Between “this” side and “that” side: On performativity,youth identities and “sticky” spaces

Abstract

Keywords

Ethnicity space affect emotions intensities Bosnia and Herzegovina

Introduction

Lorena: I have been to the Old Bridge a few times. It was nice to see it but I prefer to stay on this side.

Me: How come? Did something happen while you were there?

Lorena: No, nothing ever happened. I just don’t feel comfortable going to that side … It’s hard to explain …

Lorena is in her final year of high school, attending one of the ethnically segregated schools in the post-conflict city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The Old Bridge (or Stari most), beautiful piece of architecture and in many ways the symbol of the city, belongs for Lorena to a space she calls “that side” and therefore a territory she rarely ventures to, even though the school she attends is merely a few hundred meters away. The Old Bridge is one of several different places that emerge as marks of the continuing formal and informal political and ethnic divisions between two main ethnic groups in Mostar (see Figure 1). Twenty years after the war devastated the city and the whole country, social and political life continues to experience different ethno-national polarizations both at the institutional level as well as in everyday life. These processes of boundary making are involved in the constant reproduction of spaces deemed Bosniak or Muslim and those designated as Croatian or Catholic. The social and spatial border separates “this” and “that” side of the city as ethnically designated spaces, yet the border is not continuous and fixed along its path, rather it is shifting, ambiguous and differentially negotiated in social space. The boundary markings in social spaces are not always visible or known to the uninformed observers, such as for example groups of tourists that continually traverse these spaces, yet they are naturalized in the lives and identities of young Mostarians. However, the question remains: how does the differentiation of bodies and subjectivities emerge within lived spaces of Mostar? “It is hard to explain”, said Lorena and as I talked to her on several occasions during my visits to the school, she tried to describe a rather vague and embodied sense of discomfort that she experiences on those rare occasions when she goes to the Old Bridge. This paper delves into such rather unstructured and unqualified bodily sensations as affective intensities involved in the embodied experiences of difference in Mostar, pointing to a complex and intertwined relationship between discourse and materiality of the body, as well as between identity-claims and everyday sensitivities in urban space. The Old Bridge emerges as, what I call, a “sticky” space for Lorena and for most of her peers, a space whose affective resonance impinges upon her body engendering different capacities to act in those spaces. Through differing affective intensities the nexus between space and identity is constantly recreated, in ways that, in the case of Lorena at least, strengthens fixed and antagonistic accounts of both identity and space in Mostar.

Figure 1.

The Old Bridge or “Stari most” (photo taken by the author).

In this article, I investigate the performativity of everyday practices – doings and sayings – that work to constitute identities and spaces through different affective intensities. In doing so, I attempt to bridge a gap between Judith Butler’s account on performativity and affect theory by developing the notion of “sticky” space that I define as a performative embodied space saturated with affect. The article builds on the literature that highlights the spatial approach to performativity (Butler, 2015; Gregson and Rose, 2000; Thomas, 2005), and seeks to further develop it through engaging with feminist accounts on affect and emotions (Ahmed, 2004; Butler, 2009; Sedgwick, 2003). Responding to continued critiques of Butler’s theory for failing to account for vital capacities of corporeal life (e.g. Thrift, 2008; Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000), I seek to focus on the processes of materialization that take the body as an active part in the very production of the social. Specifically, I investigate the ways different processes of materialization, constructions of identities and spaces in Mostar, occur through the intensification of emotions and affect. Engaging with Ahmed’s (2004) concept of stickiness as a way emotions and affect get attached to objects, I identify space as an object that sticks or gets saturated with affect (see also Laketa, 2016). As Cloke et al. (2008: 245) argue, “places are made meaningful only by the embodied and emotional interactions”, thus making space a connection between discourse and embodied forms of conduct (see also Holt, 2007; Hyams, 2002). Strengthening these insights, throughout my analysis I argue that variations in affective and emotional intensities become crucial in structuring and guiding young Mostarians’ everyday socio-spatial practices. Therefore, in addition to contributing to the discussions on space and performativity, my work seeks to benefit the emerging literature on affective geographies in postconflict cities and sites (Navaro-Yashin, 2012; Till, 2005), as well as children and youth political geographies (Kallio and Häkli, 2011; Skelton, 2013).

The article proceeds in the following manner. First, I give an outline of the literature on performativity of identity and space that informs this research, as well as develop the notion of sticky space through engagement with the notion of affective and emotional intensities. Second, I briefly address the political and social context of Mostar and describe the research project and its methodology. The next section investigates the performative aspects of young Mostarians’ identity by focusing specifically on the ways affective and emotional intensities are involved in a co-constitutive relationship between space and ethno-national identity in the city. I analyze everyday repetitive practices of Mostar’s youth with particular attention given to two elements of the urban landscape involved in the process of stabilizing difference – the school and the main Boulevard.

