Ambiguous Perpetrators and Forward-Looking Ethics: Perspectives from Post-Yugoslav Autofiction
Ambiguous Perpetrators and Forward-Looking Ethics: Perspectives from Post-Yugoslav Autofiction

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the absence of classical perpetrator-narrators in post-Yugoslav autofiction on the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s. Instead of centering a war criminal’s retrospective self-explanation, these narrations often displace perpetration onto unstable, proximate figures. These include soldiers whose culpability remains contestable and descendants who inherit suspicion, silence, and fractured family histories. This study contends that such narratological displacement produces a shift in ethical orientation. The focus moves from accounting for past acts of violence to negotiating how communities might coexist after violence, with memory conceptualized as a practice that can perpetuate division or foster a more just common life. The analysis is structured around two complementary ethical scenarios. First, it interprets a confession by a narrator who doesnot unambiguously qualify as a perpetrator, as seen in Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una (Knjiga o Uni, 2011). This is treated as a form of testimony that resists denial and dissociation while opening personal memory to collective accountability. Second, it explores dilemmas faced by children of alleged perpetrators who never confess. This focus is on Lana Bastašić’s Catch the Rabbit (Uhvati zeca, 2018) and Goran Vojnović’s Yugoslavia, My Fatherland (Jugoslavija, moja dežela, 2013), where suspicion and familial silence reshape identity, loyalty, and responsibility without legal closure. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s work on memory, testimony, and “little ethics,” as well as Jeffrey Blustein’s ethics of memory, the article conceptualizes these narratives as forward-looking ethical interventions. These texts foreground attribution, the civic stakes of speech, and the role of testimony in envisioning institutions and relationships capable of sustaining peace.

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