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In:Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe
Edited by Martina Berrocal and Aleksandra Salamurović
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 84] 2019
► pp. 211–238

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Chapter 9
Epistemes of contemporary nationhood

Narrations of the past, legitimations of the future

Published online: 23 July 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.84.09maj
Abstract
This chapter aims to map the configurations of dominant epistemes of the contemporary Serb nationhood in Republika Srpska (RS) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) as truth claims in the current social hegemony founded on discourses legitimizing the 1992–1995 wars. By engaging in a combination of archeological-genealogical and a discourse historical approach to critical discourse analysis (DHA CDA), I analyze three types of elite discourses shaping the postwar cultural politics in Republika Srpska (RS): the poetic, the philosophical and political discourse. More specifically, I focus on the trope of history repeating, which, as an extended metaphor, also realizes its argumentative potential and becomes a topos of history, visible in the legitimation of the Srebrenica genocide preempting the potential Serb pogrom like the one in World War II, securing the epistemic warranty of contemporary Serb nationhood and providing a raison d’être for the Republika Srpska.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • What “genocide does”: Narrating a “repeatedly” violent history in the BiH context
  • Discourse analysis as a method for cultural research: The “history repeating” trope and its epistemes
  • Data
    • Looking for the holy grail of nationhood: The poetic discourse
    • Reading Agamben and genocide: The philosophical discourse
    • The creation of Republika Srpska: Culturalized politics discourse
  • In lieu of a conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Websites
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Websites
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Žíla, Ondřej
2023. ‘Exodus’: The Serb flight from Sarajevo, its legacy, and its role in the political memory of Republika Srpska. Nations and Nationalism 29:3 ► pp. 1007 ff. DOI logo
Barton Hronešová, Jessie
2022. Ethnopopulist denial and crime relativisation in Bosnian Republika Srpska. East European Politics 38:1 ► pp. 21 ff. DOI logo
Majstorović, Danijela & Zoran Vučkovac
2022. Bosnia and Herzegovina After the Transition: Forever Postwar, Postsocialist and Peripheral?. In The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 years into the ‘Transition’ [International Political Economy Series, ], ► pp. 81 ff. DOI logo
Majstorović, Danijela
2021. Decolonizing a Future in a European Periphery Between Socialist Interruptions and the Postcolonial Present. In Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo
Majstorović, Danijela
2021. From Discourse to Body and Back via Critical Materialism: Bringing Discourse and Affect Research Together. In Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo

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