For montage

Sarajevo is simply a name or a sign that grabs our attention, so that there will no longer be a Sarajevan landscape. It is such so that nothing else will get mixed in with it, and so that we do not get mixed up in it, that is, we other cosmopolitan Europeans (Nancy, 2000: 145).

To be for montage is not to be for pastiche…for a whimsical hotchpotch to which there is nothing more. To be for montage is to be for a tonality of fragments…Lev Kuleshov, the avant-garde Soviet filmmaker and theoretician, referred to his own particular strategy of montage, his rapid intersplicing of differently situated people and urban landscapes, as ‘creative geography’ (Pred, 1995: 26–28).

I am from a Lancashire cotton mill town in the northwest of England and have no immediate connections to Bosnia. Yet I can remember references to the war in Bosnia and the word, the name, Sarajevo, becoming part of my childhood vocabulary. News reports of the war in Bosnia by journalists staying at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo were some of the only TV news I remember absorbing as a child. Nightly news broadcasts that seemed to take up an infinite amount of time, beamed across Europe to the screen of a house on the outskirts of Preston, Lancashire. They traced the journey Zekija and her son Dino made, as they reached a neighboring Lancashire cotton town, Blackburn, in 1992, after escaping Novi Travnik in central Bosnia at the outbreak of the war. They would go on to become friends with a family of Slovenians who lived nearby, and through them I first met Dino and Zekija. In addition to the time spent with Zekija and Dino in the UK, I met Belma and her husband Ahmed at a protest in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, they tied a white ribbon around my arm in Prijedor in northwest Bosnia and we walked to Srebrenica together in eastern Bosnia. When my father died suddenly during the writing of the book this retort is about, Ahmed attended the funeral and now lives in Derby, England, with Belma.

They are only some of the contributors to a community film that I was making about Bosnia, which I have never finished yet hope to revisit. I describe a personal history to introduce this author response in order to reveal the background work that goes into a book, the relationships that I have built with people in Bosnia and the diaspora in the UK and in Australia. The time spent creating small yet meaningful collaborations with academics, artists, activists, and non-governmental organizations. I have traveled with genocide survivors as part of the annual peace march, carefully documented monuments in the landscape, analyzed artworks and archival documents, and followed a protest movement providing a first-hand ethnographic account of an uprising. These are the stories that make up the book this review forum is arranged around. They are woven within a book which is an attempt to show not tell the reader what Bosnia is like, an aim that Jeffrey describes as humble. The book in part takes the form of a travelogue, and as Laketa writes in her review, this is an imperialist genre which leads to the questions of positionality that Carabelli focuses upon, and my presence, or absence, in the landscape. Jeffrey too sees the experimental form of the book which strays across genres, writing that this perhaps could be an artwork rather than a monograph and Dittmer reiterates this, before asking questions that speak to Drozdzewski’s reading on the politics of remembering. I will reply thematically and concentrate upon positionality, the travelogue as an imperialist genre, and the geographical imagination in retort, arguing for montage as a critical methodology. Experimentation with montage in Bosnia, builds upon a literary approach taken in my first monograph about landscape, memory, World War I, and a poet (Riding, 2017), and draws from a long history of experimental work in geography from Olsson (1980, 1991) to Pred (1995, 2000) and more recently Matless (2015) and others (see Hawkins, 2019).

Geographic representation plays a decisive role in constructing a popular geographical imagination by building ‘imaginal’ worlds, and human geographers have explored the ‘geopolitical implications and effects of pictures’ and indeed, films, maps, and monuments as I have done in Bosnia (Bottici, 2014). Yet it is Said’s (2003) notion of ‘imaginative geography’ as an imperial projection that is key to my understanding of the geographical imagination. Daniels (2011: 183) refers to this as the ‘darker side’ of the geographical imagination; the issue of ‘who possesses the powers of the imagination’ and ‘where it is materially deployed’ (Daniels, 2011: 183). The geographical imagination is a view from somewhere not nowhere, defining places and peoples; what is historically, a one-dimensional, imperial, European, Western, white gaze (Morrison, 1992).

