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Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
of violent and exclusionary matrices of political, social and economic imagination,
association and organization that underpin the culture of exception globally, hiding
the new/old ways in which we are being subjected and governed in this part of the
world. Within this social magic in the last 20 years, with its burdening recursive quality
(we are produced as agents of social practice by structures which are no more than an
objectifi cation of our past practices as agents), visual and performative strategies are
of key importance in the politics of memory and memorialization that resist selective
memories and sanitized futures. It is of utmost importance to engage in a joint eff ort
to critically frame cultural and knowledge production that transforms the shackles of
imposed ideologies and practices of identity and memory.
My own critical lenses are shaped by the empirical analysis of the culturalized regimes
of memory and identity operative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a (post-)Yugoslav region,
Europe and globally, as layers of international lives and politics. I have elsewhere been
concerned with the sovereign politics of the camp/ghetto and technologies through
which trauma/terror/atrocity are being normalized, and how these technologies of
governing life have been resisted and traversed at some intersectional spaces and practices
in the fi eld of art and theory, civil society, media, science and law (see more in Husanović,
2010a). Contextual optics are used in order to refract a universal crisis of current
political imaginaries when it comes to global “governance of life”. Th is happens through
the management of eff ect (“ethnic hatred”, for instance) and accompanying technologies
for governing “traumatized nations” through culturalized liberal governance leading to
peace and security, development and creative diversity. Concerning this, I will draw
on several critical insights and important heuristic tools in the texts/presentations by
Milena Dragićević-Šešić and Aldo Milohnić concerning the visual and performative
reconstruction of identities through cultural practices and policies (monuments,
theatre, etc.) by focusing on the context of identitarian regimes in managing eff ect in the
Yugoslav successor states caught in a “transitional” ethnonationalist-neoliberal vortex
(Dragićević-Šešić, 2011; Milohnić, 2011).
Viewing social life as a series of continuities out of discontinuities in a historicized
and sociologized fashion is the approach of Milohnić’s text analysing the ideology and
aesthetics of national theatres in Slovenia in the modern period and (post-)Yugoslav
contexts. My question1 is: how can we fi ght and transgress the brashness and insolence
1 Th is question is particularly inspired by an insightful remark by Milohnić: “In May 2002,
exchange of performances by two – Slovenian and Serbian – national theatres provoked a lot of
pomp, media panegyrics and orgiastic apotheosis. Slovenian media reported frenetic applauses
and a delirious response from the Belgrade audience to performances by the Slovenian National
Th eatre (Drama SNG Ljubljana). Belgrade theatre Atelje 212 received similar acceptance
during its tour in Slovenia. Interstate exchange of artistic products is not necessarily a bad thing,
especially if some artistically powerful performances fi nd themselves in such an elitist selection.
In this case, however, an extra-artistic, culture-political aspect of that theatre and media circus was
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