| Summary: | Nationalism re-emerges from contemporary cultural debates under a
panoply of controversial perspectives. In some of them like, for instance, the
contemporary fields of border studies and the study of migrant cultures and writing,
it fairly often takes the shape of an effort to strengthen hierarchies, hold differences
together into ideologically ‘sterile’, supposedly homogeneous units, and to delimit
overflowing identities. What binds a great many such contemporary reassessments is
the urge to retrace or excavate past experience of nationalism, especially in cases
when its purportedly beneficial properties of sheltering nations are brought to such
ends as dictatorship, autocratic and authoritarian rule.
The present article ruminates on those violent forms through the medium of
two literary works authored by contemporary writers in its attempt to analyse the
traumatic, but also prolific potential of re-membering past oppression. The study is
concerned with their responses to an excessively violent political form of selfproclaimed nationalism which are worth considering because of their borderline
status. Both Anthea Nicholson and Kapka Kassabova fall into the category of migrant
writers. Of Georgian and Bulgarian descent, both writing in English, each one of them
retraces a remembered and oppressive past experience in an effort that aims to
reconstruct the contemporaneity of their countries of origin. Alongside specific
contextual details, the investigation meditates on the common features of their
fictional responses to a shared past. A meaningful outcome of their retracings is the
critical distance that forms between remembered experience and the contemporary
state of their birth lands which illuminates in a creative way the problematic
achievement and development of state sovereignty.
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