Stimmen zum Buch
"This book brings a refreshing approach to the region (the former Yugoslavia), the country (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and the city (Sarajevo) that have been suffering, as it were, from an over-abundance of studies, reports, and analyses. Riding’s original understanding of the work of Georges Perec offers an eye-opening methodology for scholars, journalists, artists, and writers alike. The book’s innovative and experimental qualities are anchored in rigorous research, ethical commitment, and personal engagement. Strongly recommended for locals, experts, and those who are yet to fall in love with the landscape and its people."—Igor Štiks, author of Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States
“Detailed summaries of moments in Riding’s journey are vehicles to open discussion of the relationship between past and present. This challenging book combines insights about the "Plenum movement" of 2014, memory, and commemoration of wars. Riding observes a "stark difference between the ways in which these violent periods have been commemorated and remembered" (p. 140), providing photographs of memorials, monuments, and sites visited to illustrate the complexity of maintaining memory in today's Bosnia.”― B. Lieberman, Fitchburg State University - CHOICE connect, Vol. 57 No. 11
"Steeped in the work of Georges Perec and making an experimental reckoning with human geography’s conventions for representing landscape and trauma, James Riding chose Bosnia & Hercegovina (BiH) for a circuitous revisiting of the British archaeologist Arthur Evans’s 1875 journeys and three days of deep observation two years later in a single Sarajevo square."— Catherine Baker, Europe-Asia Studies, Volume 73, 2021 - Issue 5
„In ‚The Geopolitics of Memory. A Journey to Bosnia‘ Riding is attempting something quite difficult: to write a book about the geopolitics of the recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina that neither re-treads the steps of previously published works nor romanticises the divisive politics of the present. The eclecticism of the text helps achieve these aims, and the style is unlike any book I have read on BiH.“—Alex Jeffrey, University of Cambridge, UK, Dialogues in Human Geography, Volume 11, issue 1
„James Riding’s The Geopolitics of Memory: A Journey to Bosnia offers an innovative approach to ethnographic place-writing, exploring the human geography of a post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina through the synthesis of experimental methodology and meticulously detailed research.“—Ewa Anna Kumelowski, Comparative Southeast European Studies, Volume 68 Issue 4