Performativity and affect: Negotiating identity and space

The concept of performativity has a long and complicated history within geographical literature. It entered the discipline in the early 1990s marking the so-called “performative turn” in the humanities and social sciences. Building mostly on Judith Butler’s influential theory on the performativity of gender and, to a lesser degree, Austin’s speech act theory, this line of inquiry was embraced by mostly post-structural and feminist geographers seeking to denaturalize different notions of identity such as race, gender, ethnicity and so on (Rose-Redwood and Glass, 2014). In Butler’s work (1990, 1993), the notion of practice and repetitive actions take center stage in explaining the concepts of identity and subjectivity. In short, the subject is said to be an effect rather than a cause of routinized and reiterative performances. Rather than positing identity as a psychological aspect of an internal self, Butler acknowledges its relational and contingent nature as a product of (often unconscious) ritualized doings and enactments, or, in Butler's words: “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (1990: 34).

To begin with, I find Butler's performativity theory relevant for the project of destabilizing the recalcitrant forces of ethno-national identity in BiH for the following reasons: the assumption that group identification is a social rather than natural process; the idea that groups are never fully sutured by the process of identification, and that, consequently, resistance to identity is always possible; and finally, that both the suturing and unraveling of identification must be accomplished in and through social space. The latter point has been particularly emphasized by geographers in an attempt to “spatialize” Butler's theory (Gregson and Rose, 2000) and this spatial articulation of the concept of performativity has been widely used from the research on gender and sex (Duncan, 1996; Longhurst, 2000), race and ethnicity (Campbell, 1998; Thomas, 2005), as well as state formation (Jeffrey, 2012; Kaiser and Nikiforova, 2008). Moreover, in her recent book (2015) Butler engages further with spatial accounts of political performativity by delving into the notion of public space and its role in the recent spate of large protest movements. While performativity theory developed in Butler’s early works did not generally “discriminate by place, space, or subject” (Thomas, 2005: 1234) and often considered spatiality merely in terms of context in which these practices take place, in her recent works she turned to the notion of space as having performative power in itself. Here, the performative space enacted as an assembly of a plurality of bodies opens the notion of the performative beyond the linguistic domain, where the geographical embeddedness is situated at the center of the political contestations.

Thomas' (2005) study of racial practices in a US high school gives a particularly compelling account of a spatial approach to performativity. She examines racial segregation in the high school lunchroom and the ways everyday spatial practices of segregated sitting reproduce racial difference. Focusing on the everyday practices of sitting Thomas (2005: 1240) concludes: “Although sitting separately is construed as a result of social difference, the sitting is itself the very method through which difference is embodied and assumed.” This study builds upon these important insights and seeks to further emphasize the embodied aspects of performativity of identity. For example, what are the learnt and acculturated affective and emotional registers of the reiterative practice of segregated sitting in Thomas’ study and what is their role in constructing difference? If we understand that racial (and other) ideologies are not merely inscribed on bodies, but rather they emerge through the body, it is important to further explore affective and emotional registers of such embodied practices.

The concept of the body has a complicated status in Butler’s theory. For example, in her highly influential Gender Trouble (1990) body appears as a neutral surface on which culture is inscribed rendering the physical body as a practical impossibility. However, in Butler's subsequent work the materiality of the body becomes less static proposing “a return to the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effects of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (Butler, 1993: 9). In other words, difference is not only imposed upon the body, wherein the body is rendered as a medium through which power operates, rather difference is materialized as an effect of reiterative embodied practices. The repetitive practices that Butler’s theory highlights are never merely representational practices, they are foremost corporeal practices such that they disrupt the rather obstinate binaries between discourse and materiality of bodies, as well as between cognitive and pre-cognitive, conscious and unconscious. Moreover, these embodied repetitions also involve variations in affective and emotional intensities that I seek to further elaborate on.

The attention to corporeality, as well as to notions of affect and emotions, have significantly marked Butler’s work in the past couple of years. Some have noted this as an ontological shift in Butler’s recent writing, relative to her early work in the 1990s, as the affective and the lived dimensions of politics become a central preoccupation (Nelson, 2015). In her latest writings (2009, 2015) Butler addresses issues of ethics and responsibility by posing bodily vulnerability as a basis for establishing and nurturing a particular ethics of grieving. In her emerging work on affect and bodily vulnerability, Butler draws on a range of feminist scholarship, one of the most notable being the work of Sara Ahmed. To that end, the paper engages further with Ahmed’s (2004) own writing on the cultural politics of emotions, in order to address the ways processes of materialization of identity and space occur through the intensification of emotions and affect.

First, following Spinoza’s understanding of emotions and affect as “modifications of the body by which the power of action on the body is increased or diminished” (Spinoza, 1959; cited in Ahmed, 2004), Ahmed explores how emotions shape what bodies can do, rather than questioning what emotions are.¹ Second, in Ahmed’s project the focus is on movements of emotions, investigating how they “stick” to objects and bodies as well as how they move. These circulations, or what she terms affective economies, involve variations in intensities of feeling that arise through contact between different bodies. Finally, Ahmed makes a direct link between what Butler calls materialization, or the “effects of boundary, fixity, and surface”, with the notion of intensification of emotions. She states: “the impression of a surface is an effect of … intensifications of feeling” (Ahmed, 2004: 24). These intensities of feeling are not understood as individualized psychologized emotions, nor are they social or collective feelings. Rather these variations in intensities that arise through contact between bodies allow for the boundary between the individual and the social to be created in the first place. In my work, I define such emotional and affective intensities as variations in bodily energy that a person can register yet that remain diffuse and difficult to pin down or name. In my analyses, I trace what these variations in bodily intensities do, investigating their social and political implications. The emotional and affective intensities are thus conceived as sites of meaning-making and boundary construction that emerge through localized social and spatial interactions. In Ahmed’s words, emotional and affective intensities are “bound up with how we inhabit the world, how we live in relationship to the surfaces, bodies and objects that make up our dwelling places” (Ahmed, 2004: 27).

