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Part of
Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe
Edited by Martina Berrocal and Aleksandra Salamurović
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 84] 2019
► pp. 211–238

Chapter 9
Epistemes of contemporary nationhood

Narrations of the past, legitimations of the future

This chapter aims to map the configurations of dominant epistemes of the contemporary Serb nationhood in Republika Srpska (RS) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) as truth claims in the current social hegemony founded on discourses legitimizing the 1992–1995 wars. By engaging in a combination of archeological-genealogical and a discourse historical approach to critical discourse analysis (DHA CDA), I analyze three types of elite discourses shaping the postwar cultural politics in Republika Srpska (RS): the poetic, the philosophical and political discourse. More specifically, I focus on the trope of history repeating, which, as an extended metaphor, also realizes its argumentative potential and becomes a topos of history, visible in the legitimation of the Srebrenica genocide preempting the potential Serb pogrom like the one in World War II, securing the epistemic warranty of contemporary Serb nationhood and providing a raison d’être for the Republika Srpska.
Keywords: regimes of truth, epistemes, topos of history, Serbhood, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • What “genocide does”: Narrating a “repeatedly” violent history in the BiH context
  • Discourse analysis as a method for cultural research: The “history repeating” trope and its epistemes
  • Data
    • Looking for the holy grail of nationhood: The poetic discourse
    • Reading Agamben and genocide: The philosophical discourse
    • The creation of Republika Srpska: Culturalized politics discourse
  • In lieu of a conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Websites
Published online: 23 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.84.09maj
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