Rethinking Yugoslav Revolution III: The Revolution’s Liberation: Adjustments of Revolutionary Teleology within the Yugoslav Cultural Field

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In 1921, Ljubomir Micić exclaimed in his well-known, provocative style: “Marx did not lie when he wrote that Yugoslavs were incapable of Revolution!” Micić's exclamation can be regarded as the symptom of a wide-spread malaise concerning the question of who has the right to appropriate the Marxist revolutionary narrative: it points to a (colonial) logics that firmly relies on a tension between centre and periphery, with the periphery (the South Slavs in this case) having to either follow the central movement of history or to perish. This symbolic structure quite evidently caused certain problems for the cultural production of socialist Yugoslavia: there can be liberation only through the revolution; at the same time, however, on a symbolic level the revolution has to be – at least partially – “liberated” from its own authoritative narrative in order to be actively appropriated by its new, “peripheral” subjects.
The panel would inquire into the manifold symbolic shifts and displacements that were undertaken within the Yugoslav cultural field in order to liberate the revolutionary narrative to new contexts and usages, foremost with regards to representations of the NOB, it would estimate the ideological consequences of these shifts and their relevance for a broader socialist imagery. This panel hopes to contribute to the field of New Yugoslav Studies.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Marjana Krajač, Ohio State U

Papers

• Nikoletina Bursać: The Revolution’s Vanishing Presence - Adrian Pelc, U of Vienna (Austria)

Discussant

• Miranda Jakisa, U of Vienna (Austria)