However, my analysis also slightly departs from the one Ahmed employed in her Cultural Politics of Emotions book. Specifically, while Ahmed conceptualizes emotions and affect by highlighting the importance of relationality, context, and repetitive practice, in her analysis she makes a troubling move of shifting her focus on circulations of specific identifiable emotions that works to, paradoxically, decontextualize affect from “our dwelling places”. Similar critique of her work was passed by Wetherell (2015: 159) who additionally noted: “The obscurities become particularly noticeable as we attempt to translate this approach beyond the analysis of texts in cultural studies to social research on everyday, live affective scenes, events and episodes”. Building on this critique, in my work I focus on grounded performative practices that are situated in and through social space.²

To that end, I introduce the notion of “sticky space” as it offers a way of understanding how emotions and affect congeal in space through repetitive practices and the way they are involved in the constitution of boundaries between bodies and objects. Ahmed’s concept of stickiness of emotions has recently been used in geography in research ranging from investigating changing practices of motherhood through real-time video (Longhurst, 2013) to examining the concept’s methodological applications for feminist social research (Laliberté and Schurr, 2016). Furthermore, stickiness as a characteristic quality of social relations has been differently theorized through related concepts of viscosity, coagulation and thickening developed most notably in the writings of Saldanha (2007). Viscosity, for Saldanha, becomes a way to theorize racial relations and to argue for the importance of racial phenotype in understanding how racial types aggregate. In my work, I argue that social spaces become important objects in urban affective economies as places that stick or become saturated with affect, in order to investigate the very mechanisms through which these coagulations are forged. Moreover, I emphasize the stickiness of space as it enables and arrests the circulation of objects in ways that move beyond the optical regime of social difference, such as phenotype.

Finally, I find that the concept of sticky space is compatible with spatial accounts of Butler’s performativity for two reasons. First, stickiness of space highlights histories of contact between different bodies and objects where repeated habitual actions become acculturated on the body. Second, such spaces are able to account for the multiplicity of force relations that are engendered in that space (Massey, 2005), especially the performative power of institutional and “constitutive constraints” that diminish or undermine bodies’ capacity to act. Therefore, the next sections start by offering brief overview of the urban and political geography of Mostar and the methodologies the project builds upon followed by an analyses of young people’s everyday socio-spatial doings and sayings with particular focus on the city’s two sticky spaces: the school and the Bulevar.

Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Landscapes of division

The city of Mostar in southern BiH is a city that reflects many traumas and transformations of the turbulent BiH history of the modern era. It is a historic setting, the contemporary socio-spatial landscape of which is the product of war atrocities, competing nationalist ideologies, and a volatile political climate created under the administrative ethnic partitioning of post-Dayton BiH. The deadly and destructive war of 1992–1995 for many Mostarians represents a violent rupture that completely tore apart their lives, identities and belief systems, in ways that even today people still present oral histories of their lives in terms of “before” and “after” the war (Palmberger, 2013). Building on that narrative structure, I will briefly describe the political and social context of the city.

“Before the war”, Mostar was considered one of the most ethnically diverse towns in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Going beyond the myth of “peaceful coexistence”, daily life was qualified by a fluid, heterogeneous and rhizomatic relationship between its residents, as a complex negotiation of social differences and tensions (Hromadžić, 2015; Palmberger, 2013). However, following a 1992 referendum in BiH when citizens voted for state independence, a series of violent fightings was waged on its territory. Mostar endured two major sieges throughout the war (Makaš, 2007). First siege took place in spring 1992 as Serb controlled Yugoslav National Army (JNA) attacked the city with heavy artillery. In order to fight the JNA, Bosniak-led Army of BiH (ABiH) and the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) joined forces and managed to successfully defend the city. The second siege of Mostar took place in spring 1993 and was arguably even more devastating. Namely, following their joint defense against JNA, even bloodier fighting for the control of the city began between Bosniak (also called Bosnian Muslim) and Croat armed forces. The political leaders and their respective armies waged a battle for power and territory on the streets of Mostar as HVO took control of the western side of Mostar and ABiH took hold of the eastern banks of the river. In addition to mass murder and displacement, Mostar became a site of urbicide (Architectural Association of Mostar, 1993) through a targeted destruction of much of the urban public spaces as places of conviviality, including the infamous destruction of the Old Bridge. These multiple forms of violence served to propel the ethno-nationalist project of producing ethnically homogenous areas void of members of other ethnicities (Toal and Dahlman, 2011). Signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 marked the end of the war. The partitioning of land and people created under Dayton institutionalized the notion of (ethno-national) identity as rooted in territory (Mujkić, 2007).

