Yugoslav Memories I: Book Discussion: Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia, by Ana Hofman

Session Submission Type: Book Discussion Roundtable

Brief Description

This panel discusses Ana Hofman’s Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia, which explores collective singing as a form of activist engagement in the post-Yugoslav region. Over the past two decades, self-organized choirs, that have emerged in Yugoslav urban centres, have been recuperating Yugoslav and international antifascist and socialist song repertoire. Revitalization of these legacies aims to demask the privatization, dispossession, and political exhaustion that, instead of a promised capitalist dreamland, have shaped lives in the region after the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. Through a nuanced analysis of these choirs, the book interrogates the complicated coexistence between lived and imagined socialism as meeting in the now.
The panel participants will engage with the book’s central themes, addressing the potential and limitations of collective singing as a means of organizing against the adverse effects of neoliberal capitalism. Key questions for discussion include: How does the current global context compel us to reassess the “lost” historical knowledge and lived experiences of Yugoslav socialist project, particularly in the realm of art and culture? What role do nonprofessional, communal musical practices play in fostering structures for anti-capitalist organizing? Finally, what can the focus on an amateur artistic engagement reveal about the broader process of envisioning alternative, anti-capitalist modes of social organization today?

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Alma Prelec, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (UK)

Roundtable Speakers

• Piotr Goldstein, ZOiS Berlin (Germany)

• Walter Benn Michaels, U of Illinois at Chicago

• Carol T. Silverman, U of Oregon