Bogdan Raditsa, the 1970s, and the Question of Croatian Emigration

!e article contends against a fallacious assumption that Croatian political emigration in the second half of the twentieth century formed a homogeneous and monolithic whole, while it is rather the case that it was fissured and destabilized by each successive wave of emigrants. This differentiation is here presented in a number of contributions by Bogdan Raditsa, written in the 1970s and published in Hrvatska revija predominantly and occasionally in other emigration journals as well. Raditsa, as one of the nestors of the “new emigration” occurring after World War Two, notes a trend of increasing radicalization of the emigrants entering political arena as a result of reprisals following the suppression of the Croatian Spring in 1971. The 1970s are thus seen as a pivotal decade in which generational distinctions within Croatian emigration were manifested in a number of high-profile radical and terrorist acts committed by the latest wave of emigrants. Raditsa’s position indicates his adherence to democracy and liberalism on the model of the United States, while he subjects different models of political activism in emigration to reasoned scrutiny. His political analysis is not only a record of a diasporic intellectual disposition but also an incisive comment on the vicissitudes of Croatian politics in the stifling embrace of the Cold War. Consequently, an argument is forwarded that calls for a definitive inclusion of political diaspora into Croatian Cold-War history, while suggesting that such a goal might be achieved among other things by a sustained reception of Raditsa’s formidable oeuvre

Prošlost i sadašnjost dobi i starenja u romanima The Country of the Pointed Firs (Kraj šiljastih jela) i Olive Kitteridge

The text examines the well-known late-nineteenth century novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) by Sarah Orne Jewett and the early twenty-first century novel Olive Kitteridge (2008) by Elizabeth Strout, and sets them in several distinct but intersecting contexts within a larger argument about the reading methodology motivated by age studies and their growing appreciation in the humanities. This argument is then extended in the sections focusing on pastoralism and the way it incorporates, or evades, the question of age and ageing. The next section takes up the possibilities opened up by the pastoral mode and links them to another strain of fiction to which both texts belong despite the temporal distance, that of regionalism and its long tradition specifically in New England fiction examined from the vantage point of age. Finally, the last section of the argument adds further considerations not only of the parallels but also of telling differences between the two texts due to the different temporal and cultural context in which they strive to represent age and ageing. By focusing on emotions and their display as part of the narrative of ageing, both texts (Olive Kitteridge in particular) meaningfully illustrate the issue of age with its many ramifications for the contemporary Western societies. The two texts thus show a transition in American culture in the representations of age and ageing from its pre-scientific phase (in Jewett’s text) to the current medicalized and scientific view of age and its consequences (in Strout’s text).Tekst razmatra klasični roman američke književnost s konca 19. stoljeća, The Country of the Pointed Firs (Kraj šiljastih jela, 1896), spisateljice Sare Orne Jewett i roman Olive Kitteridge, spisateljice Elizabeth Strout, s početka 21. stoljeća (2008) te ih postavlja u međusobne kontekste unutar interpretacije inspirirane studijima starenja i njihove sve veće prepoznatljivosti u humanistici. Ovaj se argument potom dopunjuje pojmom pastoralizma, osobito s obzirom na to kako uključuje ili isključuje pitanja dobi i starenja. Oba se teksta potom stavljaju u kontekst regionalne proze i njezine duge tradicije osobito u prozi Nove Engleske, promatrano iz očišta dobi. Konačno, značajne sličnosti ali i razlike između oba teksta nadaju se razmatranju na koji način različiti vremenski i kulturni konteksti utječu na prikaz osjećaja i njihova izražavanja u njima. Promotrene razlike ilustriraju na koji način pitanje starenja, i njegove brojne popratne pojave, utječu na suvremena zapadna društva. Oba teksta, dakle, pokazuju prijelaz u američkoj kulturi od prikaza dobi i starenja u predznanstvenoj fazi (Jewett) do suvremenoga medikaliziranog i znanstvenog pogleda na starost i njezine posljedice (Strout)

"Povijesti koje bismo svi trebali znati": azijsko-američki muški subjekt iz međuetničke perspektive

