CFP And After Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia! New Histories, New Approaches

[Marina Antić]

Call for Papers: "And after Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia! New Histories & New 
Approaches"

Please send all submissions to Marina Antić: antic at pitt.edu
Deadline: November 30th, 2013

The last twenty years of scholarship on former Yugoslavia and its 
successor states have undergone significant shifts, not least of which 
has been the introduction of new theoretical positions and paradigms 
(Bakić-Hayden and Hayden, Wolff, Todorova). However, the vast majority 
of this new scholarship has struggled to escape the resurgence of 
nationalist quasi-historical narratives or the transformation(s) of the 
Cold War totalitarian historical paradigm into postsocialist 
“transitology.” The latter has served as the ideological correlate of 
neo-liberal reforms in Eastern Europe, providing interpretive frames 
(justifications) for the rise of the free market economy, electoral 
democracy, and the construction of “civil societies,” the three 
hallmarks of postsocialism. In this context, transitology has primarily 
focused on EU accession as the final conceptual and political frontier 
of these now liberalizing societies. In reality, the transition itself 
has been not into Europe proper but into a periphery of global capital 
(Shields). Moreover, in the wake of the global financial crisis, the 
Arab Spring and the radical “left turn” of Latin America, the 
“transitology” discourse has increasingly appeared vacuous, fetishized, 
a totem of a global order fundamentally premised on what David Harvey 
has called “accumulation through dispossession.”

 From history to art, economy to literature, political science to 
anthropology, scholars have been preoccupied with explaining the violent 
end of Yugoslavia and its aftermath via the nationalist and totalitarian 
models (Glenny, Kaplan, Malcolm, Alcock, Meier, Wachtel, Bieber, and 
others); they have struggled to explain Yugonostalgia and the Yugoslav 
legacy that seems not to vane in the region (Todorova and Gille, Djokić, 
Wachtel); and many have continued to treat the Yugoslav past as an 
aberration and the post-Yugoslav reality as the “natural” state of 
affairs. Despite challenges to the “Orientalist” or “Balkanist” 
discourse of the region and despite attempts to situate the rise of 
nationalism into global realities and socio-economic developments 
(Woodward, Gowan, Petras and Vieux), Yugoslav history and the 
post-Yugoslav reality have been codified within the old confines of Cold 
War history-cum-transitology and nationalist historiography.

At the same time, post-Yugoslav cultural production, social movements, 
and cultural and ideological shifts in the region have been telling a 
different story. Social opposition to nationalist regimes has only 
increased with time in the most troubled post-Yugoslav state – Bosnia 
and Herzegovina (JMBG protests, Dosta!) as well as in the most 
“Europeanized” one – Slovenia (2012-2013 Maribor protests, ongoing 
nation-wide). Film, literature, art, and alternative media productions 
have continually challenged simplistic nationalist narratives as well as 
the dire, postsocialist realities (Tanović, Žbanić, Stanišić, Rudan, 
Veličković, Studio LuDež); and everyday life in the post-Yugoslav states 
has challenged “transitology” and its lessons of civil society, 
political culture, and free market economics. In the process, the 
Yugoslav past remains a central preoccupation of both the nationalist 
regimes and its former citizens: from neo-nazi revivals to 
Yugonostalgia, the legacy of this common and shared cultural, 
socio-economic, and political space continues to influence all spheres 
of life in many different ways.

This volume addresses this disjuncture between post-Yugoslav realities 
and nationalist historiography and/or the neo-liberal transitology. What 
sets this volume apart from a myriad of collections about former 
Yugoslavia is a commitment to critically engage, challenge, and advance 
beyond nationalist historiography and transitology while reassessing the 
Yugoslav legacy and reexamining the Yugoslav past as phenomena 
fundamentally relevant to our understanding of the present and, indeed, 
our future. In short, this volume (re)considers “Yugoslavia” as a 
relevant contemporary political and social phenomenon, rather than 
merely a tragic and/or utopian historical moment. Moreover, our 
intervention seeks to deliberately reposition the post-Yugoslav space in 
the context of the unraveling of the global neo-liberal order. We 
explicitly reject the narrative that the only “realistic” (or ideal) 
future for (the former) Yugoslavia is membership in a dissolving 
neo-liberal monetary and political union—the only facsimile of a 
political program advanced by the “transitional” local elites and their 
international partners. Our conception of Yugoslavia emerges as against 
the EU’s preferred “Western Balkans” and/or “South-East Europe” monikers 
and in line with more than a decade of democratic, alter-globalist 
eruptions in Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East.

The volume consists of three sections:
1. Post-Yugoslav Realities
This section is devoted to assessment of the current situation in 
post-Yugoslav states, analysis of the effects of postsocialist 
“transition,” new social movements, as well as the wider, global context 
for the social changes that have taken place since the fall of socialism.

2. Post-Yugoslav Culture
This section is devoted to critique and presentation of post-Yugoslav 
cultural production in context, including but not limited to new 
literature, film, art, popular culture, and other media productions. We 
are especially interested in approaches that address the continuities 
and discontinuities between the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cultural 
production in the region.

3. Yugoslav History and Legacy
While the question of Yugoslav legacy is a common thread for the entire 
volume, this particular section is devoted specifically to new topics, 
contexts, and theories regarding the common history and heritage. From 
the origins of the Yugoslav idea in the 19th century to the legacy of 
the Non-Aligned Movement in Yugoslavia to an exploration of 
Yugonostalgia today, this concluding section seeks to raise new research 
questions and suggest new points of departure for studying the region 
and its history.

We invite proposals for contributions to any of the above mentioned 
topics, while especially encouraging new methodological and theoretical 
orientations, interdisciplinary work, and research from across the 
humanities and social sciences.

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