The Europeanisation of citizenship governance in South-East Europe

there are precious few of those) to invest the time needed to read a book that merely confirms existing cultural theory. It must be admitted, however, that this approach can sometimes yield spectacularly comic effects, as in the following discussion of Hrvoje Hribar’s 2005 film What is a Man Without a Mustache?: ‘the counter-archive thus invoked in Hribar’s film demands that Derrida’s perspective on Marx as mourning be examined against Deleuzian masochism to produce a detailed analysis of how Marx is still operative in post-socialism’ (161). Fortunately, not all of the contributions are this opaque and a few are quite enlightening. Post-Yugoslav Constellations is divided into three sections: ‘Entangled Legacies of Extreme Violence’; ‘Reclaiming the Past’; ‘Reconfiguring the Post-Yugoslav Present’. In the first, we find a number of articles focusing on literature and trauma. The wars of Yugoslav wars of the 1990s produced an exceptionally large amount of literary and cultural production on this theme, and the individual authors of this section make no attempt to systematize them. Rather, they focus on particular works, producing close readings that can serve as variations on a theme. Of these contributions, perhaps the two best are Antje Postema’s discussion of Ozren Kebo’s Sarajevo za početnike (Sarajevo, A Beginner’s Guide) and Vladimir Biti’s consideration of novels by Saša Stanišić and Ismet Percic. In both cases, the authors achieve what anyone writing about obscure literature from a little-known culture must do: they convince the reader that she should actually go out and read the works being discussed, and they provide a framework that would help this theoretical reader appreciate some of the nuances of what is being read. And given that the primary texts under discussion are all available in English translation, there is a fighting chance that a non-specialist in post-Yugoslav culture might be inspired to go and seek these books out, which, by the way, would be an excellent idea. The same consideration for non-native speakers of BCS is not to be found in the second section of the book. Here we are treated to complex discussions of works that, for the most part, have not been translated into English (or other major languages) and therefore we simply have to take the authors’ claims at face value. On the contrary, the last section of the book is the most accessible and successful. Guido Snel’s article on Dubravka Ugrešić and Danilo Kiš is simply a splendid examination of the role that archives, lists and other memory aids play in literature to overcome (or not) historical loss. And Vladimir Zorić’s article focusing on portraits of the Serbian philosopher Radomir Konstantinović in various media and at various historical periods provides enormous insight into the process of memorialization using a single telling example. Finally, Martin Pogačar’s essay on the digital afterlife of Yugoslav pop icons in post-Yugoslav cyberspace opens an entirely new and quite fascinating consideration of how ‘normal’ people use contemporary social media to commune with the dead and make sense of their own past and present.