US ethnic studies, specifically their Asian American section, have been marked by a sustained interest in the questions of the models of Americanization through adopting dominant masculine roles, usually presumed “white”. The reading of two recent novels from the Asian American canon, namely, Gus Lee’s China Boy (1991) and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) suggests, however, that we pay attention to the ways some alternative models of homosocial relations (a term borrowed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) work to counteract the idea of dominant white masculinity, and draw the male protagonists in the novels closer to an interethnic model of identity building usually involving an important African American figure. In the process this also signifies the changes and redefinitions in American social formations which have to do with ethnicity, race, immigration and citizenship status in different phases of the post-Civil Rights period.Etnički studiji, posebice dio koji se bavi tekstovima azijsko-američke tematike, zanima se za pitanja muškosti i građanskoga statusa kao i procesom asimilacije kroz utjecaj dominantnih, bjelačkih, modela muških uloga. U novijim tekstovima azijsko-američkih autora, od kojih se ovdje interpretiraju neki vidovi romana China Boy (1991) kinesko-američkog autora Gusa Leeja te Native Speaker (1995) korejsko-američkog pisca Chang-rae Leeja, taj se model homosocijalnih odnosa (ovdje preuzet od Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), pomiče od bjelačkog prema međuetničkom i polietničkom modelu, osobito kroz znakovite interakcije s afroameričkim likovima i kulturnim elementima. Time se komentira i upozorava na znakovite promjene u shvaćanju statusa etničkoga subjekta, imigranta i potencijalnog građanina u nekoliko faza koje slijede nakon razdoblja borbe za građanska prava, te se ocrtava novi model međuetničkih odnosa u suvremenom SAD-u

Women Writers on American History and Space

Ksenija Kondali: Prepleti paradigmi: prošlost, pamćenje i prostor u američkoj ženskoj prozi, Sarajevo: Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Sarajevu, 2017

Women Writers on American History and Space

Ksenija Kondali: Prepleti paradigmi: prošlost, pamćenje i prostor u američkoj ženskoj prozi, Sarajevo: Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Sarajevu, 2017

The Transatlantic Anglophone Literature of the Eighteenth Century: a New Sensibility, Sentimentalism and the Modern Self

Taking off from Charles Taylor’s premise about the key institutions of the Western modernity – the economic sphere (the market), the self-governing people (the political sphere), and the public sphere – that emerge or consolidate in the course of the eighteenth century in the transatlantic scope, the argument focuses in particular on the cultural reverberations of the constitution of the bourgeois civil society and a representative individual, a man or a woman of the middling sort or, the middle class. The new social imaginaries coming into play in the ambit of the transatlantic geo-culture of the eighteenth century (Shapiro) are considered by way of a nascent public print sphere being marked by the appearance of the novel and other forms of print. Representative texts, circulating in the ambit of England and its diaspora (the American colonies), consist of Daniel Defoe’s early novel Moll Flanders (1722); Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography (1771–1789); and the British-American late sentimental novel Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson (1791, 1794). Consequently, the important impulse provided by Adam Smith’s model of moral sentiments is taken to have crystallized or spurred the tendencies observable in these works, as Smithian moral synthesis builds on the work of his predecessors while charting new notions of a moral universe inhabited by self-regulating, self-interested but humanely, benevolently disposed individuals. Further studies of the period have marked the paramount transformative agency of the public sphere and the channel of print, allowing us to locate in the literary sphere an important repertoire of social practices, manners and values informing the new modern subject. Additional attention is given to the cultural underpinnings of the contractual consensual theory of social relations that opens up limited but unprecedented at the time opportunities for women to claim their share of the public sphere. The foregoing tendencies have contributed to the ongoing reconceptualization of the transatlantic eighteenth century as a new, burgeoning area of inquiry in the Anglophone literary and cultural studies

