Dissertation: How the Silence Sounded: Writing Trauma in Albanian and Post-Yugoslav Literatures. University of Michigan.

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/178044

Abstract: This dissertation traces how trauma became the primary lens for framing, reading, and understanding the literatures of Albania and the Yugoslav successor states after the collapse of state socialism. Focusing on writers from Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, and Croatia, I show that the traumatic framework operates at both the local and transnational level, involving a diverse set of actors who produce and reproduce a hegemonic narrative that these countries’ past was uniquely violent and traumatic. By untangling the different ways that these writers were asked to testify, and the ways they refused and resisted the testimony, I historicize the process of establishing trauma as the primary framework of promoting and circulating Albanian and post-Yugoslav literatures at the turn of the 20th century. I argue that this process depended on the mutually constitutive relationship of postsocialist national and collective memory construction in Albania and the Yugoslav successor states, and the introduction of each country’s national literatures to the international literary market. At the end of the Cold War, writers, translators, editors, academics, publishers—in the region and abroad—together with local and transnational memory institutions, politicians, and supranational entities like the European Union, perpetuated the idea that Albania, Kosovo, Serbia and Croatia were nations fully traumatized by socialism and war. For local political and cultural elites, the narrative of trauma and victimhood—what I have called traumatic exceptionalism—helped to disavow the socialist past, strengthen their own power and appeal to the West. For Western Europe and North America, the traumatic framework was an effective method for discrediting socialism and exerting political influence on Albania and the Yugoslav successor states during their periods of transition. I show that the verbalization of suffering and trauma in the form of testimony was crucial to the goals of these local and international entities and to the establishment of the traumatic framework. As a result, Albanian and post-Yugoslav writers faced intense pressures to testify to their trauma according to a prescriptive passive, apolitical victimhood.

My dissertation theorizes the subversive strategies that writers used to resist the traumatic framework and the generalizing effect, ethnonationalism, and historical revisionism that it promotes. To do this, I examine the multiple manifestations of refusals to testify in the writing of Ali Podrimja (1942-2012), Daša Drndić (1946-2018), David Albahari (1948-2023), and Luljeta Lleshanaku (1968  -). The central method of resistance that I explore, which also shapes the entire dissertation, is these writers’ use of silence as a strategy of subversion against the imperative to testify. Throughout this dissertation, I model a method for reading Podrimja, Drndić, Albahari and Lleshanaku—as well as Albanian, post-Yugoslav, and postsocialist writers more generally—beyond the simplified generalization produced by the traumatic framework. The fiction and poetry that I analyze in this study deal with systematic and large-scale violence, including the Second World War and the Holocaust, the repression of the Albanian population in Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav wars, and the authoritarianism of the Albanian dictatorship. My sustained engagement with silence leads me to other, related forms of resistance in these four writers: the rejection of conventional narrative structures, the refusal to provide reconciliatory conclusions that redeem suffering, and a distinct move away from stories that operate on a binary of victim and perpetrator, and toward the implicated subject. By attending to the subversive silences and other forms of narrative disruption employed by these authors, I show that despite writing about violent events, they do not adhere to the norms of victimhood that the traumatic framework designates for them. By resisting the externally imposed imperative to testify, they subvert the instrumentalization of trauma in service of homogenizing ethnonational narratives of history (Podrimja and Albahari); challenge the memory standards imposed by world literature and the European Union (Lleshanaku and Drndić); and through a lack of redemption or reconciliation, prevent the overidentification of the reader with the victim, instead proposing a relation of implicated subjecthood.

The Wretched on the Walls: A Fanonian Reading of a Revolutionary Albanian Orphanage, Feminist Critique #3, 2020 (pp. 39-63). https://doi.org/10.52323/309702

Lives of Leisure and Labor - an interactive essay about steamboat history and labor organizing in 19th century Detroit, made for the Detroit River Story Lab

See my researcher profile on the NYPL blog, here.