Re-rigging Othering: Subversive Infantilisation in Contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian Prose

Abstract

In this article I put forward the concept of subversive infantilisation to designate a phenomenon in contemporary Bosnian literature, which by using a certain kind of childish outlook on the world undermines paternalistic and balkanist Western discourse on Bosnia and Herzegovina. By analysing primarily the portrayal of the role of mass media in a few literary texts, principally books by Nenad Veličković and Miljenko Jergović, I highlight the way in which these texts "re-rig" and by means of irony and exaggeration illuminate the problematic logic inherent in the subject position from which one represents the other. Textual characteristics of subversive infantilisation are contextualised further and seen as a discursive continuation of experiences of the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

‘Fiction keeps memory about the war alive’: Mnemonic migration and literary representations of the war in Bosnia

“…Alen Mešković’s 2011 novel Ukulele Jam , which was read by two focus groups in Denmark, tells the story of Miki, a teenager staying in a hotel serving as a refugee camp on the Croatian seaside after fleeing the Bosnian Serb occupation of his hometown back in Bosnia. The novel provides a rather slow and personal perspective on the war that focuses on the ordinary challenges of teenage life (personal insecurity, parties, girls, and music), while the war looms in the background, filtered through the anxiety of the fate of his older brother, who has disappeared in Bosnia, and the distant parents (see Borčak, 2016). Insisting on as normal a life as possible, despite the crippling presence of war, Mešković conveys the banal and terrifying boredom of life as a refugee.…”