Breathing Underwater

Breathing Underwater: The Complicity of the Defaced in Post-Multinational Literature offers an intervention in contemporary world literature studies by introducing the post-multinational condition as a dynamic and polyvalent platform for literature's worlding. Moving beyond conventional frameworks, it reorients how we read the works of Dubravka Ugrešić, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišić and challenges prevailing assumptions in narrative and literary studies.

The book presents Dubravka Ugrešić, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišić as post-multinational writers who strive to disentangle themselves from the burdensome legacy of the dismembered Yugoslavia. After its dissolution, Ugrešić settled in the Netherlands but continued to write in her own language; Hemon settled in the United States and started to write in English, and Stanišić settled in Germany and took recourse in German. Being thrown into multiple non-belongings, they resorted to the depersonalized medium of writing so as to forge an alliance with the faraway and unknown defaced counterparts who likewise felt stranded in their presents. By instigating such a long-distance platform of commonality, the writers seem to have drawn more benefits than those whom they pretended to be taking into protection. The more addressees they galvanized, the more powerful they became, turning from history's outcasts into the masters of a complicitous alliance.

Drawing on imperial and post-imperial studies, postcolonial and legal theory, memory and trauma studies, visual and media studies, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and historiography, this book reads Ugrešić, Hemon, and Stanišić through an eminently political lens, one that examines how post-post-imperial states administer citizenship and belonging.