The Sense of an Ending: Children of Yugoslavia Looking for Home

Tomislav Longinović

To be really free of time we should have to be totally unconscious

or in some other way indifferent to what we normally call real.
—Frank Kermode
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always
some reason in madness.
―Friedrich Nietzsche

Slowly, the past throws me around like a convict, step by step as I

think in a language nobody believes in any longer, the language
that no longer has a country in which you can think, speak and
write it.
—Margita Stefanović Magi

Abstract: The post-Yugoslav intellectual environment has continued to emerge

through a variety of cultural rhizomes into the global cultural landscape, especially
through the work of those writers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists who
trudged along the same paths as the anonymous multitudes whose destinies were
determined by the forced movement that pushed them outside their native realm.
This process of nomadic transplantation was followed by the translation of an affec-
tive tenor that used to belong to the previous habitus, as a narrative guided by the
trope dominant since the Homeric times: looking for home. This search for a location
that is no more is often written upon the surface of an adopted language, as this is
the necessary condition in which the new culture can be territorialized as a symbolic
domain of identity. It is hardly unexpected that the new territory will be that of the
city, an imaginary space of modernity that makes itself much more available to trans-
lation due to its tendency to homogenize experiences across the divides of languages
and cultures.

Cities in Translation

Every culture experiences movement, but cultures affected by war and con-
flict experience it as an undesirable displacement of both the communal and
personal sense of belonging to a certain location. In the case of Yugoslavia,
whose ending began more than two decades ago, the displacement of millions
of refugees out of the shared territory has been marked by the agonistic flow

Scholarship as the Art of Life: Contributions on Serbian Literature, Culture, and Society by
Friends of Radmila (Rajka) Gorup. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, ed. Bloomington, IN: Slavica
Publishers, 2016, 147–58.
148 TOMISLAV LONGINOVIĆ

of humans and a sense of cultural crossing-over, determined by the processes

of translation understood in the widest possible sense of the word. This trans-
lational mode of existence often causes the sense of unreality experienced by
most post-Yugoslav subjects, as they reject being pigeonholed into the ethnic
requirements of the new nation-states: “I wonder whether I exist myself, and
who’s observing whom here: they me or me them,” writes Dubravka Ugrešić
in her most recent book of essays about revisiting the location of her past by
perusing her personal archive. “Then, like an uncoiled spring, a detail I’d
never noticed before jumps at me. With a confidence seemingly backed by
hard science, some of the stories point the finger at my ethnic background,
others hysterically demand that I finally declare it myself“ (Ugrešić 2011, 215).
Unwilling or unable to yield to the homogenizing requirements of the new
identity, most post-Yugoslav writers form a diasporic assemblage that can
never quite be a community, yet share a common desire for an absent yet
ethically uncompromising cosmopolitan horizon of the future. While recon-
structing their personal archives they are guided by the narrative that is yet
to come, attempting to restore some sense to the madness brought on by the
conflict, after the proclamations of brotherly love that once kept the country
united have succeeded in tearing it apart.
The post-Yugoslav intellectual environment has continued to emerge
through a variety of cultural rhizomes into the global cultural landscape,
especially through the work of those writers, filmmakers, musicians, and
visual artists who trudged along the same paths as the anonymous multi-
tudes whose destinies were determined by the forced movement that pushed
them outside their native realm. This process of nomadic transplantation was
followed by the translation of an affective tenor that once belonged to the
previous habitus, as a narrative guided by the trope dominant since Homeric
times: looking for home. This search for a location that is no more is often
written upon the surface of an adopted language, as this is the necessary con-
dition in which the new culture can be territorialized as a symbolic domain of
identity. It is hardly unexpected that the new territory will be that of the city,
an imaginary space of modernity that makes itself much more available to
translation due to its tendency to homogenize experiences across the divides
of languages and cultures.
“I saw my new city through the eyes of Sarajevo,” writes Aleksandar
Hemon. “Chicago’s map had been superimposed on the map of my home town
in my head. The two places had now combined to form a complicated inter-
nal landscape, a space where I could wander and feel at home, and in which
stories could be generated. When I came back from my first visit to Sarajevo,
in the spring of 1997, the Chicago I came back to belonged to me. Returning
from home, I returned home” (Hemon 2011). The superimposition of one city
 THE SENSE OF AN ENDING 149