Today, “after the war”, Mostar is a town riveted with binaries and apparent dichotomies. Split by the river Neretva into its east and west side, Mostar's picture is commonly found in undergraduate geography textbooks testifying to the power of space and the built environment. Divisions between the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian Catholic populations, between the Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, between Orientalist notions of the backward East and progressive West, seem to be embedded and naturalized in the landscape. The east side with narrow winding cobblestone streets and a horizon dominated by many minarets is contrasted with the west's grid-like structure of wide boulevards and a horizon dominated by a huge church tower and a cross. All this attests to the enormous power of space and landscape to serve as apparently objective proofs of sometimes-abstract ideas about identity, difference and belonging (Massey, 2005).

Yet such simplified and predetermined binary readings of Mostar's landscape are, in reality, constantly challenged in the relentless and immanent production of space and identity through daily negotiations and mundane practices. It is these everyday practices that I investigate in order to unravel how ethnicity is (re)produced, performed and experienced through quotidian practices of moving through space. The following section presents a glimpse into the complexities of daily life and its mundane politics. The results presented here come from a larger research project undertaken between 2011 and 2014 where I used several qualitative methodologies, from participant observation to interviews and photography projects, in order to explore the intersection between lived spaces and embodied identities of Mostarians. In this paper, I focus on the findings coming from my engagement with Mostar’s high school students attending ethnically divided schools in the city. Specifically, in the period between February and November 2013, I visited several Mostar’s high schools and conducted a series of interviews with school personnel as well as senior year students,³ with a selected number of participants also engaged in a photographic project.⁴ In order to make sure collaborating high schools were representative according to their location and their curriculum, one school from west Mostar and another from east Mostar participated in the project, along with a school located near the division line (see Figure 2) where both curricula were being taught (so-called “two schools under one roof” model). From the 54 participating students, 28 students underwent education through the Federal (unofficially, Bosniak) curriculum, and 26 were educated under the Croat curriculum.

Figure 2.

Aerial view of the city marking the former war front-line as current line of division.

In my investigation of everyday lives of Mostar's students, I recognized the need to be attentive to the effects of my own ethnicity on this research. I am native to BiH with mixed ethnic background, but also an outsider coming from a foreign university. I attempted to stay mindful of the effects of my own positionality especially insofar as ethnicity, class, and gender (among other categories) often influenced what was being said and done, and how (Sprague, 2005). In addition to different axes of my own identity that were weaved into this research, I was also constantly reminded of the inherent emotionality of the entire research process (for a further discussion see Laliberté and Schurr, 2016). That is to say, my research directed attention to my own embodied sensations in ways that positioned me as enmeshed in the very practices I was researching, rather than being above them. The conversations were all held in the local language⁵ and they revolved around the students’ views on the city, their likes and dislikes about living in Mostar, as well as their daily activities and interests. Most of my questions were rather general and open-ended as I wanted to stay receptive to the possibilities generated by these encounters. It should be noted, however, that in most of my interviews with high school students, the poisonous atmosphere of division and the role of ethnicity (“nacionalnost”) in structuring their daily life came into discussion within the first few minutes of me merely asking to describe in general terms their views of Mostar.

From “this side” to “that side”: Embodied identities of Mostar's youth

Sides are very important in the daily lives of young Mostarians, most notably sides of the river Neretva and sides of the main Boulevard that runs through the center of the town. Uninformed observers would have difficulty noticing this invisible line of division, yet it is constantly reproduced in young Mostarians' daily lives and quotidian practices (see Figure 2).

“I live entirely on one side of the city!” exclaims Emina,⁶ an 18 year old senior that lives on Mostar's east side. Emina finds this situation confining and frustrating and considers the city (or her side of it) “dead”; she hopes to move to another place as soon as she finishes high school. Activities such as going to school,⁷ doing sport activities, running errands, socializing, drinking coffee, visiting friends and so on, are for most students confined to their own ethnically designated spaces. These habitual and ritualized socio-spatial practices repeatedly enact and reinforce the imaginary division to the point that it becomes almost like a real and tangible “thing”. Nerim, an 18 year old senior explains it to me like this: “In Mostar we have a river, but it might as well be a wall. We don't know what is on their side, and they don't know what is on our side.” In other words, through repetitive daily practices the division is brought into existence as an ontological entity – a wall. Further effects of these performative practices are solidification of ethnic difference and naturalization of identities. During my interviews with Mostar's youth, the divisions between east and west side, or “this” and “that”, “our” and “their” side, were narrated almost as facts they have grown up with to the point that they are considered natural. This boundary is for the majority of students a normalized and everyday occurrence that mostly goes unnoticed, leaving the impression of two different parallel cities.