Unlike a traditional travelogue, journeying through Bosnia in a single trip like West (1941) or Evans (1876), or a number of travels in Bosnia like Holbach (1910), I deploy literary montage to create a non-linear structure that crumples time in place. Yet as Calvino (1974: 14) writes, your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages, which leads Perec to the constraint, force yourself to see more flatly (Perec, 2008: 51). Following Perec and his attempt to see more flatly, there is an attempt to de-center the singular view and to constellate fragments. I aim to show the importance of telling multiple not singular stories, by retelling the memories of others and re-presenting images of war alongside descriptions of the present. What is more, I display the fundamental importance of the geographical imagination and the travelogue to imperial visions (Bassin, 1999). When Evans (1876) traveled through Bosnia in 1875 at the height of imperialism, he noted its Islamic nature. This was a standard response in the regional travel writing of the era, evident also in the Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia undertaken by Munro (1895). While Edmonds (1927) later extolled the hospitality of these exoticized and primitive locations, where an Englishman could travel without fear of being shot. The reason for including these imperialist travelogues, is to reveal the Balkanism of much writing by British men and women about this peninsula in southeastern Europe.

To move beyond the imperialist traditional comforting geographical authorial voice deployed in these previous journeys, the flat yet fragmentary methodology deployed in The Geopolitics of Memory: A Journey to Bosnia tells a spatial story of the mêlée (Nancy, 2000). Following Massey (2005: 59) on space as ‘open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming’ and Pred (1995, 2000) on montage as ‘radical heterogeneity, often focusing on seemingly inconsequential details to project the largest possible picture’ (Pred, 2000: xiii), the book attempts to show

a montage of the present, a history of the present in montage form, an assemblage of images…a set of distant, not so distant and very recent (geographical hi)stories, a tonality of fragments which brings the past into tension-filled constellation with the present moment, which speaks to the here and now in strikingly unexpected but potentially meaningful and politically charged ways. (Pred, 1995: 23–24)

By enacting montage and conceptualizing space in such a way, the experimental text holds ‘history to be open’ and this is ‘a prerequisite, too, for the possibility of politics’ (Massey, 2005: 59). Indeed, the method of montage contributes for Benjamin (1982: 574),

to a dialectical reading of history defined not as a continuum projected out of the past and propelled by progress into the future, but history apprehended from our vantage-point in the present as ruptured moments that take on significance because of their relationship to the present. (Willis, 1990: 41)

I attempt to build a ‘tonality of fragments’ and to foreground the stories of others (Pred, 2000: xiii). On the occasions when describing the landscape as I witness it, I attempt to do this matter-of-factly, in order to reveal distance and acknowledge my position as an outsider, and juxtapose this with the fleeting moments of bodily connection and a collapse of self and world in the landscape (Nancy, 2008). While its flat methodology and montage form has encouraged a lively debate, I am glad to see extensive engagement with my book and indeed my positionality. The large presence of white male academics in Bosnia producing historical political science from the UK and the US is a problem, which has led to the silencing of other voices and the online abuse of female Bosnian academics.

I recently discovered that a few miles from my childhood cotton town is a small port called Poulton-le-Fylde that sent a ship into slaving making half-a-dozen or so journeys (Eddo-Lodge, 2017: 5). Cotton spinning was a colonial endeavor with Manchester and Liverpool at the center of a global trade of cotton and people, what Yusoff (2019) describes as the establishment of the extractive economies of subjective life under colonialism and slavery. The erasure of this history from my home landscape revealed a need to look again at the region I call home, and to deconstruct ‘the imperialism of the imagination’ (Goldsworthy, 1998). An exploitation of Balkan history and geography in Western cultural representations and performances has created a region that is the ‘Wild East’ of Europe and Oriental at the same time and yet tantalizingly ambiguous: simultaneously attracting and repelling outsiders (Goldsworthy, 1998). As Goldsworthy (1998: 211) writes in Inventing Ruritania, this is ‘the way in which an area can be exploited as an object of the dominant culture’s need for a dialogue with itself’.