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Yugoslav Configurations II: Warped Time in the Balkans

Sun, November 23, 10:00 to 11:45am EST (10:00 to 11:45am EST), -

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores the relationship between memory and time via the motif of time travel and similar interventions in contemporary fiction from and about the Balkans. In the works discussed within this session, time appears as warped, looping, and fractured. Memory becomes an ambivalent and contradictory force: it is a technique for navigating this unsteady time-terrain. But it is also the catalyst for time’s unraveling. Memory is also explored through time travel in these works of fiction, but these journeys end up calling the reliability of memory into question as well.
This session also considers the relationship between time, memory, and trauma. How do war, migration, or political upheaval and the memory of it distort one’s perception of time? Can one be a refugee not just in space but in time itself? The panel examines how marginalized temporalities—especially queer time and the time of the elderly—disrupt dominant historical narratives.
The interplay of science fiction and political critique in these novels reflects a region where history is experienced as both repetition and rupture, where the past refuses to settle, and where the future remains radically uncertain. Through this lens, the time machine serves as a narrative mechanism that questions who controls history—and who dares to rewrite it.
Ultimately, we ask: Is memory a time machine, and if so, does it take us somewhere new or, ultimately, only back to where we started? What does a time machine actually do and what are the risks of entering it?

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