In addition to daily socio-spatial practices, different words, names and sayings are also part of the quotidian enactments of identity through which boundaries are constituted and reinforced. There are numerous examples of minor and banal linguistic differences that testify to the performative force of speech. The reproduction of the boundary between Croats and Bosniaks through these different signifying practices needs to be constantly maintained, and policed as well. Many times, I witnessed students policing themselves, as well as their peers, for words deemed “their” and not “our”. Moreover, on several occasions I got corrected for using an inappropriate term or an expression in the wrong place (or the wrong “side”). One of such instances occurred as I discussed a recently renovated square called Španski trg in Mostar with a group of students in the west side of the city. At the beginning of the conversation I got quickly reprimanded and corrected by one of the students: “Here, we don't say Španski trg, on this side we say Španjolski trg!” Of course, both Španski trg and Španjolski trg mean exactly the same (i.e. Spanish square), attesting to the importance of the signifier rather than the signified in the process of identity construction and enactment. Performativity theory suggests that identity is not merely a driver of these practices, but it is also that identity is materialized through these doings and sayings. The performativity of such utterances serves to initiate the subject as well as (re)construct space (Rose-Redwood and Glass, 2014). Reenacting these powerful norms engendered in the landscape is intricately involved in the processes of becoming a Croat or a Bosniak in Mostar, a process further elaborated in the following sections. Furthermore, failure to repeat normative utterances endangers the stability of established boundaries that are constantly (often unconsciously) regulated and surveilled. All this testifies to the power of language as a marker of difference in BiH and its important role in the ethno-nationalist project (see also Kordić, 2010; Majstorović, 2011).

Quotidian doings and sayings discussed in this study point to not only their performative “power to produce an ontological effect” (Rose-Redwood and Glass, 2014: 3), but also to the dynamic role of space as deeply constitutive of the process of identity formation. In other words, these daily habits and rituals are productive of both identity and space in Mostar. The question of ethnic difference in Mostar is inseparable from the question of the social space through which this difference is performed (see also Dwyer and Jones III, 2000). As evident in the aforementioned interview excerpts, the pronouns of “us” and “them” were reiterated numerous times in my conversations with students. However, the question of who “us” and “them” are, was rarely elaborated on. In other words, students rarely utilize the official ethnic, national and religious labels to claim their identity, such as Muslims, Croats, Bosniaks, Catholics and so on. However, the spatial marker of identity “from this side” or “from that side” serves the purpose of self-evidently and indisputably identifying who actually “we” and “they” are. Fixed space becomes a dependable marker of identity in ways that highlight the co-constituted relationship between space and identity, as geographers have long claimed (Massey, 2005; Natter and Jones III, 1997). What is more, the fixing and stabilizing of difference is achieved precisely in and through this social space. Congruent with geographic scholarship on performativity (Gregson and Rose, 2000; Thomas, 2005), as well as with Butler’s own recent writings (2015), these findings support the view that space is integral to a full understanding of the performative force of practice, rather than it being reduced to a “context” or a “stage” upon which enactments take place. The following sections further delves into the emotional and affective registers through which identity/space nexus is (re)created.

The school

The institutional setting of the school gives an essential backdrop to understanding the constitutive constraints in which the aforementioned quotidian practices are embedded. In order to understand the performative power of this institutional setting, I will briefly describe the contentious issue of education in BiH using the “before” and “after” the war dichotomy. “Before the war”, the schools, the classrooms, and the textbooks were shared amongst the schoolchildren in BiH irrespective of their ethnic, national, or religious affiliation. The unified educational system served, indeed, as a cornerstone of the Yugoslav ideology of “brotherhood and unity” (Torsti, 2009). The very first year of the 1992–1995 war engendered, however, a dramatic shift in school education. Previously mixed classes and schools experienced a stark segregation that included different buildings, textbooks, curricula, as well as different school holidays between Bosnian Croat, Serb and Bosniak population. The separation of schools and school curricula between the three ethnic groups that was brought about at the very outset of the war, continues with some modifications to this day. “After the war”, the school in BiH is a site of struggle between the three ethno-national political oligarchies. With currently no common curriculum among BiH schools, the analysis of school textbooks of the so-called “national subjects” (history, geography, language and religion) reveals their promotion of one-sided views of events, wherein differences among the ethnic groups are accentuated and commonalities undermined (Husremović et al., 2007; Turjačanin et al., 2009).

Extending upon the literature that examines curricula and textbooks in order to investigate the ways that young people are socialized into fixed and mutually antagonistic ethnic identities in BiH (e.g. Husremović et al., 2007), here I explore the degree to which visceral daily experiences (re)create and (re)articulate these ethnic categories. Butler's performativity framework urges us to shift from a pre-determined institutional perspective to a perspective of daily enactments. The school is not merely a place where texts are disseminated, it is rather an intricate site of different material and discursive forces, a built environment where these ethno-national identities are enacted, negotiated and lived through daily encounters and mundane experiences. The school building is a complex setting where difference is constantly materialized, rearticulated and sometimes entrenched.

