Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Culture of trauma and identity politics -
critical frames and emancipatory lenses of cultural
and knowledge production
Jasmina Husanović
Abstract
This presentation reflects on the ways forward in recent knowledge production
encompassing the gestures of repoliticization within the cultural politics of memory in
the (post-)Yugoslav space. It builds on several critical insights and important heuristic
tools provided in the respective analyses by panel speakers concerning visual and
performative cultural production (monuments, theatre, etc.) in the wider context of
identitarian regimes for managing affect in the Yugoslav successor states, caught up in a
complex “transitional” ethnonationalist-neoliberal dynamic. The author’s aim is to focus
on the emancipatory potential for challenging the culturalization of trauma within the
therapeutic paradigm of governance as an ideological mechanism for the perpetuation
of sovereign and identitarian terror (inter)nationally (using select empirical lenses of
current conundrums of memory and identity politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina). In
this regard, the presentation will attempt to gear the discussion towards the importance
of artistic and scholarly interventions interrogating the politics of abjection, affect, revolt
and collectivity in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and post-SFRY
context which traverse the petrified ideological straitjackets of cultural politics today.
Keywords: culturalization of trauma, identity politics, (post-)Yugoslav space, Bosnia
and Herzegovina
This text reflects on some ways forward in current and future knowledge production
which questions the Leviathan called “the transitional dynamics of cultural identities”
globally, through the lenses empirically provided by the context of Bosnia and
Herzegovina and the (post-) SFRY region. (It is a Leviathan because its spectre is felt
in the vertigo of everyday life infused with a myriad of technologies of statecraft and
governance through identity management.) We have to build upon productive critiques
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