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Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
So, what is this dissensus and how can we talk about it in terms of critical knowledge
production and social practice concerning the politics of memoralization? Precisely
these questions are productively tackled in Milena Dragićević-Šešić’s analysis of
cultural policies, cultural identities and monument building – new memory policies of
Balkan countries. Her text off ers acute diagnoses of cultural policies in post-socialist
countries and their European context oscillating between ethnic and transcultural
strategies. 3 Th ere is an overview of the current and the planned and an encouragingly
ambitious research into the memory politics and monument building strategies in
the former Yugoslav region, based on an elaborate model embedded in taxonomies
of practices of memory/identity/culture constitution, consisting of models of anticulture,
models of culturalization and models of dissensus. 4 It identifi es the potential
of particular importance for further study and action, and invites us to enrich this
research transversally, building upon some disparate strands of knowledge production
and activism in the region concerning the politics/aesthetics of dissensus in the politics
of memory and monuments in/of our lives.
Dragićević-Šešić’s intervention maps out several productive ways of scholarly
engagement for those who would like to underpin such analyses with examples
from Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the materiality of memory inscription is about
encircling the abject – “mapping a genocide” and “telling the story of a mass grave”, 5
over our “ethnocitizen body”, leaving you breathless with its Hieronymus Bosch
aesthetics, and urging us towards emancipatory gestures of repoliticization and dissent.
Th e task ahead is to challenge the culturalization of trauma within the therapeutic
paradigm of governance as an ideological mechanism for the perpetuation of sovereign
and identitarian terror (inter)nationally (Husanović, 2011a).
3 Such as this insight: “In this respect it can be said that Eastern cultural policies are Ianus
faced policies – turned to the national identity and European cultural values at the same time
– homophobic and antidiscriminatory at the same time. To diff er from the cultural policy
of socialism, which had, besides it ideological, also explicit ethical and esthetical platforms,
the cultural policy of contemporary liberal societies tries to distance itself from any kind
of explicit aesthetic platform – wanting to prove that freedom of creative expression is the
fundamental principle and value, while support to diversities should be, at the same time, the
starting point and the policy outcome” (Dragićević-Šešić, 2011: 3).
4 “Th e methodology of the research will be based on categories identifi ed by Kodrnja et
al. (2010) and Slapšak (2009: 17), re-adapted and further developed for the needs of this
research. Th us we identifi ed three diff erent models:
- the model of anticulture ...;
- the model of “culturalization ...;
- the model of dissent – creative dialogue ...” (Dragićević-Šešić, 2011: 6)
5 As I have explored elsewhere – see Husanović, 2010b and 2011b.
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