Among the schools in Mostar, one particularly stands out as an epitome of mundane divisions and precarious effects it engenders. This school building caters to two separate curricula – Croat and Bosniak (officially called the “Federal program”). This and similar kinds of segregatory school arrangements in BiH are known as the so-called “two schools under one roof” model. During the morning shift the school is called Prometna škola representing the Croat curriculum, while in the afternoon it is called Saobraćajna škola, during which the Bosniak/Federal curriculum is taught (for a further discussion on the geopolitics of this and other schools in Mostar see Laketa, 2015). During my visits and interviews with the students and school personnel in both Saobraćajna and Prometna škola, I came to understand how the students at this school are undergoing the same vocational training (for a traffic technician), yet their textbooks and teachers are divided according to the infamous “ethnic key”. There is little communication between the teachers and personnel of the two schools and students are mostly not acquainted with their peers from the other shift. I also came to understand how the “two schools under one roof” are involved in the process of institutionalizing ethnic difference in ways that operate through both discursive and affective registers. In addition to distinct school names and separate curricula, difference is further materialized in the very built environment of the school. While students from both shifts share the classrooms – the same physical space, the two schools' administrations hold separate offices – one is on the first floor, the other on the second floor. These specific spatial arrangements direct attention to the affective registers that work to fix and stabilize identities at play. Consider, for example, my conversation with Nerim, one of the students attending Mostar’s infamous “two schools under one roof”. Nerim is a straight A student and the president of the student council, an accomplished and polite young man with high ambitions. Yet, he retells me of an incident that occurred in the school that worked to mark him as a criminal and a potential threat. He recounts:

One day I went to school a little earlier than usual, and I came during their shift. Everybody was watching me, as if I had done something. They see I am new; I'm not from their shift … They see me entering the offices here [administration offices on the second floor] … And they keep looking at me as if I am … [sentence was not completed as Nerim gestured placing his palms on his chest and shrugging his shoulders].

This rather mundane encounter in school space tells of Nerim’s affective experience of breaking the ritualized repetition of norms. His seemingly banal act of coming to school a little earlier, during “their” shift, exemplifies what is at stake in the transgression of these social and spatial boundaries. Specifically, his performative “slippage” is a moment when the hegemonic rules are vigorously reinforced and inculcated. This intense emotional encounter directs his immediate attention to his body in that space – what his body is doing and where he is going. He feels exposed to being surveilled by other's ocular gaze constructing him as an intruder, as well as a potential criminal. The corporeality of feeling out of place in his own school (see Cresswell, 1996) came to the fore as affects intensified through the repetition of the gaze (“they keep looking”). The repetition that fixed Nerim’s body also diminished his affective capacities in that space. These affective intensities thus worked to solidify and strengthen the “ethnicization” of the school space. The slippage further invokes the quality of stickiness and as such, the school can be considered a sticky space (see Figure 3) or a “site of personal and social tension” (Ahmed, 2004: 11). In other words, slippery space is not considered as opposite of stickiness, for it does not produce smooth space rather it appropriates a viscous slimy quality (Saldanha, 2007). The space becomes treacherous and tricky highlighting body’s vulnerability in that space (Butler, 2009).

Figure 3.

One of the participating high schools in Mostar (photo taken by the author).

In order to understand how school space impresses upon Nerim’s body, we need to take account of the multiplicity of force relations that operate in that space ranging from segregated schooling and divisive curricula to histories of encounters and embodied sensitivities. It is through such affective and emotional registers of both discursive and non-discursive practices that the school space itself becomes “ethnicized” (Zembylas, 2008). It is important to point that the variations in intensities became foregrounded during an act of violation of ritualized repetitions, as an act that disrupts reiterative affectivity of the everyday. Ahmed’s theory points us to understand how though such violations we feel the boundaries in the first place; how we literally “feel our way”. Considering the schools as a sticky space in the city allows accounting for both institutional as well as everyday affects involved in (re)materializing and reinforcing ethnic difference. This space impresses upon different bodies in different ways (Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2006; Militz and Schurr, 2015) and the case of the two schools under one roof presents a particularly compelling example of the shifting way that differing affective intensities stick to these spaces based on the time of day one passes through them.

The Bulevar

“I hardly ever go there”, says Sofia pointing to the direction of Mostar’s Bulevar, a large four-lane road about a hundred meters away from us. The two-kilometer long road going north–south and paralleling the river, appears at first as an innocuous car transit route, almost as a “non-place” (see Figure 4). Yet for Sofia and for most of her peers, it is one of the most distinct places in Mostar’s landscape as this road marks for them the invisible spatial border between “east” and “west” Mostar. My research directs attention to the Bulevar as a place where affect and emotion congeal to create the effect of boundary between the two ethnic entities. In order to understand how the Bulevar comes to occupy such a role in the urban landscape, it is necessary to briefly address the genealogy of the road.

Figure 4.

Mostar’s Bulevar (photo taken by the author).

Initially built at the turn of the 19th-century as a train transport route during the time of Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Bulevar converted into a car lane in the 1960s (Makaš, 2007). Afterwards, and gradually, the street evolved into one of the most important social hubs of Mostar. Areas along the Bulevar became places of urban conviviality, centering mostly on the square in front of the popular department store called “Hit” on the western side of the road (ABART, 2012). The atmosphere of conviviality that surrounded the place came to a sharp end during the 1992–1995 war. Specifically, the Bulevar became a frontline in the fightings between the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) and the Army of BiH (ABiH) in Mostar. As HVO took control of the western part of the city in 1993, they pushed and deported its Muslim residents eastwards across the Bulevar. The street then turned into a militarized boundary and a no-man’s land with checkpoints installed and free crossings prohibited for the duration of the war. After the signing of the peace agreement and unification of Mostar in 1994, the checkpoints were dismantled and free crossings were officially allowed yet hostilities remained (Makaš, 2007). As a frontline, the Bulevar suffered great destruction yet the process of reconstruction has been slower relative to other places in the city and the remnants of the war remain highly visible. The Bulevar today is a place of decay and ruin, a seemingly empty place haunted by its former function as a non-divisive main street (Kuftinec, 1998).

