Between Zageb, Berlin, and Amsterdam: Dubravka Ugrešić as a Translocal Writer

Brought into focus as an important aspect of transnational mobility, the concept of the translocal offers an approach to living and writing across borders that foregrounds specific localities and avoids questions of national identity. At the same time, the translocal perspective is not static but agentive and affective; it refers to movements between localities and the creation of networks of relations between them. This paper reads Dubravka Ugrešić as a translocal writer whose work engages with three major cities that come together in her writing: Zagreb, Berlin and Amsterdam. The main argument of the paper is that the three cities are connected as sites of marginalization, which the writer/narrator turns into a position of creative power and a source of agency. Marginalization can be caused by different factors, from self-conscious withdrawal into the spaces outside the power structures to ostracization and migration. However, in each case, it is taken by the author/narrator as the position that allows for new ways of seeing that reveal what would otherwise remain invisible. More specifically, in Ugrešić’s case, the concept of defamiliarization connects with feminist ways of seeing from the perspective of those who are marginalized and rendered invisible.