on another offers a model of a more or less successful cultural translation

of Sarajevo into Chicago, by dispersing the notion of home over the global
landscape in an attempt to reconfigure the writer’s identity. Sarajevo is even
outfitted with its own eyes that the author cannot escape when looking at his
new city, yet this type of seeing is the only one corresponding to the truth
of his persona as a writer breaking free from the constraints of the Bosnian
language to reach the global audience in his inflected English. The new stories
can finally be conceived in a previously alien idiom as one city merges into
another and gives birth to the specific poetics of cultural translation.
In the beginning of the essay, Chicago appears as a desolate location
whose streets are sparsely populated by laborers, junkies, suicides, and a few
unsuccessful artists, which Hemon’s narrator cruises while searching for a
place where he can mingle with people and feel part of a life where humans
recognize each other while sharing fragments of their personal narratives:

Chicago, on the other hand, was built not for people to come together
but for them to be safely apart. Size, power, and the need for privacy
seemed to be the dominant elements of its architecture. Vast as it was,
Chicago ignored the distinctions between freedom and isolation,
between independence and selfishness, between privacy and lone-
liness. In this city, I had no human network within which to place
myself. My displacement was metaphysical to precisely the same
extent to which it was physical. But I couldn’t live nowhere. I wanted
from Chicago what I had got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.
(Hemon 2011)

The task of cultural translation is guided by the sense of discovery and

affective mapping while creating a space that is not immediately visible in the
cityscape of the Midwestern metropolis. By overcoming the sense of urban
alienation from other humans around him, the narrator attempts to come to
terms with the absence affecting the interior landscape that had shaped his
youth, translating his own life story into a different language and its space-
time continuum, so that humanity can somehow be regained in the face of
inhumanity encroaching from all sides. The initial cruelty and strangeness
encountered in the Chicago streets are gradually domesticated, as the narrator
gains a sense of mastery over an urban idiom marked by the invisibility of an
urban soul. In fact, translating cities requires a type of cultural assimilation
that overcomes the conventional signs embodied in the highways, skyscrap-
ers, and empty lots marking the movement of the narrator in the beginning of
his odyssey, altering them through the sense of closeness and intimacy that
the author imports from his native Sarajevo.
150 TOMISLAV LONGINOVIĆ

This struggle to regain some semblance of humanity tied to the destruc-

tion of a common Yugoslav home is dominant in the writing of Dubravka
Ugrešić as well, whose wartime wartime experience in Zagreb starts with
a new form of internal exile reserved for subjects unwilling to accept the
wholesale takeover by the new anti-Yugoslav political establishment. Once
abroad, she recalls the process of homogenization initiated by the conflict as
her neighbors, embodied both by the common people and her academic col-
leagues, begin to heed the call of the Croatian nationalist leadership to reject
Yugoslavia and its legacies. As is well known, Ugresic, together with three
other women writers and intellectuals, was branded a “witch” by the nation-
alist media. Their names and home addresses were published in the daily
press, in a veiled invitation to a (post)modern witch hunt. It is Ugresic’s narra-
tors who experience the most direct confrontation with the newly awakened
nationalist sentiment in Croatia. In a brilliant piece of creative nonfiction enti-
tled “A Question of Perspective,” published in Karaoke Culture, her latest book
of essays, Ugresic provides a devastating clinical dissection of nationalism
and its banal mechanisms of manipulation. The narrative device she employs
is that of a file filled to the bursting point with clippings from real newspapers
that chronicle the attacks on her as a traitor to the newly resurrected nation.
“In front of me sits a bulging file containing a mass of Croatian newspaper
cuttings from the early 1990s. The newsprint has yellowed a little, the paper
become thin. In one breath, it seems this indifferent heap of newsprint has
absolutely nothing to do with me; in the next, the old paper cuts like a razor.
For a moment (just a moment), fresh blood runs from the wound” (Ugrešić
2011, 214–15).
Like Hemon’s, this is an autobiographical reminiscence, using the meta-
phor of a personal archive to introduce a temporal flow from the past to the
present in order to establish the authenticity of both the protagonist and the
locations where the author dwells. The city in which the drama of the author’s
exclusion from the native realm takes place is presented as a prop whose own
reality is there only to support the replaying of the traumatic displacement
that took place in Zagreb decades ago. “It’s an icy January in Amsterdam,
unusual for the wet Dutch winters. In the warmth of my writing room, I per-
form my morning ritual—flicking through the online newspapers, Croatian
ones among them” (Ugrešić 2011, 203). The narrator rearms her new identity
as an exiled writer and scholar with blood occasionally dripping from the
wound inflicted by the inhabitants of her beloved Zagreb.
Exemplifying the divided habitus of subjects who have been doomed to
perpetually cross the boundaries of nation-states and threshholds of linguis-
tic and cultural identity, Ugrešić poeticizes the continual problem the transna-
tional subject encounters in attempting to settle down as an immigrant in a for-
 THE SENSE OF AN ENDING 151

