This book looks at the making and breaking of peripheral selves in and from postsocialist Bosnia in an empirically rich self-reflexive account of the documented politico-economic and ideological developments. Through world systems and postcolonial theory, historical and new materialist optics, discursive and affective analytical registers, and various qualitative methodological choices, the author analyzes peripheral subjectivity in connection to global proletarianization but also past and present resistance via social and personal movement(s). She refers to the former Yugoslav socialist and anticolonial struggles as well as the more recent ones, including the social justice and feminist collective enabling her to engage with workers’ and women’s struggles in postwar Bosnia and the Justice for David movement. She finishes off by analyzing lives of new third-wave Bosnian migrants to Germany post-2015, which she temporarily became part of, in juxtaposition with non-European migrants in Bosnian reception centers pushed back when trying to cross the EU exposing labor and race, border struggles and market as new variables for studying selves in this particular context.
The author first positions Bosnia and Herzegovina within post-Cold War reconfigurations as a tangible material space of daily social reproduction in Southeast Europe and a periphery marked by twenty-six years of neocolonial administration. Bosnia is questionably European— by becoming a country of “double transit,” it has been dubbed as Europe’s “dumping ground” for non-European migrants and a “waiting room” for its own citizens who are leaving to seek work in the EU. The chapter discusses periphery from the world systems and urban studies perspectives as a relational concept, further complicated by both spatial and non-spatial intersectional axes of oppression. Whereas spatial dimensions are mostly geographical and infrastructural, the non-spatial ones are structural, exploitative and historical dimensions in which peripheral selves are socially nested.
Secondly, she discusses the peculiarities of the Bosnian socialist and decolonial claims and postcolonial, postsocialist and peripheral present. She examines the relevant literature claiming international socialism’s contribution to decolonization against the one maintaining that socialist modernity was also colonial. By proposing that different politics of location may be crucial in the perception of these two different types of understandings, the author discusses BiH in terms of its colonial past prior to WW2 and the revolutionary potentials of the People’s Liberation Army, the Antifascist Women’s Front and the Non-Aligned Movement. Critical of the current BiH’s ethnonationalist postsocialism and neocolonialism of the international community, she sees these three as historical interruptions of BiH colonial continuity urging for deeper coalitions fighting against capitalism and coloniality across the globe.
Danijela Majstorović (MA 2003, Ohio University; PhD 2006 University of Banja Luka) is Professor of English Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Banja Luka’s English department. She was a Humboldt Experienced Research Fellow studying social protests and third-wave migrations in and from post-2015 Western Balkans at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. She was also a visiting researcher at Lancaster University in 2006, a Fulbright fellow at UCLA in 2012-2013, a Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta in 2014 and a visiting researcher at Indiana University in 2016. Her research interests involve critical discourse analysis, critical theory, feminist theory, post- and decolonial theory, and post-Dayton Bosnia. She published over 25 journal articles, co-authored Youth Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Palgrave, 2013), authored Diskursi periferije (Biblioteka XX vek, Belgrade) and Diskurs, moć i međunarodna zajednica (FF Banja Luka, 2007). She edited Living With Patriarchy: Discursive Construction of Gendered Subjects Across Cultures (John Benjamins, 2011), U okrilju nacije (CKSP Banja Luka, 2011) and Kritičke kulturološke studije u postjugoslovenskom prostoru (Banja Luka, 2012). Her most recent book Discourse and Affect in Post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peripheral Selves came out for Palgrave in 2021.