engleski

The Importance of Space in “Shopping for a Better Country“

In his two collections of essays and short stories Infidelities and Shopping for a Better Country Josip Novakovich deals with different fates of ordinary people living in various countries, mostly in the area of his former homeland, Yugoslavia which was torn apart in the 90s. His characters range from Yugoslav immigrants living in America to people from his native country who have experienced bitter consequences of war, regardless of the nation they belong to. In his travelogues through his war-torn homeland and other European countries such as France, Austria, Hungary and Russia, Novakovich shows his cosmopolitan spirit, as well as an “exilic impulse” which drives him to be constantly on the move. As a kind of “voluntary exile” who writes in English as a second language, the author experiences diaspora space as one of the reasons of multiple, hybrid and fluid identities – crossing borders includes hybridity of different nations, races, cultures, religions and worldviews. The individual is at the same time connected with the space where he lives, as well as distinguished from it. The aim of this paper is to analyse Novakovich’s essays in the context of the author’s notion of space as an inevitable constituent and determinant of one’s identity as well as the influence of diaspora space on the entire community.

Josip Novakovich; space; diaspora; hybridity; identity

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