Introduction Hicks, Jim
The Massachusetts review,
04/2017, Letnik:
58, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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.
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.
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...
...Perišić depicts a well-known image of a ticking clock whose thirty-second appearance would precede the equally well-known programme's opening credits: "At 7.29 pm a huge clock appeared on the ...screen. Shopping excursions to this Italian town were a way to obtain otherwise unavailable goods such as branded jeans, fashionable shoes, foreign coffee, electronic devices, and small kitchen appliances. ...as proof of their frequent visits to Italy, every respectable household boasted a kitsch plastic replica of a Venetian gondola that was often exhibited on top of the TV set.6 Due to the vast cultural background associated with this object, its mention in Vladimir Tasić's novel Farewell Gift requires at least a minimal translators' intervention. Namely, they impetuously celebrate whatever holiday appears on the calendar, marking with equal enthusiasm past and present official holidays, as well as religious festivals and saints' days. ...a Christmas tree will serve to decorate the drawing room and mark the New Year (for children, because they don't know the old customs), while the Yule log is brought into the kitchen (for grandfather and grandmother). Since the remnants of common Yugoslav history are unmistakably evident in the corpus through the customs, habits, practices, and artefacts of everyday living, we have presented the complex features of Yugoslav culture through scenes depicting everyday life and discussed the level of their preservation in the English target texts.
Starting with the 1990s a myriad of literary texts that tackle the Yugoslav wars has been published worldwide. Despite the wide variety of texts, scholars (Obradović, Pisac, Vervaet, Wachtel) have ...focused mainly on those written by ex-Yugoslav writers and on the representation of the former country in these books. This paper focuses on the aforementioned literary phenomenon - the representation of ex-Yugoslavia - from a broader perspective. My selection includes texts that originate in different geo-cultural areas. In this respect, the aim of this paper is to show that former Yugoslavia is not the only space represented in this cluster of texts. Other countries and cities, such as Germany, Ukraine, Amsterdam, or Shanghai, also play a significant role. I argue that the occurrence of these various spaces reveals a paradoxical pattern: the closer to ex-Yugoslavia the writer is or was, the more diverse the fictional spaces are, as well as vice versa. However, this geo-cultural diversity that defines post-Yugoslav migrant writers is constantly disregarded by critics, cultural journalists, and scholars, which is an indication of the hegemonic character of world literature.
Transnationalism is a current reality as globalisation has accelerated by the never before experienced boost in the development of technology, transport and telecommunications. The modern era is also ...characterised by migrations - voluntary and involuntary, but most of today’s transmigrants do not live the exilic lives once lived by migrants, longing for their homeland. Instead, they live in an in-between space – the host country and the homeland, where the mixing of cultures takes place. Although these zones have often been idolized in the recent literature, the lives of many transmigrants are characterised by feelings of loss, displacement and trauma. The present article attempts to map Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon as a transnational diasporic writer by tracing the features of transnationalism in his life and his novel The Making of Zombie Wars. It will also position that several of the migrant characters in the novel are hybrid identities, battling the consequences of displacement, trauma and mobility, following the ideas of Homi Bhabha and Jopi Nyman. It will explore the processes as they occur in spaces in-between.
This paper examines self-fashioning in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Everything,” a story about a Sarajevo teenager’s journey through ex-Yugoslavia to the Slovenian town of Murska Sobota. His aim? “To buy a ...freezer chest for my family” (39). While in transit, the first-person narrator imagines himself a rogue of sorts; the fictional journey he takes, meanwhile, is clearly within the quest tradition. The paper argues that “Everything” is an unruly text because by the end of the story the reader must jettison the conventional reading traditions the quest narrative evokes. What begins as a comic tale about a minor journey opens out, in the story’s final lines, into a story about larger historical concerns, namely, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. By introducing contemporary history, Hemon points beyond the closed world of his short story, while rejecting the quest pattern he has established.
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