Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper considers different forms of affective engagement with socialist past progress, including irony and nostalgia, which evaluate the past through contemporary ideas about solidarity, socialism, capitalism, and their interrelations, revealing personal ideological commitments.

Paper long abstract

There has been a recent surge of interest among cultural workers, scholars, and local populations in post-Yugoslav countries in Yugoslav ‘past progress', especially in the anticolonial and antiracist projects through which socialist Yugoslavs contributed to the Non-Aligned Movement. Numerous exhibitions, films, books, and research projects are being produced today, in an attempt to make sense of the socialist past progress within the epistemic infrastructures of neoliberal capitalism.

In this paper, I consider different forms of affective engagement with socialist past progress, including irony and nostalgia. Ironic engagement assumes that Yugoslav solidarity with (formerly) colonized populations during the Cold War was an empty rhetoric driven by a pragmatic desire to establish itself as a significant player on the geopolitical stage. Nostalgic engagement, by contrast, is shaped by the belief that Yugoslavs were motivated by an honest ideological commitment to solidarity and antiracism that ultimately placed them on the ‘right side’ of history. Both ironic and nostalgic engagements with past progress evaluate the past through contemporary ideas about solidarity, socialism, capitalism, and their interrelations. As such, they reveal more about the ideological commitments of those engaging in these interpretations than about the Yugoslav socialist past itself.

To understand past progress in its own terms, I suggest that scholars need to employ the analytical strategy of reading against the double grain – that is, reading both against the categories of the socialist state and against the liberal triumphant narrative of the ‘end of history’, which led to decades-long amnesia regarding socialist past progress.