eign land and attain some semblance of local identity. Her day in Amsterdam
begins with an imaginary return to the façade of a homeland mediated by the
virtual reality of the Internet. As her narrator reads the online newspapers
in an attempt to reestablish the connection with the originary location, the
memories of the past that she had managed to suppress begin to emerge. The
first image she encounters is that of an old man smiling and thumbing his ears
at the world, an attitude Ugrešić will spend her powerful essay in decoding
for her Western readers: “It’s the smile of the swindler giving you the fin-
ger, his hands buried in his pockets” (Ugrešić 2011, 204). The irreverence of
those who have crossed her and continue to mock her back in Zagreb is what
gets the blood flowing from her emotional wound, momentarily transform-
ing her Amsterdam apartment into a battlefield of memory. The old man is
transformed into an archetype of the Balkanized version of an evil trickster
for whom the cultural achievements of the human race mean absolutely noth-
ing. His irreverence is symptomatic of a population degraded by the conflict,
as the values of an enlightened culture have been abandoned to the cultural
domination of gangsters, thieves, and liars. This absence of humanist values is
at the bottom of her critique of the post-Yugoslav transition, as the new heros
and heroines of popular culture emerge to render useless the half-century of
modernization that took place under the guise of Titoism.
The figure of absence features prominently in the works of David Albahari
as well, this time as a symptom of the condition of exile from the native land.
Another post-Yugoslav author, who translated Serbian Zemun into Canadian
Calgary while continuing to inhabit the unresolved space of the cultural inbe-
tween, Albahari writes in Reč o odsustvu: “It is most difficult to speak of absence
since every word, however small or silent, is in fact a measure of presence. The
absence is measured by silence and weighed by emptiness, and words are just
a useless burden, a cargo that weighs us down forever, a weight for measuring
our despair, our confusion, our sorrow, our hope that all of this—all of this!
—happens to someone else, somewhere far away, in a place where words are
still words, where no one is invoking the silence” (Albahari 2008b, 42).
The creation of a writer with a complex understanding of movement, lit-
erature, and identity, Albahari’s non-heroes wander between a home that was
never truly theirs and a home that will never become truly theirs. What plagues
the narrative is the absence of any kind of catharsis or resolution that would
arrive from the recognition that home can never be found. Instead, the wan-
dering continues, only to be temporarily interrupted by a promise that maybe
movement itself can provide temporary relief. The escape from the trauma
enveloping the dissipating homeland is never fully possible, since translation
between locations cannot escape the echoes of war and conflict as Albahari’s
narrator travels through the Canadian landscape. In Mrak, Albahari notes:
152 TOMISLAV LONGINOVIĆ

“On the other continent, on the other side of the ocean, the wars in Croatia
and Bosnia turned into a distant echo. Now, as I write this, war is just a cal-
endar for measuring memories. For example, I arrived in Canada when the
Croats proclaimed independent Herzeg-Bosna. I traveled to Winnipeg when
the Serbs blew up the Ferhadia and Arnaudia mosques in Banja Luka. When
the grenades exploded in a Sarajevo marketplace, I was already travelling in
the far north” (Albahari 2008a, 135).
This radical divorce between the two locations in Albahari’s short novel
should also be seen in light of the genre, since it is used as a device to charac-
terize the protagonist-narrator of a fictional narrative escaping the decaying
homeland in order to tell the real story of its sad destiny. In fact the narrator
carries a set of file folders containing documents that explain the inexplicable
about the Yugoslav war, using the familiar device of the purloined letter to set
the narrative machinery in motion. The transcendental truth of the narrative
itself is invoked but never articulated, as the search for the story of the end
multiplies into several possible outcomes, while the revelation of the truth
about the Yugoslav conflict is suspended and remains hidden from the reader,
working against the human backdrop that remains passive, yet immersed in
the everyday delusions that peace and love can ever be found.

