Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The book documents and critically evaluates contemporary poetry within the dynamic field of cultural production in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the late 1980s. Its context spans three historico-political phases: firstly, the cusp on which socialism was already losing its primacy and ethno-nationalism was gaining dominance; secondly, the subsequent collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing war led by ethno-nationalist elites; and thirdly, the period of the aftermath of war — the so-called “post-war transition”. This new approach to thinking about poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina focuses on alternative cultural practices, which have articulated a more equitable organisation of Bosnian society. Such practices have the capacity not only to tell us how unfree we are, but also to shift the criteria of possibility of our freedom towards a more hopeful politics. Dr. Arsenijeviæ’s knowledge of and passion for his research in cultural and literary studies and his art-theory political interventions shed scholarly light on the terror of inequality, the solidarity of unbribable life, relevant knowledge production, and material memories of war and genocide. He works throughout former Yugoslavia.