Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-Torn Communities

Fethi Keles of Rhode Island College reviews Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-Torn Communities. This book sets out to describe and explain the complicated links between forced migration, memory, and identity in a global diasporic space made up of Bosnians who left their villages, towns, and cities because of the 1991–1995 war in their home country and settled in countries such as Australia, the United States, Germany, Austria, and Sweden. Himself a survivor of the havoc wrought in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the author writes from within in a way that does not sacrifice analytical clarity and theoretical sophistication to concerns over hyper-reflexive ethnography. The book is crafted around the premise that forced migrants perform various acts of remembrance through local attachments or strong feelings of belonging to a sub-national level of locality in the home country.

Read the book review at https://doi.org/10.1111/imre.12210.