Nonaligned Literature (Part 2)
Yugoslavia cultivated extensive literary connections with its nonaligned friends. Writers from Yugoslavia traveled to nonaligned countries and brought back accounts of their observations and experiences, published in the press and as book-length travelogues; and many authors and culture workers fostered literary networks with fellow nonaligned countries. Part 2 of 2.
With Nataša Kovačević (Eastern Michigan University).
Listen: “Nonaligned Literature (Part 2)” (Episode #123)
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Transcript: “Nonaligned Literature (Part 2)” (Episode #123)
PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to the extended episode, as well as all past extended and bonus episodes.
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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your guide, Peter Korchnak.
In the last episode we armchair-traveled in the nonaligned world with diplomats, journalists, artists, and other culture workers who then wrote travelogues for Yugoslav audiences.
Today we’re going to continue the trip around the nonaligned world. We’re also going to place Yugoslav travel writing in the context of literary connections and networks Yugoslavia cultivated with its cultural policy in the Nonaligned Movement.
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Taking us on this journey today is Nataša Kovačević, author of the new book, fresh out from Northwestern University Press, titled Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs.
Kovačević teaches postcolonial literature at Eastern Michigan University and is also investigating how postcolonial studies are relevant to studying the Balkans. She is from Belgrade and left Serbia in the 1990s.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: I became really interested in recent scholarship that was trying to connect histories of Eastern Europe with the histories of like Africa and Asia during the Cold War, right, these various types of anticolonial internationalisms. And so nonalignment was one of them.
Growing up, I never really thought about nonalignment, it was something that was in the background. It was the cultural and political orientation of the country. But at the time, you know, I was growing up in the 1980s 70s and 80s, it was already kind of a joke, right? People didn’t really necessarily take it seriously, especially as Yugoslavia was becoming kind of crisis ridden, right, in the 1980s.
But when I started looking into it, I was kind of fascinated to find this history of literary and cultural collaborations, but also this attempt to enter the global circulation of knowledge around coloniality and anti colonialism, and contribute to these global discourses about race.
And then reading Yugoslavia’s like archives and texts, I realized there’s this whole kind of early wave, right, of anticolonial theory that was actually happening at the time of the actual struggles for decolonization. So that history has been almost completely erased in postsocialist Yugoslavia. And I think that’s a real loss.
And if there is the mention of colonialism or coloniality, these discourses have been basically commandeered by the right wing in the region, right, as they portray many of these regions as colonies of Western capital, or just, you know, colonies of international capital. Or you know, they spread fear through discourses about the migrant invasion that is going to somehow replace the indigenous populations, right, of the Yugoslav region.
And so I think that connecting to this earlier history, right, of decolonial thought that arrived in Yugoslavia through the Nonaligned Movement is important so that the country can reclaim that history and think about kind of a socialist lens through which these very important topics can be thought about.
PETER KORCHNAK: In that sense, the work that especially scholars and artists are doing to counter this erasure of history has been particularly important. Less remembering Yugoslavia, and rather retracing or even excavating Yugoslavia.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: I tried to retrace the networks of writers and journalists and scholars, right, who connected Yugoslavia with a number of postcolonial spaces and nonaligned spaces, such as India in the 1950s or Algeria in the 1960s or Vietnam in the 1970s and beyond. And when it comes to literature, I think of it in this kind of very capacious sense, as including a variety of narrative forms, right, from fiction to poetry to travel writing, memoir, diaries, and essays.
Many of these texts were actually written by well-known figures in Yugoslavia’s literary landscape, including, you know, people like Oscar Davičo, or Grozdana Olujić, Aco Shopov, Ivo Andrić, the Nobel laureate, or, you know, by well-known figures in literary scholarships, such as Sveta Lukić or Svetozar Petrović. But these texts, have kind of, for the most part been treated as marginal to the main body of their work, and kind of overlooked by scholarship.
But what I’m interested in is how, like a number of these narrative forms kind of help shape a nonaligned worldview. So I look at the different nodes in this engagement.
PETER KORCHNAK: We talked about one such node in the previous episode of this literary miniseries: travelogues, or as Kovačević calls the genre, “revolutionary travelogue,” that is published accounts of mostly journalists, former Tito’s Partisans, of anticolonization struggles in the Third World. This quote unquote “engaged travel writing” helped galvanize support in Yugoslavia for these liberation movements.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: A lot of the authors, who were almost exclusively men, were also former Partisans, right? So as they’re reporting on various battles for independence, they also understand the methods of guerrilla warfare.
