Sazetak

Abstract:

In the traumatic historical context of the 1990s, the turning of Bosniaks to themselves took place, among other things, through the intensification of the religious component of cultural identity. Starting from Šaćir Filandra’s thesis that Islam “nationalized Bosniaks by becoming an instrument of gaining national consciousness”, this paper traces the continuation and completion of this process in the late 20th and early 21st century through its resonances in literature. The theoretical basis of the paper is the notion of identity as an unstable and procedural category, and the research focuses on the corpus of literary works by Hadžem Hajdarević, Miljenko Jergović, Alija Isaković, Faruk Šehić, Alija Nametak, Ivan Lovrenović, Samedin Kadić, Abdulah Sidran, Ozren Kebo... As evident on this occasion too, literature is shown to be an unparalleled seismograph, an unprecedented medium when it comes to re-presentation of juxtapositions of social trends and personal worlds, but its proactive role in the processes of identity construction should not be underestimated.

Key words: Bosniaks, cultural identity, nationalization of Islam, bosnian literature, reconfiguration of identity.