Stone Speaker: Medieval Tombs, Landscape, and Bosnian Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

ISBN-13: 9780312239466 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 230 str.

Amila Buturovic; Francis Jones

Opis

The Poet Mak Dizdar (d.1971) has become a cultural icon in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. Inspired by the lapidary imagery and epitaphs of medieval Bosnian tombstones, his best-acclaimed collection of poetry, Stone Sleeper, reawakens the medieval voices and assigns them a new role in the historical imagination of contemporary Bosnians. In this study, Amila Buturovic looks at Stone Sleeper's recovery of the ancestral world as an effort to refashion the sentiments of collective belonging. In treating the medieval tombstones as sites of collective memory, Dizdar's poetry evokes new possibilities for Bosnians to cast aside national differences based primarily on religion and embrace a pluralistic identity rooted in the sacred landscape of medieval Bosnia.

Recenzje

'The idea proposed by Amila Buturovic is, in a word, superb. Mak Dizdar's life and work, as well as the ensuing events leading to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, offer a textbook example of a cultural figure who looms central in the historical, political, and cultural imagination of a people. As such, Buturovic's work promises to be relevant far beyond the scope of its purported field-that is, students and scholars of the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and a variety of other regions will have much to learn from Buturovic's study.' - Ammiel Alcalay

Spis treści

Introduction Re-Writing the Nation: of Mak Dizdar, Text, and Context The Archaeology of the Stecak: Historical and Cultural Considerations The Ancestral Voices Speak: Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper Shaping the Collective Memory: Sacred Space, Text, and History Conclusion Appendix of Dizdar's poetry in Bosnian original and English translation

O autorze

AMILA BUTUROVIC received her Ph.D. in Islamic studies from McGill University in 1994. She has been visiting Professor at Haverford College and The University of Toronto. Currently, she is Assistant (Associate) Professor of Religious Studies and Humanities at York University. Her research explores Medieval and contemporary Islamic cultures from a broad-based, interdisciplinary perspective. Her publications include essays on Arabic and Bosnian Literature, on religion and cultural identity in Bosnia, as well as translations from Bosnian Literature.