A lot of these travelogs are almost kind of written in the heat of the battle right as they travel around with liberation movements as embedded reporters.
So what they’re doing is they’re trying to galvanize support for liberation movements.
But what they’re also doing is, they’re kind of creating an archive, right, a historical archive in real time.
And they also document the marginalized position of these liberation movements that kind of helps contest kind of a colonial imaginary, right, that often would have represented them as disorganized or chaotic or bloodthirsty, or, you know, through any number of negative stereotypes.
PETER KORCHNAK: In other words, just like other forms of art encompassed within the country’s cultural policy, literature was here put to use as a means of supporting Yugoslavia’s (geo)political goals in the Nonaligned Movement.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: All these discourses, all these relationships cannot really be separated from material solidarities that Yugoslavia participated in terms of supporting a lot of, let’s say, liberation causes, often through both military aid, but through political support in the United Nations or NAM platforms, through humanitarian aid, financial aid, and so on.
It really highlights the intertwining between literature and politics and shows the ways, in which Yugoslavia really used travel writing for cultural diplomacy.
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PETER KORCHNAK: There were other types of travelogues published in Yugoslavia.
You’ll recall that the story of nonaligned travelogues started with Tito and his trips to the Third World, supported with country reports prepared by his staff.
Tito also always had a writer accompany him on these trips.
On his trip in 1961 to Africa on the ship Galeb, the writer in residence was Dobrica Čosić, a Serbian-born former Partisan and prolific author who was quite taken by Tito, describing him as “a modern politician and statesman” of “unusual, impressive personality” who “has the power of honesty and does not hide his intentions.”
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: He travels with Tito and he feels burdened by what he thinks is this expectation that he should write a book about the trip to Africa. At some point, he explicitly asks Tito to relieve him of that expectation. And he says, you know, I’m a writer, I’m a creative writer, I can’t really write a book about political speeches and and meetings, you know, what would that look like? And Tito says, Well, no, you don’t have any, you know, there’s no expectation, I am just basically taking, you know, one writer in every delegation, because I want you to see the world, and I want you to expand your horizons and so on.
In any case, what Čosić is doing is, he’s kind of, again, reflecting on this very thorny questions, question of creative autonomy, right.
But Čosić is also kind of fundamentally uninvested or uninterested in the non-European world, and a lot of the registers that he draws on to describe the African spaces that they visit tend to recycle very familiar colonialist stereotypes of bloodthirstiness and backwardness, especially religious backwardness and feudal relations.
PETER KORCHNAK: Soon, especially after 1966 when Yugoslavia’s Number 3 in charge of the security apparatus and a staunch centralizer, Alexandar Ranković, was purged, Čosić became disillusioned with Tito whom he now saw as “morally hypocritical and unscrupulous in his love of power” and “a great manipulator and triple impostor.”
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: He also thinks of Africans as childlike, as not really suited to modernization.
Čosić is ultimately using these stereotypes to indirectly, kind of castigate what he calls Tito’s royal court, on the Galeb ship, which, you know, he says, you know, showed to him that there was no hope for democratic socialism in Yugoslavia.
And of course, we see that some of this thinking kind of carries over. At the time, he’s still kind of a Yugoslav, but once Čosić becomes kind of a Serbian nationalist, he will use the same kinds of Orientalist stereotypes to describe the Albanians and other Muslim nations in Yugoslavia.
PETER KORCHNAK: In the 1980s Čosić took a hard anti-Titoist and, more importantly, nationalist turn. Tito was now “the greatest enemy of [the Serbian people]” and a “monarch from Brijuni.”
Čosić was considered to be a co-author of the infamous Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts from 1986. The Memorandum claimed that Serbs were discriminated against and Serbia exploited in Yugoslavia and thus laid the groundwork for Yugoslavia’s disintegration and the wars that accompanied it.
From 1992 to 1993 Čosić served as president of the rump Yugoslavia.
The one travelogue everyone mentions is Crno [na] belo (Black and White) by Oskar Davičo from 1962.
