Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
politics of memory and identity is where culture becomes the main arena of governance
and resistance. Inseparable from these matrices is the “post-politics”, through its
depoliticization of the questions of freedom and equality and its over-celebration of
difference and over-insistence on identitarian issues through rather performative
techniques of bestowing “order” to societies in transition, after loss, atrocity and so forth.
However, the vectors of dissensus, resistance and radical truth in the face of abjection/
affect, introduce doubt and controversy, situating art in the field of experience, politics and
capitalism. It is in the marginalized fields of cultural production, arts and activism that new
collective words and deeds are produced so as to assume bare life, our radical relationality
and contingency as a starting point, towards new re-imaginations of the political. We see
this in feminist production and art in the region where an affirmative politics of witnessing
to trauma does offer ways of identification and participation that are an authentic challenge
to the populist/right-wing/fascist mobilization of affect and passion on the one hand, and
the aseptic liberal management of effect in white gloves and in the name of human rights,
on the other (see more in Husanović, 2007). When witnessing the legacies of atrocity,
ethical social relationships must be instituted anew, based on critical reflection on the
origins and methods of violence, where mass atrocity is only the culmination of everyday
biopolitical control over life and death. This battle is also the battle over the monument.
Instead of the over-authorization of victims as “secular saints” and the monopolization
of experience where the politics of affectivity is based on the sacralization of horror in
a desacralizing world, there is a political act of traumatic remembering, the attempt to
speak communally and publicly about justice and equality in the face of abject politics
that resurrects the dead to serve the governance of (inter)nationalized ghettoes sinking
into a triple bind of poverty, banality and corruption. 6 We must analyse precisely such
instances and acts of the politics of witnessing to trauma in search of new coordinates
of universal politics, from the field of cultural and knowledge production and public
activism, where experiences are turned into critical insights and actions, collectively.
This often occurs in particular forms of social activism, movements based on the politics
of solidarity and equality (workers, students, women and other “others”), as well as in
cultural and artistic production. It also occurs in specific forms of knowledge production
that are tied to transformative action in various spaces of publicity. 7 Examples abound
and we have to weave them together, in critical solidarity.
6
For more on this triple bind, see Sullivan, 2002: 136.
7
I have explored these elsewhere, especially in Chapters 6 and 7 of the monograph Između
traume, nade i imaginacije (Husanović, 2010a). See also Husanović, 2009 and 2011c.
66