The Story of the End

Looking back at Homi Bhabha’s seminal essay on narrating nations, and espe-
cially to what he called “the Janus-faced ambivalence of language itself in the
construction of the Janus-faced discourse of the nation,” one is struck by the
difficulty in telling the story about the way in which certain nations meet
their ends. It is especially in the context of the homeland I shared with the
writers above, the long-gone state entity known as Yugoslavia, that the story
of the language itself has been generating narratives of the nation that tend to
complicate Bhabha’s Janus-like binary, but are additionally doubled and quar-
tered in the interplay of discourses related to conflict, violence, and affect that
do not cease to gain complexity with the passage of time.
The opposing faces of Bhabha’s Janus are those of ideological discourse
and material conditions, which turn “the familiar two-faced god into a fig-
ure of prodigious doubling that investigates the nation-space in the process
of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they
are in medias res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process
of being made.” The postcolonial moment Bhabha tries to impart in his nar-
rative theory shares similar concerns with the unfinished articulations of
post-Yugoslav nations and their identities, which are haunted by the proxim-
ity of war and violence. Post-Yugoslav cultures are at the very beginning of
 THE SENSE OF AN ENDING 153

telling their stories of emergence after 1991, although the demand for expedi-
ency in developing clearly constructed narratives has definitely dominated
the way in which social sciences and humanities embraced different types
of narratives labeled by the concepts of transition or postcommunism. The
political habitus of post-Yugoslav nations produces ways of telling whose in
medias res quality invokes narratives most similar to that of war reporting, so
that the emergent stories of new nations are not even half-made, but continue
to find ways of discovering languages that would hopefully be able to artic-
ulate new and different times and spaces, inclusive of the otherness that has
been so brutally and mindlessly eclipsed by the conflict. As the extraordinary
profanation of humanist values was tied mainly to the name of Yugoslavia
and its successor states, the global media industry kept informing us about
the Balkan vampire republics, where dominantly armed ideologies of ethnic
survival shaped the material conditions without much resistance from the
shocked and awed populations.1
The story of the language previously know as Serbo-Croatian and its mul-
tiple clones is perhaps the most symptomatic example of how to narrate the
nation’s end: it details how the emergent nationalist ideologies respond to the
martial material conditions and produce multiple narratives while telling the
story of a language that was once a common medium of communication for
the non-country of Yugoslavia. In fact, the case of Serbo-Croatian is a painful
reminder of the cultural reality whose language is the marker of collective
identity and the extension of national territory. Structured by extra-linguistic
forces tied to the power of social elites and their projected political aims, lan-
guage is charged with the most basic interpellation of those who are subjected
to the emergent narrative of the nation.2
Discussing the quite different relationship between Québécois and French
within Canada, Annie Brisset comes to a conclusion that rings very true in the
case of Serbo-Croatian as well: “translation becomes an act of reclaiming, of
re-centering of the identity, a re-territorializing operation. It does not create
a new language, but it elevates a dialect to the status of a national and cul-
tural language” (Brisset 2000, 346). The literal reclaiming of national territo-
ries through the violent breakup of the common South Slavic state during the
Wars of Yugoslav Succession (1991–95) and in their aftermath (Montenegro
2006, Kosovo 2008) has initiated at least seven re-centering operations of the
kind outlined by Brisset, performed through different types of linguistic

1
 For a theory of Gothic imaginary and its prevalence in the representation of the
former Yugoslavia and invention of “the serbs,” see my Vampire Nation.
2
 For a detailed analysis of language policies after Yugoslavia, see my “Translating
the Non-Identical Twins.”
154 TOMISLAV LONGINOVIĆ