Meridian Alice Walker i problem pravednog nasilja

At a time of growing interest in questions of ethics in contemporary theory, this article suggests a broader understanding and offers a historical perspective of the ethical implications which from the start have been presupposed in US ethnic literatures. Alice Walker’s Civil-Right’s Bildungsroman Meridian (1976), with its entangled implications relative to the issues of violence, revolution, social and personal transformation, is a case in point. These concerns potentially work at cross purposes, but the argument of this paper outlines the problematic possibility that some forms of violence, if ritualized, circumscribed and symbolized appropriately, as suggested by models of Freudian psychoanalysis (as outlined in Totem and Taboo), Julia Kristeva’s model of abjection, and René Girard’s sacrificial anthropology, offer modes of regarding violence as just, that is, responsive to ethical concerns. Such a redefinition of violence also takes place in conjunction with, rather than separate from, narrower aesthetic concerns, as proposed further by Elaine Scarry, Terry Eagleton and, again, Julia Kristeva, given their work at the intersection of ethics and symbolic forms.U novije vrijeme suvremena je teorija obilježena zanimanjem za etičko, što odražava i tematika ovoga članka, naime, bavljenje etičkim implikacijama koje su od početaka snažno prisutne u američkoj etničkoj književnosti. Etnički i feministički Bildungsroman Meridian (1976) suvremene spisateljice Alice Walker, iz doba borbe za građanska prava, donosi isprepletenu tematiku nasilja, revolucije, društvene i osobne transformacije. Iako se u analizi pokazuje da su ovi sklopovi često suprotstavljeni, ocrtava se mogućnost da određeni oblici nasilja, ako su ritualizirani, omeđeni i prigodno simbolizirani, a sve na tragu Freudova modela društvene psihologije u Totemu i tabuu, modela abjekcije Julije Kristeve te ključne antropološke studije o nasilju Renéa Girarda, mogu, dakle, ponuditi okvire za razmatranje nasilja kao etičkoga elementa ili čimbenika etičke dispozicije. Takvo vrednovanje nasilja, nadalje, neodvojivo je od estetskih implikacija njegove uloge koju su u novije vrijeme ponudili Terry Eagleton, Elaine Scarry i, ponovno, Julia Kristeva

Povrijeđena povijest: interpretacija proze Edwidge Danticat

The contemporary Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat appropriates in her fiction representational models observable also in so-called minority, post- or neo-colonial writing, which bears comparison to the dynamics of trauma as laid out in contemporary cultural theory based on the revision and rereading of Freud’s texts (especially by Laplanche, Caruth, Felman). Drawing on Danticat’s fictional texts, such as the novels The Farming of Bones (1998) and Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and a short story collection Krik? Krak! (1995), the article suggests indispensable links between the project of articulating traumatic events underlying collective, but unrecognized and so-far unrecorded, history, and the projects of bearing witness and carrying on the memory of an event. This conjunction is crucial for the articulation of collective, group history, and finds its embodiment in the hybrid form of historiographic metafiction and testimonial writing, while observing the temporal structure of traumatic belatedness and deferral, and the ultimate impossibility of transposing the traumatic into the narrative (The Farming of Bones; Krik? Krak!). The other line of argument tries to foreground the impact of structuring or base trauma as it interferes with the working-through and the transposition of a personal trauma into a coherent narrative of one’s Bildung (Breath, Eyes, Memory). Still, these impasses mark a significant cultural intervention launched by Danticat and other similarly positioned authors in order to account for and bear witness to a history that articulates itself as an impossible, because traumatic, narrative.Proza suvremene američko-haićanske autorice Edwidge Danticat promatra se kao dio širega etničkoga, subalternoga i post-kolonijalnoga diskursa, koji ima dodirnih točaka s teorijom traume kako se artikulira u suvremenim čitanjima navlastito tekstova Sigmunda Freuda (Laplanche, Caruth, Felman). Čitanjem njezinih romana The Farming of Bones (1998) i Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) te zbirke novela Krik? Krak! (1995), upućuje se na ključne veze između nastojanja za prikazivanjem prešućene i potisnute, pa time i traumatične, kolektivne povijesti, koja, stoga, slijedi dinamiku traumatske latencije ili odgode. Hibridni žanrovi, s elementima historiografske metafikcije, ali i književnosti svjedočenja, ukazuju na važnost pojma svjedočanstva kao mogućnosti prikaza alternativne povijesti. U romanu Breath, Eyes, Memory proširuje se interpretativni doseg teorije traume korištenjem modela strukturne ili bazne, prvenstveno individualne, traume, koja se pokazuje kao jedan od modela transpozicije traumatičnoga iskustva u narativnu formu, ali i upućuje na ograničenja koja žanrovski oblik Bildungsromana nameće projektu izgradnje identiteta kroz suočavanje s osobnim i povijesnim traumama