Description
Combining critical trajectories in war and military studies with interdisciplinary research on dance and electronic music, this paper explores two documentaries that visualise entanglements between rave culture and the everyday politics of war by focusing on the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I illustrate, how, mediated through the aesthetics of rave and dance culture, the films produce a multisensorial landscape that complicates dominant imaginings of Bosnia simply as a conflict space, recalibrating our perceptions of the sensory politics of war, its reverberations in the everyday and the creative attempts to outlive its shadows. At the same time, the documentaries add interesting layers to the map of global dance and club culture by spotlighting how sonic, embodied, affective and material registers of the rave and club experiences circulate and are re-imagined through local complexities, creativity and everyday realities. Through the aesthetic of rave an intricate international political scene emerges, bringing into focus unique multisensorial and affective gradations and the ambivalent, sometimes creative, responses of those touched by war and its afterlives, but also revealing transnational connections and networks of solidarity through music and club culture that offset conventional ways of seeing Bosnia beyond war’s shadows.