In order to understand the interplay between the past and the present in constructing the Bulevar as a fault line, especially for the generation that was born after the war ended, I go back to my conversation with Sofia. I talked with Sofia and her friend and classmate Lorena on several occasions during my visits to her school located near the infamous road. Sofia has lived in Mostar all her life while Lorena moved there a few years ago from a nearby smaller town. During our initial meeting the two friends began describing their experiences of their life in Mostar and our conversation quickly turned to discussing the experiences of the two sides of the city. Lorena stated that she had crossed the Bulevar only a few times and had never gone further eastward of the river Neretva. Sofia, per contra, said that she has been many times to the “other” side yet she was almost always accompanied by her mother who had some business to attend to there. Both young women never went to the “other” side alone and both addressed intense feelings of discomfort during those travels. It is during our subsequent meeting when we further delved into the sensations and feelings they experience as they cross the Bulevar:

Sofia: I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel as if it’s not my city. I don’t belong there.

Lorena jumped in: I feel as if there were a sign ‘I am a Croat’ [‘Ja sam Hrvatica’] written on my forehead. I don’t know but I have this subconscious … As soon as I cross [the Boulevard] I feel easier right away [‘odmah se osjećam lakše’].

Echoing Nerim’s aforementioned observations, the experience of crossing ethnically designated spaces is accompanied by sensations that refocus the attention to bodily surfaces (such as the feeling of having a sign on your forehead). Particularly for Lorena, the intensities of feeling work to mark her body as ethnically designated “other” in that space. As Ahmed notes: “It is these moments of intensification that define the contours of the ordinary surfaces of bodily dwellings, surfaces that are marked by differences in the very experience of intensities” (Ahmed, 2004: 27). The variations in the embodied intensities such as “feeling easier” upon crossing the Bulevar become crucial in structuring and guiding Lorena’s daily activities. Emotional and affective intensities work to create surfaces and borders in social space and also direct the embodied response such as pulling away and avoiding certain objects and places.

These histories of contact become acculturated on the body and each embodied experience of “crossing” re-establishes “this” and “that” side as ethnically marked spaces. Thus, the embodied experiences of difference in social space are often difficult to erase and extend even to those youths that actively try to challenge and disrupt Mostar’s ethnic divisions. Consider for example my conversation with Lucy and Jasa that illustrates the stickiness of the Bulevar in the process of negotiating difference in Mostar. Both Lucy and Jasa stated that they seek to socialize across different ethnic groups in Mostar and they actively work to cultivate those relationships. However, negotiating such multiethnic social relations becomes often a process of negotiating social space of the city. Specifically, the two young women describe problems they encounter when trying to arrange a meeting point with their peers from the “other” side:

Lucy: We [friends from both ethnic groups] are always trying to find a good coffee shop [‘kafić’] to meet up, a place where we are neither here nor there. For example, Coco Loco [a bar near the Bulevar]. We are always there. But if there is for example a band playing at Abrašević [a youth center located one block east of the Bulevar], they [friends from western part of the city] don’t want to come there. I keep constantly calling them, but no, no, no. They say: ‘We’ll be somewhere else and then later we can all meet up at Coco Loco’.

Jasa: You know, if for twenty years they teach you, as well as them, don't go here, don't go there, it simply sticks ['ostaje']. I mean it is not something you can easily erase. Even though I have friends, like from the other side and all, we hang out normally. I go to them, they come to me. But again they also have this kind of discomfort when they come here, as well as when I go to them.

The spatial politics of the young Mostarians described above takes us into considering questions of agency. Agency in Butler's theory is always understood as a variation on repetition where both notions of hegemony and resistance are made possible through the same process of repetitive practices. This approach thus seeks to transcend the binaries between power and resistance where resistance is always “deemed to be in opposition to a preestablished system of power” (Rose, 2002: 384). In order to understand how Lucy and Jasa’s friends from the west Mostar come to prefer “Coco Loco” over “Abrašević” as a meeting place, one needs to account for their complex everyday spatial and political agencies (Kallio and Häkli, 2011). Merely one street east of the Bulevar, “Abrašević” is for Lucy and Jasa’s friends a place they rather avoid since going there would involve the act of crossing the infamous road. As stickiness depends on “histories of contact that have already impressed upon the surface of the object” (Ahmed, 2004: 90), the Bulevar can be understood as a historic site where past meanings and material traces from other times clog up and block the movement of bodies (Kuftinec, 1998). Stickiness becomes an affective quality of the Bulevar that enables and arrests social and spatial relations in Mostar. These histories of contact also allow us to consider how stickiness varies across space and time, as some spaces become stickier that others in the process of identity construction in Mostar. Moreover, even as Jasa and Lucy espouse fluid and contingent notions of ethnic identity, this acknowledgment does not dissolve the regulating power and constitutive constrains of the socio-spatial ethnic grid imposed upon their bodies and their movements (“don’t go here, don’t go there”). The affective quality of stickiness thus transforms our understanding of political agency as resistance towards the Spinozan ethical question of what a body can do and what relations it can forge. Therefore, agency here is conceptualized as an action that is always performed in relation to stickiness, rather than it being external to it. The stickiness impinges on the body in a particular space, sometimes working toward thickenings of difference and sometimes dissolving and disintegrating.

