with its root meaning of indivisibility) was simply a "biologically convenient delusion." ...given the mess we've made of this planet (which may already be beyond repair), the very question may soon be moot. Elsewhere, with his typical mix of surrealism and science, Daniele Del Giudice's short fiction (ably translated by Anne Milano Appel), "Shipwreck with Painting" takes the crossing between art and catastrophe as its point of origin.
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The Right to See In his study, Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985), British Caribbean writer David Dabydeen draws attention to the multiplicity of black ...figures in 18thcentury English paintings. In so doing, Dabydeen's texts question how images and the archives that contain them produce visibility, suggesting that visibility is produced by an assemblage of discourses, media and norms, which are complicit with power structures. ...the postcolonial and transcultural novels at the heart of this essay partake in the visual turn that Cara L. Lewis (2019) deems characteristic of many contemporary novels - she names, amongst others, the works of W.G. Sebald, Ali Smith, Aleksandar Hemon and Ben Lerner as examples. Yet, they give the visual turn a more specific, namely politicized twist, by highlighting the power of images to construe world-views, produce visibility and organize sociality (cf. ...understood, the regime of visibility, prefigured by visual archives, is akin to Judith Butler's concept of frames. An increasing number of scholars as well as novelists recognize the importance of visuality in negotiating constructions of knowledge and identity (Neumann 2015, 2023; Cole 2016). ...word-image configurations have the potential to question epistemologies saturated with power relations; they help to reassess critically the working of archives and ratified narratives of the past, thus opening the way for telling other stories, stories of an unofficial nature that grant recognition of colonial pasts and what has come in their wake.
This article focuses on Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon’s two 2019 memoirs published in one volume, My Parents: An Introduction and This Does Not Belong to You. Specifically, it applies Rosi ...Braidotti’s notion of nomadic memory to Hemon’s telling of his and his family’s life stories. Analyzed with the tools provided by critical posthumanism, Hemon’s nonfiction becomes an example of remembering in what Braidotti calls a minority-mode. He presents the migrant as a subject-in-becoming, belonging to their community thanks to the workings of a transgenerational, nonlinear memory, operating in a time continuum where stable identities are deterritorialized and creative ways to access an unavailable past are generated. In Hemon’s writing, identity is rooted in concentric homelands, and the truth of the memory resides in the affects it provokes and sustains. Opposing the static authority of the past and any fixed notion of the self, Hemon understands the past as a cultural practice deposited in bodies and rituals, as a home apparently beyond reach to which the migrant reconnects through the resources of the imagination.
Bosnian‐American author Aleksandar Hemon is a self‐described diasporic writer interested in questions of identity, displacement, and exile. This article proposes an approach to the Hemonian displaced ...character based on two of the most influential conceptualisations of contemporary subjectivity: on the one hand, Rosi Braidotti's critical posthuman subject, a nomadic, multiple subject who embodies complexity, favours a dynamic notion of relationality, opposes the view of difference as inferiority, and embraces a situated and accountable perspective. On the other, Nicolas Bourriaud's radicant subject, a wanderer caught between an urge to connect with the other and the forces of dislocation and removal, between individuality and the standardisation enforced by globalisation, between exchange and imposition, between enrooting and uprooting. In Hemon, subject and city are essential constituents of an elaborate system—aimed at fostering bonding and building community—which has been damaged by forced migration and violence. The insistence with which the subject's process of becoming is grounded in an urban context invites a topopoetic reading of Hemon's fiction and nonfiction. The obsessive description of the war‐ravaged architecture of besieged Sarajevo turns home into what Maria Tumarkin calls a ‘traumascape’, a place marked by violence and loss. Meanwhile, Chicago is the non‐place that the refugee is forced to shape into a narrative space in order to build a human network and a personal infrastructure—what Hemon terms ‘a geography of the soul’. Ultimately, the phenomenological approach to the sensory experiences and material practices of the displaced person reveals how their predicament adds new meanings to urban wandering and the construction and appropriation of the city from below. The human and the urban are seen as operating in a complex network of interconnections and interdependencies, generating an ongoing state of encounter that allows Hemon and his characters to feel ‘placed’, both physically and metaphysically.
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In the present transnational world populated with transmigrants, food and foodways have assumed a new, hybrid role. In the process of transformation of transmigrant cultural identity of which food ...and foodways are a central element, the production and consumption of food that is often the result of Svetlana Boym’s reflective nostalgia, may act as a bridge between the homeland and the host land as a material means for maintaining ties with the home country. However, while transmigrant food can assume an inclusive function in their exilic lives, it might also deepen migrants’ sense of displacement and trauma and other them further. The article explores how transmigrants in Hemon’s “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls”, “Family Dining” and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You experience food and foodways and what role culinary practices assume in the process of constructing their new, fluid and flexible hybrid identities in Homi Bhabha’s liminal Third Space.
Ever since the beginning of migration of Eastern and Central Europeans to North America on a massive scale at the turn of the twentieth century, this group of new-comers faced the exclusionary ...nativist rhetoric, similarly to other ethnic groups before and after them—a rhetoric that posited them as the Other and a threat to the established communities (cf. Zecker; Sojka; Pula; Gladsky). Unlike immigrants of color, though, the subsequent generations of white Eastern Europeans could quickly assi...
Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man consists of a web of interconnected stories that unfold over multiple geographies spanning the United States and Eastern Europe. The stories as a collective map how the ...novel’s multiple narrators came into contact with Jozef Pronek, a migrant displaced by the Bosnian war, in Sarajevo, Kiev, and Chicago. Building upon the insights of network theory, this essay examines how Hemon’s deployment of network aesthetics, which tells the migrant’s story in a plotless manner, introduces a transnational frame of thought for exploring precarious forms of life led by migrants and refugees displaced by the Bosnian war. I argue that the novel’s focus on weak social ties formed by the intimacies of transient encounter not only offer insights into the struggles of the migrant, but call forth critical engagement with nation-bound structures of feeling linked to Eastern European histories of war and migration in the late twentieth century.
