Postcolonial Memorabilities and Transforming Performativity in Dispersion

Abstract

This text discusses the Croatian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian cultural circles comparatively, on the background of the remaining interactive traces of three empires, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Yugoslav, which permeated these cultures in the past, on the one side. On the other side, the text discusses the more recent intellectual/artistic dispersions from these national cultures across the Central European territorial and cultural domains. I reconsider the concept of postcolonial in reference to that, as relative to the concepts of both post-imperial and re-national, and as tuned in to my major analytic frameworks of gender and cultural performativity. On that ground, I attend to the questions of domination and continuity as the shifting patterns and political variables affecting the processes of the present identifications involved in personal, group, ethnic figurations. My analysis evolves around two points: 1. the postcolonial as manifested in the mnemonic work in the cultural production in dispersive moving trajectories 2. the transforming performativity of a creative singular acting that reinscribes these mnemonic traces with the newly produced quality in rhizomatic cultural interactions. Therefore, I expose domination and continuity as pulsating in the rewritten challenges to the previous or existing structures, providing the mnemonic also with dialogical traits in dissolving the compulsory group memorabilities – as seeing in the examples of literature, art, and theory made in dispersion.