Introduction

Abstract

Awillingness to create and destroy, to sacrifice and dispossess, to give up and take away life, all in the name of “belonging,” imderpins the politics and poetics of nationalism. Wherever we turn, the construction of nationhood proves to be a Performance of ardent aspirations and acts. In 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina entered the world stage as a site of the most ab- ject kinds of national assertion witnessed in Europe since World War II: genocide, destruction, forced migration, concentration camps, and sys- tematic rape. “Ancient ethnic hatreds” became the most populär trope in the discourse surrounding the Bosnian war. By the end of the war in 1995, thousands of people had been killed, many more displaced, and most of their material possessions confiscated or turned to rubble. Even as I write, nearly six years after the Dayton agreement, the Situation in Bosnia- Herzegovina remains volatile. Although the Dayton, thankfully, secured peace on the g round, it für the r destabilized any sense of national unity as it dissociated many people from their prewar resources and living envi- ronments. Sadly, then, national partition, rooted in religious differences and manifested in an array of Symbols and actions, is a distinct reality of Dayton. The boundaries among the three groups are highlighted as each group—Muslims/Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats—increasingly cling to their particularist pleas, memories, and interpretations of the immediate and distant past.