Breathing Underwater

Breathing Underwater: The Complicity of the Defaced in Post-Multinational Literature offers an intervention in contemporary world literature studies by introducing the post-multinational condition as a dynamic and polyvalent platform for literature's worlding. Moving beyond conventional frameworks, it reorients how we read the works of Dubravka UgreSic, Aleksandar Hemon, and SaSa StaniSic and challenges prevailing assumptions in narrative and literary studies. The book presents Dubravka UgreSic, Aleksandar Hemon, and SaSa StaniSic as post-multinational writers who strive to disentangle themselves from the burdensome legacy of the dismembered Yugoslavia. After its dissolution, UgreSic settled in the Netherlands but continued to write in her own language; Hemon settled in the United States and started to write in English, and StaniSic settled in Germany and took recourse in German. Being thrown into multiple non-belongings, they resorted to the depersonalized medium of writing so as to forge an alliance with the faraway and unknown defaced counterparts who likewise felt stranded in their presents. By instigating such a long-distance platform of commonality, the writers seem to have drawn more benefits than those whom they pretended to be taking into protection. The more addressees they galvanized, the more powerful they became, turning from history's outcasts into the masters of a complicitous alliance. Drawing on imperial and post-imperial studies, postcolonial and legal theory, memory and trauma studies, visual and media studies, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and historiography, this book reads UgreSic, Hemon, and StaniSic through an eminently political lens, one that examines how post-post-imperial states administer citizenship and belonging.

Vladimir Biti is Chair Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna and author of 11 books, including Tracing Global Democracy (De Gruyter, 2016), Attached to Dispossession (Brill, 2018), Post-imperial Literature (De Gruyter, 2022), and Perpetrators' Legacies (Routledge, 2024). He has edited multiple volumes on post-imperial Europe, comparative and world literature. Co-editor of Arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, he chaired the Academy of Europe's Literary and Theatrical Section from 2016 to 2022.

Introduction: The Limits of Literary Geopolitics: Belonging to Longing; Part One; Dubravka UgreSic; Identification-at-a-Distance: Voicing the silenced in the work of Dubravka UgreSic; Crumbled Heritage: (De)Facing Pain in in Dubravka UgreSic's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain; Un/worlding Literature: Dubravka UgreSic as a Post-Multinational Writer; Part Two; Aleksandar Hemon; Restoring a Free-Floating Togetherness: Hemon's Sheltering of the Homeless; (Re)creating Family: The Symbolic Capital of Hemon's Storytelling; Part Three; SaSa StaniSic; Entangled Chimeras: Homeland and Hostland in StaniSic's and Prcic's Novels; Farewell to Time: The annulment of temporality in the work of SaSa StaniSic; Coda: The Complicity of the Defaced; References; Index