Specters of Yugoslavia

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Culture IV: What is Yugoslav Literature Today?

Abstract

This presentation offers reflections on Yugoslavia as a spectral presence in the contemporary Croatian and Serbian prose by drawing on Jacques Derrida's hauntology. Instead of a ghost of the supposedly dark and totalitarian that needs to be exorcised, I argue that Yugoslavia appears as a trace of lost futures and unfinished struggles that continue to haunt the present as its spectral "other," offering alternative configurations of being-as-a-collective within the dominant neoliberal horizon. In viewing "Yugoslavia '' as one of multiple hauntologies across geographic, linguistic, and cultural borders, we can outline not only a regional but potentially also a global literature of postsocialism.

Author

• Vladislav Beronja, U of Texas at Austin