Unfinished Emancipation in Matrilineal Memories of Yugoslavia, and After

• In Event: Representations of Memory in Contemporary Balkan Literature: Poetics of a Common European Memory?

Abstract

This paper concerns the matrilineal family novel that has emerged as a burgeoning genre in the current phase of post-Yugoslav literature since the Great Recession. Although there are several typologies of the matrilineal family novel that can be identified, this paper examines two novels that foreground the failed emancipation of women in/and the working class as central contradictions in the cultural memory of socialism–History of My Family From 1941 to 1991, And After (Ivana Sajko, 2009) and The Life of A Woman Worker at the End of the 20th Century (Goran Ferčec, 2021). The juxtaposition of the intimate lives of working-class women and their families from 1941 to 1991 with a selective chronology of the "official" histories of Yugoslavia and its successor states, Croatia in particular, is at times incongruous. These individual lives are, in these moments, marked by ambivalence or unhappiness within the socialist project, amassing a countermemory both of unfinished emancipation and of "bad" socialist subjects. This paper will examine this countermemory in relation to growing interest—especially on the left—in 20th century socialism as a usable past or object of nostalgia.

Author

• Samantha Farmer, U of Michigan