Young People, Hip-Hop, and the Making of a “Grammar for Unpolitics” in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates youth political subjectivity and subject formation in the context of postsocialist transition and projects of post-conflict peace-building in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following a youth subculture, it explores how nationalist visions of the future, the geopolitics of partition, and the very notion of ethnic identification itself are unwound and contested through embodied, affective geopolitical engagements in a hip-hop public. Drawing on feminist political geography, the article argues for scholarly understandings of young people’s lives as constituted by and constituting everyday geopolitical realities. In doing so, it calls for scholarly attention to the ways in which youth, in the course of turning away from dominant institutions, practice illegible forms of politics. To that end, the article tracks how these young people used hip-hop to cultivate a “grammar for unpolitics” centred around the urban as an ethics and category of belonging that fostered forms of mutuality radically alter to dominant notions of identity. These unpolitical engagements, the article argues, appropriate and subvert larger political discourses such as violence and victimhood, creating spaces for politics outside of the ethno-national problematic.