Abstract
To observers of contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina, the years 2013–2016 have been marked by heightened public discontent and the emergence of civil protests. While early protests surrounded sites unmistakably pertaining to the country's socialist legacy, such as privatized factories, more recent dissatisfaction is being articulated around sites that point to Bosnia's past as a colony of the Hapsburg Empire. This essay argues it is not accidental that these colonial markers have become instigators of protest and dissent articulated through the memory of the recent Socialist past. Under the claim of cultural heritage protection, former colonial sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina and throughout the Balkans are unearthed tangibly to mark new realities of postcoloniality. The resurrection of Hapsburg heritage in Bosnia is instructive as it helps illuminate the wide range of tensions and contradictions inherent in the move from colonial Europe to a (post)colonial European Union. Far from wiping the slate clean and offering a fresh start, as EU actors often claim, this process is paradoxically reinstalling institutions that were once the embodiment of colonial expansion. In arguing for the expansion of postcolonial critique to include the Balkans, this essay examines the political, economic, and symbolic ways in which Hapsburg colonial sites and institutions are restored into public visibility as registers of Sarajevo's European futures.
Highlights
Inspired by Stoler’s (2016, 4–5) argument that “Geopolitics and spatial distribution of the world today, are not mimetic recurrent versions of early imperial incarnations but vital and revitalized reworkings of them,” I look at the sedimentation of an unambiguous Hapsburg present/past in the spatial reconfiguration of Sarajevo as a postwar, post-socialist, and European city
Resituating Sarajevo away from the socialist past, the colonial Hapsburg legacy has become a pertinent and potent narrative in EU integration processes in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), as the EU has come to serve as a custodian of Hapsburg sites, granting them visibility while anaesthetizing their imperial links
When colonial rule is debated, it is done under the broader narrative that it was “largely benevolent, marginal to Europe, and most importantly, without negative repercussions for the present” (El-Tayeb 2011, xxii). This approach, El-Tayeb argues, flattens and obscures the contemporary power relations between Europe and its postcolonial others by decontextualizing the ways in which the colonial past continues to affectcolonial Europe. Extending this critique to the Balkans, Bjelić (2016, 3) argues the “foreclosure of the Balkans’ postcoloniality as a discourse on colonial and neocolonial presence is a fragment of a much larger strategic maneuvering inside a European historiography ruled by national paradigms aimed at disowning colonial history.”
Summary
To cite this article: Piro Rexhepi (2018) The Politics of Postcolonial Erasure in Sarajevo, Interventions, 20:6, 930-945, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2018.1487320 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1487320 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=riij20
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