The debate on the ‘where’ of the Balkans seem to be stuck between national paradigms and a nostalgia for cosmopolitanism. This essay explores an alternative spatial mapping of the region, opening it ...up to the wider Eastern-Mediterranean, in particular the fuzzy and contested notion of the Levant. First, it looks into various instances of ‘the Levant’ and ‘the Levantine,’ ranging from Turkish and Greek to Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian examples – with a particular focus on the latter. Secondly, by then ‘levantinizing’ the Balkans, in an explicit analogy to Édouard Glissant’s understanding of ‘creolization’ in the Caribbean, it attempts to draw the outlines of a geography of encounters. Finally, it offers a sample of what such a geography might look like and what its literary-historical repercussions might be, bringing together the work of Semezdin Mehmedinović and Etel Adnan.
Transatlantic Mail Jergovic, Miljenko; Mehmedinovic, Semezdin
The Massachusetts review,
10/2010, Letnik:
51, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Letters by Miljenko Jergovic and Semezdin Mehmedinovic expressing their experiences during the postwar years are presented. Jergovic tells his experiences in Zagreb, a city that had not seen war ...since the time the Turks had tried to conquer it but failed. He felt the war more intensely in Zagreb in 1994 and 1995 than in Sarajevo in 1992 and 1993. On the other hand, Mehmedinovic shares how the postwar change the world and everything that surrounds him. This huge change leads him to read more books about the happenings during the 1980s.
In 1993 the architect, essayist and former mayor of Belgrade Bogdan Bogdanovic published a collection of essays entitled The City and Death which contained reflections on the origins of urbicide. By ...this the author meant the wilful destruction of urban infrastructure and urban culture and the partial extermination, partial expulsion of the city's inhabitants, a fate that befell, among others, the cities of Vukovar, Mostar and Sarajevo during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Here, Snel examines Bosnian poet and essayist Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues, a collection of essays, poems and stories written during everyday life under the Serbian siege of Sarajevo.
Sarajevo blues Hemon, Aleksandar
Poetry,
04/2005, Letnik:
186, Številka:
1
Book Review, Magazine Article
Hemon comments on Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues. Sarajevo Blues abounds in images and details that could only carelessly and callously be called surreal.
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