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Lookup NU author(s): Dr James RidingORCiD
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Routledge, 2017.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
This essay returns to Sarajevo, a city visited by Georges Perec in 1957, employing field observation and ethnographic methods that he developed during the course of his writing career. The aim, in revisiting this city and in repeating Perecquian practices, is to move beyond the clichéd ways of seeing and writing Sarajevo only as a site of trauma and as a place defined by violence. My intention as such here is to document three days in one square in Sarajevo. Field notes taken during this time are copied out word for word in what follows. The words act as a record of the everyday things, bodily movements, and nonspectacular moments, often ignored in descriptions of places defined by their traumatic pasts. Writing turned out to be a performance in itself, as place, time, and word intertwined briefly and the recounting of a present-day Sarajevo took place. Yet through this repetitive representational action, trauma and political unrest resuggested themselves. Recording place became an attempt at repairing place, in its bodily occupation of a place and in its representation of an everyday place on the page.
Author(s): Riding J
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: GeoHumanities
Year: 2017
Volume: 3
Issue: 2
Pages: 431-450
Print publication date: 09/06/2017
Online publication date: 09/06/2017
Acceptance date: 03/04/2017
Date deposited: 25/09/2019
ISSN (print): 2373-566X
ISSN (electronic): 2373-5678
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2017.1321492
DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2017.1321492
Notes: Green open access: included in Tampere University Tampub Repository
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