cleansing campaigns, which have accompanied the martial practice of what

the masters of war in Yugoslavia ended up endearingly calling “humane relo-
cation,” or in global news lingo “ethnic cleansing.”
Each of the seven post-Yugoslav political entities (Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia, Slovenia) has retaliated
against the former lingua franca of the common state in a cultural mode
reflecting its new identity by creating different visions of the national terri-
tory by linguistic means. The very beginning of the translation conundrum
was engendered during the war between the two largest of the post-Yugoslav
nations, Serbia and Croatia, bringing to the foreground the issue of cultural
relations between the two “non-identical twins” joined in their linguistic
identity through the name of the dominant language of the former common
state: Serbo-Croatian. By symbolically removing the hyphen between Serbo
and Croatian, the ethnic conflict demanded translation between the two
mutually comprehensible languages. Translation was to be a cultural practice
that would confirm and amplify differences between the two warring parties.
In fact, some of the differences were already there, but they were more on
the level of dialect, word choice, and orthography within a single linguistic
continuum than on the level of insurmountable semantic difference necessary
for a language to declare its independence on linguistic grounds and require
translation.
The complexity of Bosnian identity was in fact the main problem in sim-
ply naming the western variant of Serbo-Croatian “Croatian” and the eastern
one “Serbian,” especially after the breakup of the common Yugoslav cultural
continuum. For example, the Serbs of Bosnia speak a dialect of Serbo-Croatian
closer to Croatian, but would never agree to call their language “Croatian.”
They will insist that they speak “Serbian.” They are also reluctant to call their
language “Bosnian” since that would conflate their national identity with
that of Bosniaks, i.e., the Bosnian Moslems, the only group that accepts the
new name of the language. The Croats of Bosnia have the same issue with
“Bosnian,” since they call their language “Croatian” despite the fact that they
live within the political confines of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina and
their speech is identical to that of Bosnians. So Bosnian as a common idiom is
being perpetually assaulted by two of its constituent entities in irredentist rela-
tions with Serbia and Croatia (Republika Srpska and Zapadna Hercegovina).
The Bosniak plurality is placed in the political position Yugoslavs were occu-
pying during the late 1980s, since the name of the language is still hanging on
regional rather than ethnic political etymology.
The case of Montenegro reproduces the same type of linguistic nation-
alism, since the approximately half of the population that opposes indepen-
dence calls the language “Serbian,” while the other half, which favors the new
 THE SENSE OF AN ENDING 155

state entity, insists on “Montenegrin” as the name of the language they speak.
In the case of this newly independent state, both names refer to the absolutely
identical linguistic code shared by its speakers, with differences in the soft-
ness of the consonants š and ž taking minor differences to sublinguistic levels
of meaning, reiterating Max Weinreich’s quip about a language being a dialect
with an army and a navy. Indeed, what we may call the sublinguistic particles
of the most common speech of Yugoslavs tell stories that have crossed over
into foreignness and alienation after love managed to tear them apart.

Love Will Tear Us Apart

A month after Josip Broz Tito died on May 4, 1980, Joy Division issued a single
that still has a cult status in popular music and whose title has never ceased to
resonate with me as a musical prophecy of what was in store for those unfor-
tunate enough to be born in a country that would one day disappear. Love Will
Tear Us Apart foregrounds the shaky foundation of any union between similar
entities and describes the path to self-annihilation that was to culminate in the
suicide of Joy Division front man Ian Curtis on May 18, 1980. By comparing
these two completely unrelated deaths, with Tito as the most unusual among
the aging 20th-century political despots and Ian Curtis the most depressed
among the up-and-coming post-punk personalities who dominated the alter-
native music scene in the late 1970s, I am placing my academic credentials in
more than serious jeopardy. Yet, telling my own nation’s end in this distinctly
unusual manner is appealing to me since it invokes the slippage of national
narratives into the fictional mode, which nevertheless invokes a dimension
and a viable version of a certain kind of reality, away from master narratives
of political science, sociology, or international relations. So, if I insist that this
unlikely comparison tells a certain type of story related to Yugoslavia and its
multiple endings, it is in order to produce a counternarrative rife with fanta-
sies of love, fear, and denial. In order to protect and validate the human agency
that is fast eroding in the face of the horror, guilt, and lack of responsibility
emanating both from the Western Balkans and the so-called international
community, I will turn to anecdote and my memory of the very last years.
The parallel I draw between Joy Division and Yugoslavia will be unsus-
tainable if we look for political, historical, and cultural narratives that would
be likely to produce a story of the causes, effects, and motivations of the var-
ious political actors and their constituencies. These already officially tested
and approved stories invoke religious differences, the Kosovo mythology,
unsettled accounts from previous conflicts, Slobodan Milošević and corrupt
communist elites, external interference after the Cold War, the genocidal
nature of patriarchy, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism—each reflecting
156 TOMISLAV LONGINOVIĆ

