This most timely book powerfully tackles the question of how war—being officially over—continues to persist and ravage the lives of next generations. It offers an excellent account of the past's manifestation in the semiotic and discursive practices of the present, specifically focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina and the 1992–1995 war. The book is firmly grounded in research on the relationship between memory, space, and remembering as affective experience and hence its central concept of ‘traumascapes’, woven throughout the five analytical chapters. The presented interdisciplinary analyses draw on a wide range of concepts and principles from (critical) discourse analysis, linguistic/semiotic landscape studies, and (social) semiotics to identify discourses of remembering around the 1992–1995 war.
In the first analytical chapter, considering language-space relationships, the author demonstrates how the content, arrangement, and emplacement of graffiti contribute to constructing its violent character. ‘Graffscapes’, as revealed in this chapter, bring the war back to life for citizens by representing and concurrently (re)constituting negative affect including hate and fear. The chapter also provides a most informative discussion on the anatomy of linguistic violence emphasizing its discursive, semiotic, affective, and experiential aspects.
I found the chapter on living memorials, comprised of people who are ‘crying’ not to forget the war atrocities, the most heart-wrenching and truly unforgettable. Drawing on social semiotics, multimodality, and performance theories, Kosatica methodically explains how the survivors’ commemorative initiatives and public art installations—which place the body in the center of the performance—allow them to preserve the victims’ memory and simultaneously become a powerful voice of resistance to the current dominant discourse of genocide denial.
The third analytical chapter scrutinizes online comments made by citizens reporting on violent and/or threatening incidents. It highlights the virtual space as a platform enabling citizens to continue their engagement in war memory. Here using the discourse-historical approach, the author reveals how topics such as ‘from shaming to blaming’ and ‘history in service of nationalistic ideology’ reflect people's active participation in the war discourse.
The last analytical chapter, relying on the concept of historical trauma, offers a discourse analysis of oral narratives of the second-generation of Bosnia-Herzegovina diaspora in Switzerland. Since one of Kosatica's interests is identifying trauma in the participants’ narratives, the analysis would greatly benefit from more detailed data transcription. As the author emphasizes, discursive approaches have the potential to identify traumatic experiences in people's stories. Yet as researchers we need to work with conversational transcripts that reveal interactional features at the micro-level, especially to capture affective experiences. Still, the presented analysis demonstrates how trauma and war discourses persist beyond Bosnia-Herzegovina, negatively impacting the lives of future generations.
The book showcases the relevance of examining post-war societies for semiotic practices of remembering—understood not only as a struggle to preserve the memory of those who lost their innocent lives but also as an extension of discourses of violence. This brilliant and thought-provoking publication clearly evinces that, yes, war can and does continue despite its formal termination.
