Gendered Intimacies of the Nationalist Archive

This chapter is about the ways in which the performative practices of the Women in Black movement of Belgrade come to inhabit and trouble such sovereign accounts of archival discursivity as a vehicle for authenticating and accommodating an incomplete past. If these activists keep something about the archive, this is what is “not yet”, in Jacques Derrida’s terms: namely, the event of an “other” archive. The concern of this chapter is with how national myths and public spectacles, which aim to manage the conditions of appropriate commemoration, draw on imageries and imaginaries of proper gender. At the same time, it is concerned with how these activists trouble the sedimented intimacies of the nationalist archive, by occupying the position of the internal enemy in ways that replot the gendered and ethnicized apparatus of belonging.

Mourning Otherwise

This chapter engages the discursive conditions that made ethno-nationalist ideologies and armed conflicts of the 1990s possible and probable. Indeed, the question of how to recall the late twentieth-century history of former Yugoslavia constitutes a central aspect of the Women in Black labour of memory. The dissolution of Yugoslavia, especially the normalization of nationalist military violence in the mid-1990s, has manifested gendered norms as constitutive of nationalist discourses. Drawing on the ways in which the movement performatively brings forth an alternative public to embody the potentiality of displaced memory, this chapter argues in favor of breaking through the universalist, moralist, and humanist scripts of mourning. It seeks to make sense of the politically enabling ways in which these activists stage mourning as a site of agonistic resignification in order to interrogate the injustices and foreclosures which sustain dominant regimes of grievability, in Judith Butler’s terms.

Political Languages of Responsiveness and the Disquiet of Silence

This chapter elaborates on the political performativity of responsiveness that is articulated or withheld in the context of antinationalist modes of accounting for the past. In acknowledging the dead of the rival side, who have been treated as dispensable during the wars of Yugoslav succession, Women in Black public assemblies intervene in the ways in which violences of dispossession committed in the name of national interests came to be perceived, heard, embodied, and remembered in Serbia, but also in other former republics of Yugoslavia. Both during and after the violence, these political subjects have been seeking to counter the attempts of various agents –i.e., official authorities and media- to trivialize or deny the violence that “their own” national intimates inflicted upon others. Through a performative enactment of silence in their public vigils, they reshape the vocal registers that condition the configurations of the political. The chapter pursues such questions: how reflective responsiveness might unsettle the regimes of audibility and speakability associated with the political discourses of dealing with the enduring aftermath of war atrocities? And how does gendered silence “speak” the languages of the political in such contexts.

Spectral Spaces of Counter-Memory

How does the political action of reclaiming a public space for remembering others and otherwise work to transfigure the polis and the ways in which it comes to organize its remembrance? The counter-memory of Women in Black is enacted through deheroicized standing at Belgrade’s Republic Square, under the national hero’s sleepless gaze. This chapter engages with the ways in which theWomen in Black political actors carve an expansive cartography of critical memory in the polis through performative idioms of body-archive that decenter national memory as a haunted space of political death. This account bears on the modes of embodiment, knowledge, as well as affective intensity that is rendered possible by the work of haunting the polis’s “organized remembrance”, in Hannah Arendt’s terms. Focusing on the agonistic eventness of appearing (out of place), the chapter offers a reflection on what kind of polis would emerge from performing the spectral potentiality of disconcerted memory: an occurrence of memory that persistently complicates the ways in which people “come together”.

Epilogue: Agonistic Re-Membering of the Political

The concluding chapter provides a summary of the main argument that has been presented throughout the book. It further discusses the theme of how we might understand the politics of im/possible mourning as a means to refigure agonistic political subjectivity beyond sovereign accounts of agency. This theme has been developed in the book by exploring how the feminist and antimilitarist political collectivityWomen in Black (Žene u Crnom) in post-Yugoslavia turns mourning from a proper “feminine language” into a performative modality of aporia critically engaging with the intelligibility of the memorable and its gendered, ethnonational, and militarist configurations. The chapter outlines the thesis that vulnerability has to be rethought in its possibility of reworking the conditions by which it is marked in contexts of bodily duress, grief, and desire. Thinking (through) vulnerability together with performative agonism would prompt us to trouble the calculative, individualistic accounts that posit subjectivity in terms of sovereign will.

Introduction

This introductory chapter pursues the main question of the book: How might we capture the performative power implicit in processes of turning the impossibility of mourning into an incalculable political potentiality that deconstitutes its interpellating terms and contests state-nationalist authoritarianism? It outlines the challenge that the critical methodology of a feminist political movement in post-Yugoslavia presents for the available theoretical and political vocabularies of agonism. Through an anthropological account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade (Žene u Crnom), the Introduction addresses the ways these activists, by engaging in practices of undoing grief as feminine and national language, open onto spaces for challenging conventional divisions between the affective and the political, between the political and the performative, as well as between body and language.