"Going with one's people": Narrating collective ethnonational agency in East Sarajevo

Abstract

How do self-identified Serbs who left Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) just before and just after the 1990s siege of that city, and who settled in "Serbian" Sarajevo, from where that siege was executed, narrate agency in that displacement? How do their narrations position them in relation to post-war Serbian ethnonationalism seeking to interpellate them? This article traces how a totalizing ethnonational modality of agency in their vernacular accounts of departure renders their experiences appropriable by Serbian ethnonationalist counter-historiography. This modality chimes with the latter's moral emphasis on victimhood and sacrifice. More fundamentally, I argue, it reinforces the postulation of an ontological order inhabited by ethnonations, and thus retrospectively constitutes the very collective subject posited by that counter-historiography: "the Serbian people in BiH”.