Yugonostalgia and the Ministry of Possibilities
Ugrešić embodied anti- and non-nationalist people who, since the disintegration of their country, Yugoslavia, found themselves in a kind of an existential vacuum.
Essay, Guests, Translation
On Partisans and Monuments
For years, Vraca, like other monuments to the People’s Liberation Struggle, instead of being a place of memory became a place of oblivion.
Essay, Guests
If a Bomb Hits the Bridge
The grim thought accompanied my father on that chilly April morning in 1999. An absurd wartime thought. The same absurdity that had turned a bus ride into a matter of life and death.
Essay, Newsletter
Where the Streets Have Tito’s Name
After Yugoslavia’s dissolution, a large number of places named after Tito were renamed, beginning with cities bearing his name’s adjective.
Essay, Newsletter
Tito Go Home
Belgrade Mayor has proposed that Tito’s grave be relocated from the House of Flowers to Kumrovec.
Essay, Guests
Yugoslavia in My Life, My Life in Yugoslavia
Post-Yugoslav literature is burdened with collective memory, but it also has the ability to look in the mirror of history. If something good has come from all the terrible events that happened in ex-Yugoslavia and to it, it is that [they] have provoked an interest in the literature of my region.
Essay, Guests
Djordje Balašević: My Type of Yugonostalgia
Good art gives us a lexicon for our own feelings and experiences. It gives us back moments of our own life, expressed more poignantly. And no one was better at that than Balašević.
Essay, Newsletter
Paris, Bosnia
The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris have begun and one week into the quadrennial event story lines abound. In the former Yugoslavia, Paris 2024 harkens back to Sarajevo 1984.
Essay, Translation
Yugoslavia Lives!
Yugoslavia lives as a metaphysical symbol, a cultural relic, a value label, political subversion, and nostalgia for or collective memory of a better past.
Essay
I’m From a Country That No Longer Exists
Where are you from? A seemingly simple question that, due to my accent, I have heard a thousand times during 20 years of my life in the United States.
Essay
Rockin’ Sarajevo
When the season’s first snow falls in Sarajevo, locals of a certain age recall the Olympics in 1984, when after a dry winter they worried whether the Games would even take place…