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Browsing by Subject "Yugoslavia"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Anticipating the Blocked Future": Transitions to Adulthood and Migration Aspirations in Serbia"
    (2020-05) Andic, Tanja
    This dissertation uses ethnographic discourse analysis and qualitative interviews to understand how young aspiring emigrants in contemporary Serbia think about the future. While the Yugoslav period was rhetorically obsessed with building a utopian socialist future, and the immediate post-2000 transition regime allowed Serbians to look towards a new “European” future, the future today appears to have lost its long-held promise of “progress.” Under the context of economic deregulation, the retraction of the welfare state, political disenchantment, and rising youth out-migration, the future instead appears “blocked” in the country. In this work, I map a ubiquitous discourse of the “blocked future” as it appears in everyday life, and emerges as a structure of feeling to cope with and process the constrained material situation Serbia’s young adults face. Focusing on aspiring emigrants who entered the workforce after the 2000 revolution, I show how discussions about emigration become a route to express political discontent in private and public spheres after formal channels for political participation have proven to be ineffective. Engaging in the core aspects of the “transition to adulthood” — the movement from education to employment, independent housing, reproduction, and the role of the state — I show how the loss of structures which once undergirded what is locally called a “normal life” make emigration appear as the most viable route to achieving these once-normative (but increasingly destandardized and protracted) markers of independence. In bringing into conversation those who already left and those who aim to leave, I likewise show how the transposition of “normality” to “organized countries” places an incredible burden on Serbia’s emigrants to maintain the image of agentic “possibility” in their lives abroad despite their individual struggles with restrictive visa regimes and precarious labor conditions.
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    The Concept of Statelessness in Second-World Literature
    (2019-12) Popovic, Djordje
    My dissertation is a comparative study of the mutually constitutive relationship between homelessness as a cultural worldview and statelessness as a political condition. By focusing on socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1991), I examine how the modernist theme of homelessness—once viewed as an expression of cosmopolitan aspirations among its most progressive writers—turns into a devastating everyday reality for those rendered genuinely stateless in the course of the Yugoslav wars. My point of departure is the high modernist prose of Danilo Kiš, the so-called “last Yugoslav writer,” whose work is widely thought to have presaged a future yet to be lost in the break-up of this region. By returning to Kiš’s fictionalized autobiographical trilogy—Early Sorrows (1970), Garden, Ashes (1965), and Hourglass (1972)—I show how Kiš develops a philosophy of history in which homelessness is the metaphysical, historical, and formal problem he tries to work through rather than posit as an essential human condition. The importance of rethinking the paradigmatic status of the apatride figure is highlighted in chapters two and three, where I show a post-Yugoslav constellation emerging in world literature around the idea of bezdomnost—a term used explicitly in reference to Martin Heidegger’s Heimatlosigkeit (existential homelessness), and thematized by a number of post-Yugoslav authors, including Aleksandar Hemon and Dubravka Ugrešić. What comes into view here is a nexus of transnational works centered less on a set of shared experiences than on a common belief in the representational, explanatory, and civic virtues of homelessness and its power to contest nativism—now on a global scale. In contrast to Hemon’s “audacity of despair,” I return in the dissertation’s final chapters to the “dialectic of hope” in the writings of the WWII generation of German émigré scholars. I propose that the exiled members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory—in their sustained critique of the excesses of existentialism—remain as relevant today for a literary study of political demise as they once were for the study of fascism and nihilism.
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    Spain Interrupted: Examining Spanish Representations of Mass Violence in the Former Yugoslavia
    (2017-06) Nezirevic, Erma
    Situated within contemporary discussions of Hispanism and Iberian Studies, this dissertation explores timely issues such as memory, migration, and the links between violence and democracy in contemporary Spain. More specifically, my dissertation studies Iberian cultural representations of war violence in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s that reflect parallel experiences between the two countries during the twentieth century including dictatorships, civil wars, and their peripheral statuses vis-à-vis Europe. I show how Iberian novelists, journalists, and photographers approach the Balkan atrocity as a symbolic reliving of old Spanish traumas as this war becomes an interruption of a “modern, European” identity built on avoiding the wounds of the past. Through this research I develop a theory of hospitality to show how representations of the Balkan war can be read through the concepts of host and guest, whose interplay interrupts subjectivities in an already established Spanish national framework. Studies of memory and mass violence in Spain tend to restrict their analyses to the framework of the nation-state. In an effort to shift this insular approach, Spain Interrupted employs an innovative comparative paradigm by looking at Spain through the lens of the former Yugoslavia. The interrelatedness of these two national contexts unfolds aspects of memory and mass violence that would otherwise be less perceptible. My comparative approach breaks new ground in the way we understand the interconnectedness of relations in these fields by looking at Spain through the lens of the former Yugoslavia.