Conferences
Conference presentation
International conference, Tours, France, 25.05.2023
The Balkans as a laboratory for transnational literatures? Organized by Emmanuelle Terrones (Tours) and Daniel Baric (Paris)
Conference presentation: Transnational Feminist Circulations made in Ex-YU - Dubravka Ugrešić, Lana Bastašić and Jagoda Marinić
Abstract:
This lecture examines the works and reception of Dubravka Ugrešić, Lana Bastašić and Jagoda Marinić in the German-speaking world, all three of whom have been read in different ways as representatives of a transnational feminism. These diasporic authors from the ex-Yugoslavian region (Ugrešić lives in Amsterdam, Bastašić between Barcelona and Belgrade, and Marinić in Heidelberg) can be assigned to a hybrid, "de-territorialized" (Deleuze/Guattari) literature in which the exploration of gender relations and female identities in particular play a special role. By playing with languages and affiliations of all kinds, be it nation, religion or ethnicity, these authors also depict a cosmopolitanism from the margins in their texts that is complex, fragmented and challenging, and has little to do with the idealized lives of digital nomads in the global flow . Belonging to different generations (Ugrešić was born in 1949, Marinić in 1977 and Bastašić in 1986), all three authors offer divergent reflections on the opportunities that opened up for women in socialist Yugoslavia, but also on the longevity of patriarchal structures not only in the successor states, but throughout Europe, thus decisively rejecting stereotypical Balkan conceptions. Certain aspects of memory cultures (nostalgia, etc.) are seen both as an opportunity and as a political-aesthetic paralysis. Their literature, which situates itself outside of unambiguous concepts of nation (Seyhan), creates an alternative literary canon of multiple homelands and can thus also be understood in terms of Homi Bhaba's concept of a "minoritarian" identity.
Cultural exchange between Southeast Europe and the German-speaking world
The conference Cultural Exchange between Southeast Europe and the German-speaking regions, 16 and 17.11.2023, University of Graz was organized by Yvonne Živković and Renate Hansen-Kokoruš.
This interdisciplinary and bilingual conference (German and English) was dedicated to the exchange processes of tangible and intangible cultural heritage between Southeast Europe and the German-speaking regions. With a special focus on the so-called intangible cultural heritage, which assumes a central role in the age of globalization due to its performative and dynamic character, exchange and transfer processes, mobilities and migrations of cultural heritage in literature and art, politics and society will be examined. The conference encourages a dialog between literary and cultural studies, history and the social sciences in order to bring together different conceptions and methodologies of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in these regions. Theoretical reflections on the discourse of cultural heritage were a central component of the conference. A selection of key texts was sent to all speakers in advance.
Keynote lecture
Mitka Velikonja (Ljubljana), "Yugoslavia after Yugoslavia. Graffiti about Yugoslavia in the Post-Yugoslav Landscape" (Yugoslavia after Yugoslavia. Graffiti about Yugoslavia in the Post-Yugoslav Urban Landscape)