the perspective of a particular side and its supporters. The undeniable truth-
value of these stories is rife with ideological discourses that currently deter-
mine our knowledge of that country’s end, which most often foreclose nar-
ratives not dealing directly with the material conditions of war and conflict.
For example, too little is known about urban Yugoslav youth and its story
about a non-country that could have been its home today were it not for the
local nationalists and the global masters of war. My motivation is in no way
fueled by any form of nostalgia for that particular non-country, but I insist
on narrating the nation’s end against the grain of dominant stories that end
up reproducing the simplistic ideologies required by the urgency of othering
provoked by war and conflict. On the contrary, telling the story of no-nation
in an oblique manner invokes the idiosyncratic dimension characteristic of
the literature that has emerged as as a result of the dispersal and translation
of various Yugoslav urban cultures into a global landscape, a type of writing
that foregrounds the nomadic nature of the current identity of those humans
whose destiny is shared by multiple linguistic and cultural iterations around
the globe.
Aleksandar Hemon writes about those end-times in the Book of My Lives,
which features the urban youth of Sarajevo listening to alternative rock,
immersed in a dream world of youth culture ruled by what he terms “socialist
hippies” (Hemon 2013, 44). Narrating the deadly monotony of Yugoslav com-
munism in its apocalyptic decade, he also invokes the swastika-gate, where
his autobiographical protagonist gets caught up in the ideological nightmare
for toying with powerful wartime symbols. In the age preceded by Laibach’s
flirtation with fascist iconography, the bored yet radical youth of Yugoslavia
was growing increasingly anarchic, looking for ways to break the monotony
tied to the world of its elders and their glorification of Tito and the communist
partisans in WWII. In those years, one could be quite serious when claim-
ing that music was far more important than politics could ever be. Hemon’s
stories take place in the memory-time of the non-country; their main protag-
onists are twenty-somethings in love with the subversive potential of words
and writing, and fleeing the shadows of decaying power and its predictably
torturous boredom.
I also remember those times, especially a huge party that took place in
1981 Belgrade, just a year before I would leave for the United States and just
a year after the death of Tito. It was held in the villa of Cvijetin Mijatović, the
first president after Tito’s death. The president was away on vacation and his
daughters invited hordes of Belgrade youth who joyfully bashed the place
as they grew progressively more intoxicated. Idoli, Električni orgazam, and
Disciplina kičme were there from Belgrade and as well as some guests from
Zagreb from bands like Film and Haustor. At one point, I was sitting next to
 THE SENSE OF AN ENDING 157

Margita Stefanović-Magi, who was not yet a very big star of the alternative
music scene, with her band Ekaterina Velika, but still a diligent young archi-
tect and classical pianist. Suddenly, “Love will Tear Us Apart” started playing
over the sound system and everyone in the room became frantic and began
jumping. Magi and I looked at each other and she whispered in my ear: “This
will not end up well.”
Later on, Magi became yet another of those tortured souls who tried to
endure the onslaught of inhumanity by creating a drug-induced microcosm,
while continuing to live in the non-country of Yugoslavia. With her own post-
punk band Ekaterina Velika, she marked that end with darkly exhilarating
music and got hooked on the heroin that suddenly became cheap and avail-
able. Her words may have referred to the general hilarity of the party at the
time, but I now hear a more ominous echo in them. Earlier this year, a book
containing her journals was published in Belgrade, where I found the entry
that succinctly summarized the experience of the last generation of the coun-
try that is no more. ”Slowly, the past throws me around like a convict, step by
step as I think in a language nobody believes in any longer, the language that
no longer has a country in which you can think, speak, and write it.” The loss
of a common language equals the loss of a common life, a territory nobody
recognizes as existing, except as a memory of those times when youth still
believed in the possibility of a common future and identity that had nothing
to do with the false dichotomy of communism against nationalism.

References

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   . 2008b. Reč o odsustvu. Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga.
Bhabha, Homi K., ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.
Brisset, Annie. 2000. “Translation and Cultural Identity.” In Translation Studies
Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 343–375. London: Routledge.
Hemon, Aleksandar. 2011. “Mapping Home.” The New Yorker, December 5.
   . 2013. The Book of My Lives. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
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Twins.” In Translation and Opposition, edited by D. Asimakoulas and M.
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   . 2011b. Vampire Nation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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