Fatima Festic
The Jura Soyfer Society, its Annual Symposia and Journal open themselves as a platform for transnational cultural studies. As myself I am a person, woman, cultural and academic activist in a permanent trans-world transition, I have corresponded to the goals and activities of this platform on numerous occasions. Currently affiliated with the University of Amsterdam, Memory and Heritage Studies and European Studies, and developing a project on societal dispersion specifying comparatively cultural producers originating from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, I can anticipate that in my activities and teaching I can raise various points and coordinate activities related to Jura Soyfer’s commitment, legacy, and aesthetic-political practices. Earlier, I already brought into dialogue with all that the 1990s war and post-war dynamics in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, in my translations and presentations. Hence, I can continue to raise interest in Jura Soyfer’s work and comparisons with various historically conditioned streams of cultural production in the cultural circles that I discuss in my work (postimperial, post-colonial, post-socialist, etc.)
The semioticizing capacity of alteration that contemporary reality imposes on us all as a cultural requirement, in Europe and globally, is also close to Soyfer’s complex identity, of a Slavic Jew and Germanic writer and artist, who exceeded his dark political times and violent early death. That is a figure culturally and politically relatable to possibilities of generating positive courses of thinking and acting and could be taught to students of Literature, Arts, European Studies and to wider public in the sense of the dynamism of societal negativity and positivity, violence and imaginativeness, oppression and art, state and minorities.
I anticipate that in the future I can further develop collaborations between the Jura Soyfer Society and my multiple academic affiliations and the trans-ethnic practices that I pursue, and also engage young people in the countries of my origin and wider, stimulating them to the related research.