Confessions of a ‘Mixed’ Child: Autobiography and the Breakup of Yugoslavia

By relying on the author’s own diary, which he wrote as a thirteen-year old while witnessing the violent collapse of socialist Yugoslavia, the paper argues that autobiography is a fertile ground for the excavation of the self altered by great social upheavals. As the author is a child from a marriage that was branded “mixed” during the Yugoslav wars, the paper focuses on the ways in which he navigated his abruptly ethnicized reality. It argues that despite being branded mixed, the child embraced the nationalist narrative of the wars, abandoning it only when it became convenient to do so. Because the diary allows for these contradictions to be visible as a part of the everyday construction of identity, the paper argues that this source is particularly useful in studying ethnicity not as an identity bounded and finished, but one that is in constant flux. The overall aim of the paper is to intervene in the ideologically stale debates over mixed marriage that emerged during the 1990s by offering an alternative approach to the study of ethnicity at times of social change.