CAS SEE Seminars with Guests: Zorica Siročić

While the “reparative turn” in literary criticism demonstrates that it is possible to read and interpret in a reparative manner, does the same logic apply to political acting? In other words, can we practice reparative politics?

This presentation uses the example of feminist and queer festivals in Southeastern Europe to offer a tentatively positive answer to this question. The argument builds on the empirical research suggesting that festivals’ playfulness and creativity, interpretative (gender) dissent, acceptance of organizational and programmatic hybridity, belonging, and positive affect can be considered as features that would characterize the reparative political style. The reparative politics is vital in a context that is marked by an individual and collective trauma of heteropatriarchy, violent breakdown of the common state, and post-transitional economic precarity.

The presentation challenges the common assumptions of a passive millennial generation and offers an impulse for rethinking of the conventional understanding of what is means to practice and think “politics”.