MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
Zoran Milutinovic is Professor of South Slav Literature and Modern Literary Theory at University College London, UK, and author or editor of 9 books, including The Rebirth of Area Studies (I.B. Tauris, 2020). He is also co-editor of the book series Balkan Studies Library and Member of Academia Europaea.
In the wake of Said’s Orientalism, literary and cultural scholars turned to Ivo Andric’s Bosnia as a world between the civilized West and the Ottoman East, often contributing to stylizing this region as an Orientalist antechamber. This is clearly a misinterpretation of Andric, as are the attacks on him as a “supporter of Nazism”. Milutinovic convincingly shows that Andric was always diplomatic, in the sense that he made observations without taking sides and pointed out patterns without painting any in a better light. This study is therefore not only a critique of the contemporary Islamic reconquista of multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Bosnia, but also a warning against turning to Bosnia as a pocket of the Orient in the European Occident. * Ivana Perica, Research Fellow, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Germany *
