is a professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a novelist writing both in Serbian and English. His publications include a comparative study of the Slavic novel Borderline Culture, 1993; and the novels Moment of Silence, 1990 and Lonely America, 1994.
The Balkans and Turkey are a space on the borders of Europe marking a cultural encounter with the oriental. Constituted as an undeclared enemy, this object of anxiety acts as a catalyst for collective cohesion, eliciting mythic narratives calling for exclusion from the symbolic realm of the European community.
Tomislav Longinovic extends the concept of translation of texts to the translation of political contexts: The politics and history of the Balkans, he argues, represent the “untranslatable” and “foreign” that can not be compared under any circumstances to the politics of the “western world”. And yet, as Longinovic argues, similarities between American and Serbian behaviour against the perceived Islamic threat after September 11 and during the Kosovo war respectively, exist. These unacknowledged and “untranslated” similarities between politically unequal partners demonstrate the need for the translation of cultures and political contexts that open up spaces between cultures whilst keeping in mind the alterity of the foreign in translation.
