| Abstract (english) | Taking as a starting point the eventfulness of 1989—the fall of the Berlin Wall—as a historical break, the author contends that by virtue of historicist inscription, but also careful textual analysis, it could be argued that late-socialist literature in Croa-tia, especially in the genre of the travel narrative (real or imaginary), has been able to register, accumulate and project some of the preceding and successive shifts and breaks. It is in the travel narrative, as recently revived in postmodernist literary theory and conceived of as a para-ethnographic writing, that the discourses of self, other, identity, heteroglossia, translation, and representation find their full articulation. In particular, the article discusses these and related issues on the tentatively constituted corpus of mid-to-late 1980s travel narratives of Croats in the United States by Božica Jelušić, Neda Miranda Blažević, and Josip Novakovich. By conjoining these writers the article offers a new interpretative framework that aims to both transnationalize the reception of these writers and their work, and point to indicative array of hete-ro-images of America that at the time spawned specific auto-images of late socialist Croatian and Yugoslav societies thus producing an emergent vocabulary of historical change. |
