Towards an affective history of Yugoslavia
pages: 504-520
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1603504PKeywords:
Yugoslavia, socialism, history, affect, experience, Georg SimmelAbstract
The article discusses the necessity for the diversification of (hi)stories of Yugoslavia, arguing for the importance of incorporating the affects and experiences of Yugoslavia’s citizens into the historical narratives. Acknowledging the difficulties emerging form the fact that what is articulated as historical narrative is still part of the experience for millions of citizens of post-Yugoslav societies, the article reflects upon the potential for and obstacles to an affective history of socialist Yugoslavia through the lens borrowed from German sociologist Georg Simmel. It particularly refers to - and makes use of - two sets of Simmel’s ideas. The first concerns the nature of material and the way we are making a story out of it - more precisely, the relationship between history and experience, life and representation. The second is about the perspective from which we look at, approach, and synthesize this material. Simmel’s reflections on history and form offer a very useful tool to look at the Yugoslav case and also help de-essentialize and normalize Yugoslav history, making the anxieties that characterize it part of a much broader discussion about history, its nature, and its internal contradictions.
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Buden, Boris (2009), Zone des Ubergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus. Suhrkamp: Berlin.
Buden, Boris (2013), “Predgovor,” in: Boris Buden and Zelimir Zilnik, Uvod u proslost. Novi Sad: Kuda.
Buden, Boris (2015), “Children of Post-communism,” in: Welcome to the Desert of Post¬socialism, Srecko Horvat and Igor Stiks (eds.). London: Verso, 123-139. Cvetkovich, Ann (2003), An Archive of Feelings. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
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Duda, Igor (2015), Danas kada postajem pionir: Djetinjstvo i ideologija jugoslavenskoga socijalizma. Zagreb: Srednja Evropa.
Duyvendak, Jan Willem (2011), The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fehervary Krisztina (2013), Politics of Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Funk, Nanette (2014), “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21(4): 344-360.
Ghodsee, Kristen 2014: “Tale of ‘Two Totalitarianisms’: The Crisis of Capitalism and the Historical Memory of Communism,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 4(2): 115-142.
Ghodsee, Kristen (2015), The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Grandits, Hannes and Karin Taylor (eds.) (2010), Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s). Budapest and New York: CEU University Press.
Gregg, Melisa and Gregory Seigworth (eds.) (2010), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hofman, Ana (2015), Glasba, politika, afekt: Novo zivljenje partizanskih pesmi. Ljubljana: Zalozba ZRC.
Hunt, Nancy Rose (2014), “The affective, the intellectual and gender history,” The Journal of African History 55(3): 331-345.
Kirn, Gal (2014), Partizanski prelomi in protislovja trznega socializma v Jugoslaviji. Ljubljana: Sophia.
Kosmos, Iva (2016), “Vesoljska retroutopija,” LUD literatura, published 1st June, (internet) available at: http://www.ludliteratura.si/esej-kolumna/vesoljska- retrotopija/, (viewed 17 August, 2016).
Lindenberger, Thomas (2014), “Experts with a Cause: A Future for GDR History beyond Memory Governance and Ostalgie in Unified Germany,” in: Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe, Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou and Stefan Troebst (eds.). Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 29-42.
Luthar, Breda i Marusa Pusnik (eds.) (2010), Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing.
Mehilli, Elidor (2009) “Memory in Ruins: The Impossible Museum of Communism” (internet) available at: www.irmgard-coninx-stiftung.de/fileadmin/user_upload/ pdf/Memory_Politics/Workshop_1/Mehilli_essay.pdf (viewed 17 March, 2012).
Munslow, Alun (2006), Deconstructing history. London and New York: Routledge.
Njegic, Marko (2016), “Houston, imamo problem: I svinja moze biti heroj samoupravnog socijalizma,” Slobodna Dalmacija, 7 May, available at: http:// www.slobodnadalmacija.hr/misljenja/cinemark/clanak/id/311815/houston- imamo-problem-i-svinja-moze-biti-heroj-samoupravnog-socijalizma (viewed 17 August, 2016).
Patico, Jennifer (2008), Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Patterson, Patric Hyder (2011), Bought & Sold: Living & Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Petrovic, Tanja (2013), “Museums and Workers: Negotiating industrial heritage in the former Yugoslavia,” Narodna umjetnost 50(1): 96-111.
Petrovic, Tanja (2013a), ‘Jugoslovenski socializam u muzeju: Socijalisticko naslede kao kulturna bastina,” in: Komparativni postsocijalizam: slavenska iskustva, Masa Kolanovic (ed.). Zagreb: Filozofski fakultet Sveucilista, Zagrebacka slavisticka skola, 31-46.
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Petrovic, Tanja (2014), “Social politics of the floods in the former Yugoslavia,” Anthropology news, June.
Popovic, Milica (2016), “Exhibiting Yugoslavia,” Druzboslovne razprave XXXII (81): 7-24.
Simmel, Georg (1980), “The constitutive concepts of history, ” in: Georg Simmel, Essays on Interpretation in Social Science. Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980, 127-144.
Slapsak, Svetlana (2008), “Jugonostalgija i smeh,” Pescanik, 13 December (internet), available at: http://pescanik.net/jugonostalgija-i-smeh/ (viewed 13 October, 2016).
Slapsak, Svetlana (2011), “Twin cultures and Rubik’s cube politics: The dynamics of cultural production in pro-YU, post-YU, and other YU inventions,” Sudosteuropa 59(3): 301-314.
Spaskovska, Ljubica (2014), “The Yugoslav Chronotope - Histories, Memories and the Future of Yugoslav Studies,” in: Debating the Dissolution of Yugoslavia, Florian Bieber, Armina Galijas and Rory Archer (eds.). London: Ashgate, 241-253.
Stojiljkovic, Marko (2016), “Houston, we have a problem: Istina ili pazljivo slozena alternativno-istorijska fantazija? Sasvim je svejedno,” Lupiga, 13 May (internet), available at: http://lupiga.com/filmovi/houston-we-have-a-problem-istina-ili- pazljivo-slozena-alternativno-istorijska-fantazija-sasvim-je-svejedno (viewed 17 August, 2016).
Stiks, Igor (2015), ““New Left” in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Issues, Sites, and Forms,” Socialism and Democracy, 29 (3): 135-146.
Thaler, Wolfgang, Maroje Mrduljas and Vladimir Kulic (eds.) (2012), Modernism in Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia. Berlin: Jovis, J.Todorova, Maria (2014), “Introduction: Similar Trajectories, Different
Memories,” in: Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe, Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou and Stefan Troebst (eds.). Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 1-28.
Yurchak, Alexei (2006), Everything was Forever, until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Adrijana Zaharijevic (2014), “After Whom the Deluge: Thinking about the Urgency of Thought,” Belgrade Journal of Media and Communications 3(6): 57-71.
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Published
15.10.2016
How to Cite
Petrović, T. (2016) “Towards an affective history of Yugoslavia: pages: 504-520”, Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society. Belgrade, Serbia, 27(3). doi: 10.2298/FID1603504P.
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POLITICS OF REMEMBRANCE: POSTSOCIALISM AND ITS REVISIONS
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