Leisure for All: Memory Activism and the Exploitative Modes of Existence after Yugoslavia

• In Event: The Liberatory Potentials of Memory Activism in Central-East Europe and the Balkans

Abstract

Starting from the question of what does it mean to be engaged in the amateur, non-monetized singing activities as the form of memory activism, I discuss the potentials and limits of activist engagement in the world structured by the exploitative capitalist modes of existence. I focus on the everyday practices of politicization of leisure time by the members of post-Yugoslav activist singing collectives in order to show how the perspective of leisure is missing historical knowledge and experience that allow for the critical engagement with capitalist commodification, alienation and exploitation, and a dismissal of class perspective in the contemporary debates about memory activism.

Author

• Ana Hofman, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)