Confessions of a ‘Mixed Marriage Child’. Diary in the Study of Yugoslavia’s Breakup

Abstract

This article relies on the author’s own diary, kept between 1993 and 1994, in an effort to study how the violent breakup of Yugoslavia impacted identities of ordinary people. As it was written by a child from a mixed (Muslim-Croat) marriage, the diary, when properly analysed and contextualized, offers a way to study ethnicity as a process. In employing an unorthodox methodology in demonstrating how, as a 14-year-old, he was both marked as mixed and embraced Bosniak nationalism to the point of (risking) radicalization, the author moves the discussion of Yugoslav mixed marriages beyond the polarized and static portrayal hitherto characteristic of the debates around this topic.