(Post)Yugoslav Identities and East-West Paradigm: Empires and Imperialism on the Margins of Europe

This dissertation is a postcolonial analysis of the former-Yugoslav literary canon in context, with a special focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina. It presents a theoretical and historical argument for the use of postcolonial concepts and methodologies to analyze Western relations with Eastern Europe during the Cold War before it constructs a postcolonial narrative of the canon built around three representative figures: Ivo Andric, Mea Selimovic, and Mak Dizdar.;The first chapter answers Andrew Hammond's call to analyze power relations underlying "Orientalist" construction of Eastern Europe. It details structures of integration of Eastern Europe into global capital; compares them to identical processes in postcolonial regions with the West; and confirms that we ought to analyze Western Europe and the US as the imperialist center and Eastern Europe as its periphery during the Cold War. Focusing on the ideological elements of imperialism as they were present in former Yugoslavia, the second chapter argues that the Yugoslav literary canon is a narrative of gradual (dis)engagement with Eurocentric historiography.;Following Frederic Jameson's conceptualization of the political unconscious, the textual analyses of Andric's Bosnian Chronicle and The Bridge on the Drina, Selimovic's Death and the Dervish, and Dizdar's Stone Sleeper focus especially on formal elements, narrative structures, and in particular the "dark-vilayet" seme to reveal the cultural contexts of their creation and interpretation. Focusing on the different conceptualizations of History in these narratives, I show these texts' departures from Eurocentric historiography: in Cologna's "third space," Hasan's "noble-mindedness out of spite," and Dizdar's utopic defiance. Contrary to the national(istic) interpretations, the canon is a story of defiance, spite, inaad specifically against empires. But the empty space left by these long-gone empires speaks to the one empire these texts still could not name---the contemporary West. That task remains for the post-socialist Yugoslav literatures.;This study ends with a call for analyzing continuities and discontinuities between the socialist and the post-socialist period, not least in culture. Postcolonial methodology, as this work demonstrates, can help overcome the post-socialist structural blindness to the experiences, complex global interactions, and important legacies of the former Second World.