Family After the Genocide: Preserving Ethnic and Kinship Continuity Among Second-Generation Australian-Bosniak Immigrants

Abstract The subject of transgenerational legacies of war and forced migration has been increasingly gaining traction in the academic sphere. However, most of these studies yielded clinical implications, neglecting the role of culture in responding to the crisis engendered through the wholesale destruction of communities. The present paper examines how compounding of these phenomena impacted the formation of the social identities among the second-generation Bosniak1 migrants, whose parents survived the genocide in Srebrenica three decades ago and were forced to resettle in Australia. I focus on their family and homemaking practices in the diaspora by drawing upon findings from my ethnographic fieldwork in Melbourne. I found that the shared experience of place-based trauma of genocide serves as a connective tissue that binds the children survivors in “trans-local endogamous” marital unions through which they seek to preserve, perform and reproduce their unique (trans)local, cultural, as well as relational identities.