For decades, the very same markers one used to identify national and ethnic belonging in the "homeland," such as history, language, and ritual, have been the same indicators deployed in diaspora ...communities to demarcate their level of group identity both within the assimilatory, hegemonic, and new national identity (eg., "Canadian"), as well as against other ethnic minorities. Members of the Balkan diaspora in North America very much perform their Serb, Croatian, or Bosniak identities through the way they talk about food. But there exists a split in Balkan food identity which overlaps with a fundamental political identity: those who see, for example, Serb cuisine as unique tend to be proudly, nationalistically Serb, while those who see a common Balkan cuisine are more likely to identify with a federalist, shared Yugoslav past.
In the works of Bosnian Croat writer Miljenko Jergović (1966-) furniture and domestic things often play an essential role in defining the main characters’ psychologies and relationship with the ...historical context. As furnishings are linked to the aesthetic taste of different periods, they represent the discontinuity of history and its consequences on the lives of individuals and their families. This article analyzes the description of furniture in one of Jergović’s earliest novels, The Walnut Mansion (Dvori od oraha, 2003), presenting it as a metaphor for the collapse of the social and political utopias of 20th century Europe.
The article first examines the contrast between popular remembering and the official presentation of Yugoslav socialist past in Slovenia. We examine the discursive patterns in political dignitaries’ ...declarations and reconstruct popular remembering as it emerges from the existing research. We focus on theories that conceptualize positive popular attitudes towards socialist past with the notion of ‘nostalgia’. Following the ways how researchers overcome the difficulties of the ‘Yugonostalgia’ approach, we note that they do not take into account the embeddedness of the positive achievements of socialism into the overall fabric of socialist system. According to our hypothesis, this omission induces the researchers to overestimate the present social and political impact of positive attitudes to socialist past. Furthermore, social struggles in which researchers are engaged seem to raise barriers to scientific practice. This study attempts to contribute to the project of Yugoslav memory studies.
In this article, I deal with the public figure of the singer Lepa Brena in the context of the cultural and music politics in socialist Yugoslavia and in the war and post-war times, by focusing on her ...transition from a “genuine” Yugoslav star, through the period in which the Yugoslav label was not desirable, to the singer’s recent transformations in which she has been involved in the process of commodifying Yugonostalgia for repositioning her public figure in a new context.
The paper analyzes the last Yugoslav television series A Better Life (Bolji život) the broadcast of which ended when the war had begun on the territory of the SFRY. More than thirty years after the ...end of the first broadcast of the series, it is still popular in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, which is noticeable through numerous reruns, but also popularity on social networks, as well as numerous quotes from the series that are used in colloquial speech. The paper presents the content of the series and the main characters, as well as the most important secondary characters, briefly explains the then political and media situation in the different republics of the SFRY, which was completely uneven, which led to numerous antagonisms between nations, so in this context the series A Better Life was singled out as a series that was equally followed by citizens in all the republics, which was a phenomenon. In the context of today, the series is analyzed through the prism of Yugonostalgia, and the content of the series is analyzed through several themes that appear in the series: everyday life and rituals, dealing with the consequences of the economic crisis, the conflict between rural and urban among the residents of Belgrade, i.e. the so-called old Belgraders and so-called newcomers.Certain stereotypes appeared in the series, primarily gender stereotypes, that is, the roles of men and women in society were repeatedly pointed out through the dialogues. Although at the time of filming of Better Life, inter-ethnic relations in SFRY were in crisis, the screenwriter skilfully avoided national stereotypes, although they appeared in several scenes, which is also included in the analysis of the series. Although the series depicts a politically turbulent time, nowadays it is viewed almost romantically, as a chance for a lost better life and missed opportunities.
Over the 50-year history of Yugoslavia, there were rises and falls, successes and failures, bright and dark moments. It is thus not surprising that the many memories that people have of life in ...Yugoslavia are often diametrically opposed. These divergent memories of Yugoslavia are the central topic of our research. The study focuses on memories and their transmission from older to younger generations and is based on the results of a survey that was carried out in the Republic of Slovenia. The research has clearly shown that positively tinged memories of Yugoslavia predominate in the families of younger as well as older generations on the one hand while on the other hand it has become obvious that Yugonostalgia is nostalgia for something from the past and it is not a desire to experience or revive that in the present.
In this article, I deal with the public figure of the singer Lepa Brena in the context of the cultural and music politics in socialist Yugoslavia and in the war and post-war times, by focusing on her ...transition from a “genuine” Yugoslav star, through the period in which the Yugoslav label was not desirable, to the singer’s recent transformations in which she has been involved in the process of commodifying Yugonostalgia for repositioning her public figure in a new context.
The creation of a Yugoslav state and its collective memory was highly influenced by the state imposed cultural policies. While the nation itself violently collapsed in the 1990s, whereby creating a ...large victim diaspora, in the aftermath, its population recalls it as an economically and politically stable and safe, a phenomenon deemed as Yugonostalgia. This paper seeks to present and critically observe the current multigenerational existence and interpretation of Yugonostalgia through theoretical perspectives and field work in Yugoslav Detroit Diaspora, while explaining its past, current, and future discourse as a product of collective memory.
Some of the most pressing contemporary issues (ecological crisis, migration and integration, fragmented worldviews, social media, fake news, extremist politics and terrorism) can be understood more ...profoundly through how they interact with both individual and collective forces of nostalgia. Nostalgia is politics, but these politics are also interwoven with media and culture. Notwithstanding how nostalgia is used or contextualized in terms of politics and social practices, commodification or personal development, its power is primarily situated within its efficacy as a governing, influential human emotion. The vast and luminous contributions to this special issue on contemporary nostalgia are all investigating the role different aesthetic media formats (film, music, literature, computer games) plays in nostalgic negotiations with style, history, migration, love, nationalism, diaspora, irony, modernity, colonial and postcolonial discourses, and adoption. Mutually, these essays stand out as important, original, critical contributions to the expanding field of nostalgia studies and offer a valued insight on our world.
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