WS: Mitja Velikonja: Lost in Transition: New Perspectives on Post-Socialist Nostalgia

LOST IN TRANSITION: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON POST-SOCIALIST NOSTALGIA

This workshop will explore nostalgia and retro phenomena from a cultural studies perspective. The cultural diversity (horizontal level) as well as the ideological meanings and political consequences (vertical level) of these phenomena will be investigated. Methodological approaches will combine top-down perspectives (analysis of /materialized/ ideological discourses) alongside bottom-up perspectives (mentality patterns). The workshop covers the disciplines of memory studies, media studies, with particular focus on music, politics and history. Former Yugoslavia provides the foundations for the case studies explored here, but the workshop will be of interest to doctoral candidates operating in the above-mentioned fields, as well as with the concepts of nostalgia and memory.

A short theoretical introduction will be followed by two thematic sections including mini-lectures.

Between Collective Memory and Political Action: Emancipative Potentials of Yugo-nostalgia in Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

Yugonostalgia is usually considered in terms of a sentimental, passive, backward oriented mentality pattern and an escapist emotion of the people who suffered most during the last twenty-five years of post-Socialist transition and fraticidal wars. However, the ambition of this session is to show how Yugonostalgia in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina is also an active social platform, cultural production, and an emancipative political force, uniting most different discourses and groups of people: in nostalgic associations, in different public events and celebrations, in popular and alternative culture, in media, in the cyber world, even in consumerism and nostalgic tourism. Main features of this emancipative, engaged Yugonostalgia in Bosnia-Herzegovina are social criticism, defence of the past, openness to the outside world, and direct political activity. Examples show how it can offer – on the basis of the multicultural, tolerant tradition from the Socialist/Yugoslav decades – an effective and progressive alternative to the ethnic divisions, hatred, and exclusivism that still prevail in this war-torn country.

“Rock’n’retro” – Yugoslav and Partisan Motives in Contemporary Slovenian Music

Even today, more than two decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, almost everything that relates to it is perceived in negative terms. However, in the last few years, in contemporary Slovenian pop and alternative music we find an increasing number of motifs and narratives  connected with the socialist Yugoslavia, its popular culture, way of life, political system and its leaders, and with the Partisan resistance, that show it in a completely different light. The presentation (which is based on the analysis of about 80 songs and many more videos, CD covers, photos, interviews, outfits, stage appearances, symbols etc.) asks whether this means continuity, return, or a completely new construction of these motifs. It is argued that this new, a posteriori “Yugoslavist” discourse seems to be similar to the discourses of Balkanism and Orientalism: it is inherently ambiguous, positive and negative at the same time, and creates shifting hierarchies between us and them understood as contemporary Slovenia and ex-Yugoslavia. This part of the workshop thus offers insight into the process of identity construction and othering in relation to popular representations of the past.