Conclusion

Jasa: If for twenty years they teach you, as well as them, don't go here, don't go there, it simply sticks.

Twenty years after the war, the city of Mostar appears mired in stark divisions and continued “ethnicization” of city space. In times of uncertainty and the political struggle for power that characterize post-conflict Mostar, young people bear the burden of volatile nation-building processes as ethnicity becomes one of the most salient issue among the city’s youth. Using an analytical framework developed at the intersection of Butler's performativity theory and Ahmed’s cultural politics of emotions, I draw attention to emotional and affective intensities and the work they do in establishing multiple boundaries between “us” and “them”. Specifically, in this work I investigate different socio-spatial and linguistic practices that (re)constitute ethno-national identity in Mostar. In doing so, this paper builds upon and extends long-standing feminist debates on the notion of materiality and the matter of corporeal life as performatively constituted. Seeking to bridge affect theory and feminist geographies of difference literature, I aim to give attention to social fixities and processes of reification as an example of vital rather than “dead geographies” of political performativity. The intensities of feeling that arise in contact between bodies expand our thinking about the relationship between space and performativity, especially in relation to the politics of urban infrastructures, in ways that connect phenomenological accounts of the political to the discursive ones.

As Butler's theory suggests, society's norms and rules need to be constantly invoked and reiterated, thus emotions and affect offer a way to understand how we get invested in those norms. Jasa’s comment above illustrates the insidious power of these constitutive constraints, as she states resignedly “it simply sticks”. Taking on her insights, this work addresses the processes under which things appear to “simply stick”. Specifically, I argue for the importance of stickiness in understanding socio-spatial relations, as my work points to how through emotional and affective intensities social fixities are reproduced and meanings are stabilized. In Mostar, stickiness becomes an affective quality of certain social spaces produced as an effect of reiterative doings, morphing sometimes into slippery spaces through thickenings of difference. The concept of sticky space is developed in contrast to an emphasis on flux that is evident in some writings on affect (e.g. Thrift, 2008), for stickiness enables to take account of both coagulations and disintegrations as processes that work simultaneously and in relation to one another. In this paper I have analyzed the stickiness of a school and a main street in Mostar as places where ethnic difference is negotiated through everyday sensitivities. It is important to note that this research has shown that these everyday sensitivities and moments of encounter are inseparable from the histories of past force relations embedded in those spaces. From past relations of conviviality, to traumas of war and current politics of divisiveness, the school and the Bulevar are intricately constructed as places that block and that bind communities together.

“This” side and “that” side of the city are for the youth in my study the most relevant social and spatial orienting devices in Mostar. However, the complex question on how the impressions of “this” side and “that” side get (re)created is examined through the notion of intensities of feelings through which young Mostarians “feel their way”. Emotional and affective intensities guide their everyday doings as approaches and avoidances of objects and places. Through these intensities young people become aware of their bodily surfaces in ways that orients their bodies toward and away from certain spaces, such as the Bulevar or the bridge. These orientations are also relations of meaning-making as these movements temporarily affix the body as an ethnic subject and recreate the meaning of “this” and “that” side as ethnically labeled, thus binding the space and identity nexus in Mostar.

While this research directs attention to the ways bodies and lived spaces come together to perpetuate social exclusion, it also attempts to open possibilities for bindings that might undermine dominant notions of social difference. In concluding, I suggest further attention to examining how emotional and affective intensities could deconstruct boundaries, while being attentive to social fixities. If we accept Butler’s suggestion that both fixity and change, domination and subversion, operate within the same field of daily practice and enactment, such an endeavor would be open to variations on repetition as moments of difference. As “sticky” spaces are sites where the potential and the actual are always in tension, this opens several interesting further inquiries. How could attending to emotional and affective intensities in social spaces enable different comings-together? What effect do such everyday sensitivities have for practices of reconciliation in BiH and elsewhere? Finally, in what ways could such spaces be seen as vehicles of social change?

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would foremost like to thank the young people of Mostar who participated in this study and were generous to share their feelings and experiences with me. Moreover, the article is a result of long conversations with my colleagues at the University of Arizona and the University of Zurich – many thanks to them: JP Jones, Sallie Marston, Elisabeth Militz, Martin Müller, Chris Gaffney and Daniel Wolfe. I would also like to thank the editor and the reviewers for their constructive suggestions and advice. The writing stage was further enabled though the University of Zurich Forschungskredit.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The fieldwork for this research was supported by National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.

Notes

Sunčana Laketa is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of St. Gallen. She is a political and urban geographer and in her work she attends to the geopolitical role of the sensing body in the volatile political climate of (post)-conflict cities. Situated within theoretical frameworks of affect theory, feminist approaches to geopolitics and poststructural theories of space and identity, her recent publications examine the geopolitical dimensions of affect and emotions, youth politics, and emotional geographies of education in multi-ethnic settings.

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