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Session Submission Type: Panel
Thirty years after Srebrenica – and in light of thirty years of poetic witness to Bosnian genocide – this panel is organized around the ongoing and collective responsibility to stand against genocide and the urgent role poetry plays in such resistance. The immediacy of poetry has meant, in the Bosnian context, that it was marshalled to confront atrocity even as it was happening. The wartime poetry of Ferida Duraković and Semezdin Mehmedinović, to name only two poetic examples, brought a piercing vision of the stakes of genocidal loss. This panel engages a shared poetic archive, contributed by Selma Asotić, Adisa Bašić, Darko Cvijetić, Jozefina Dautbegović, and Faruk Šehić, among others. Attesting to the heterogenous work required to indict genocide, the panel intentionally includes poet-thinkers like Asotić and Šehić, whose work across disciplines has wrestled with the task of writing and reading poetry not only after, as Adorno would have it, but during genocide.
It must be stated outright that poetry in Bosnia has both reified genocide and has stood athwart it. Some poets have established dominant narratives of particularist victimhood that reign in postwar Bosnia, while others have significantly contributed to cultures of mourning that refuse to assimilate or appropriate genocide, and who have insisted on the irreducibility of human life to a national symbol. This panel, thus, indisputably focuses on poetic work that allies itself with peace and liberation everywhere genocide and its aftermath is a reality – from Bosnia to Palestine.
Return to 'Love after Genocide': Of Poetry and of Re-Assembling Ourselves in Bosnia and Herzegovina - Damir Arsenijevic, U of Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
The Trauma of Loss as a Motif in Realist and Dystopian Literature - Faruk Šehić
Poetry that Exhumes, Poetry that Indicts - Antje Postema, UC Berkeley
To Write Poetry During Gaza is…? - Selma Asotic, U of Massachusetts Amherst