Yugoslav Responsibility I: Disjunction and the Presence of War in (Post)Yugoslav Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel will address problems of facing the reality and legacy of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, both during wartime and in the post-war period, as they appear in a variety of media. Memory is central to all four papers, whether as wilful forgetting through music in the film of wartime Serbia, attempts to understand what exactly happened in contemporary Bosnian literature and culture, or legal intervention’s inability to cope with the experiences of victims of war as shown in contemporary Yugoslav cinema. Through their analysis of various depictions of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession from the 1990s to the present day, these papers provide some picture of the importance of articulating and addressing the disjunctions arising from the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Margaret Hiebert Beissinger, Princeton U

Papers

• Whose Burden, Whose Right to Forget?: Musical-Filmic Escapes into Sexual and Racial Plurality in Northern Serbia - Ian MacMillen, Yale U

• Silenced Women and Victims on Film: Addressing the Failure of Legal Interventions in Contemporary Yugoslav Cinema - Katie Kasperian, U of Michigan

• Articulating Disjunction in Regional Bosnia: The (Post) War Writing of Darko Cvijetić and Stevo Grabovac - Theodore Edgar Jefferies, U of Toronto (Canada)

Discussant

• Ellen Elias-Bursac, American Literary Translators Association