Rethinking Yugoslav Revolution II: The Politics of Narratives and Images of Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle: Past for Future

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel will discuss the politics of narratives and images of Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle in various genres and discourses: from literature, art and popular culture to newspapers and other relevant historiographical documents. All four papers on the panel will analyze various discourses representing People’s Liberation Struggle as a foundational historical event in building socialist Yugoslavia. This was reflected in various artistic and cultural forms, often pointing to lesser-known facts and contradictions in social hierarchies structuring the liberation. The papers will reflect on the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle as a historical event which had, and still has, its resonance for the future, especially regarding the issues of gender and ‘’narod’’ (people) in the post-war politics. We will particularly focus on the narratives about partisans in the later decades of Yugoslav socialism, as well as in post-socialist times. This panel hopes to contribute to the field of New Yugoslav Studies.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Dijana Jelača, Brooklyn College

Papers

• Liberation in Comic Strips: Curious Lives of Partisan Comics in Socialist Yugoslavia - Tanja Petrovic, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)

• A Liberation That Was Not Quite Liberation: Partisan and Anti-fascist Women between the Center and the Periphery in the Northern Adriatic - Marta Verginella, U of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

• Images of Impossible, Poetics of Revolutionary: Vladimir Nazor’s Partisan Poems and Imagination of Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle - Maša Kolanovic, U of Zagreb (Croatia)

• People or Nation?: Yugoslav Communists and the Muslim Question - Grega Ulen, Tsinghua U (China)

Discussant

• Danijela Lugarić Vukas, U of Zagreb (Croatia)