Davičo too was a veteran of the People’s Liberation War. He was one of the most prominent Serbian authors, writing poetry in a surrealist style and novels with revolutionary socialist themes. He traveled around North and West Africa at about the same time as Tito and Čosić. His reports were published in the newspaper Borba, the communist party’s organ, and later compiled in Crno na belo.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: Black and White figures as this literary, almost like cultural accompaniment to the emergent narrative of nonalignment. This is where a basically kind of avant garde experimental writer is trying to completely rethink the mode of representation and the way of writing a travelogue.
On the one hand, he’s constantly criticizing socialist realism and distancing himself from what he sees as these mechanical or too idealistic genres that he associates with kind of Soviet or Chinese influence in Africa. And on the other hand, he is trying to push against specifically French modernist writers who write also about Africa. And he describes them as too solipsistic and too kind of self-absorbed.
He’s trying to balance between what he calls aestheticism on one hand and facts on the other, right. So he’s trying to write this socialist travelog, which will nonetheless take reality into account and present kind of a critical understanding of kind of postcolonial realities in Africa.
PETER KORCHNAK: India featured in the travelogue imaginary as well. A prominent figure here was Čedomir Minderović, also a former Partisan, who was both a writer and a culture worker.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: He visited India as a cultural attaché in the 1950s and then went on a literary exchange in the 1960s.
PETER KORCHNAK: Those experiences inspired Minderović to write four books. Two collections of poetry, Potonula džunka (A Sunken Junk) and Ogrlica za Nailu (Necklace for Naila) in 1959 and ‘66 respectively; the novel Posljedni koktejl (The Last Cocktail) in 1961; and travel essays, Tragovi Indije (Traces of India) also in 1966.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: He’s kind of an interesting case, because his style of writing, not only changes right, like with the politics of the country, but he also becomes very involved with the Indian cultural and literary exchanges.
So he is somebody who was a staunch defender of socialist realism, right, after World War Two, but a lot of his writing early on, even before the break with the Soviet Union, tends to kind of mix these modernist narrative techniques with socialist realism. And then as time went on, he became more and more experimental, and his writing became— especially his prose writing became a lot more fragmented.
His books about India, they kind of draw on this revolutionary ethos that he associates with the Partisan battle and with the Indian anticolonial struggles as kind of this pure moment right of potential, where things were possible, where there was true egalitarianism.
He became a lot more critical of the results of the revolutions, both in terms of socialist revolutions in Yugoslavia, but also the postcolonial kind of, if you will, revolution, right, in India\ .
PETER KORCHNAK: As a cultural attache and exchange writer, Minderović—
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: —was also a tireless promoter of Yugoslav literatures in India. and he traveled around, you know, opening exhibitions of Yugoslav art. He published, probably like several dozen interviews and articles in Indian newspapers and magazines. He wrote about Yugoslav literature and lectured on Yugoslav literature.
PETER KORCHNAK: Minderović was but one example of the literary network Yugoslavia cultivated within the Nonaligned Movement as part of its cultural diplomacy.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: I also look at how they set up these networks of exchange and translation whose goal was to connect peripheral literatures without the mediation of metropolitan centers, right, and create these material venues and infrastructures to create, you know, independent knowledge.
There was really kind of a lively flow back and forth between Yugoslavia and a number of different countries in Asia, Africa and also, later on, Latin America. And we can see that Yugoslavs were, first of all, very alert to a number of anticolonial kind of literary conferences that were either located in countries in the Global South or were focusing on global south literatures. So for instance, you know from the archives, we can see that they closely followed these events, like the many Afro-Asian Writers Association conferences, which were, of course, under the auspices of the Soviet Union, financially and politically. They went to a number of Pan African conferences, Pan Arab conferences, the congresses of black writers and artists in Paris and Rome in the 1950s.
And they wrote extensive reports about those events where, which kind of are this fascinating melange of literary criticism, right, an overview of all the speeches that the different delegates gave, and also political analysis, right? Because many of these events, right, not surprisingly, at the time, given that the cultural emancipation was seen as intertwined with national emancipation, all of these conferences were highly politicized affairs, and so we can see the tensions at some of these conferences.
PETER KORCHNAK: As you heard in the nonalignment series episode on art, Yugoslavia had a number of bilateral agreements with nonaligned countries where culture was either included under the umbrella of cooperation or the central piece, with agreements focusing specifically on culture. In the case of literature, for example, agreements about cultural exchanges would specify numbers of writers visiting per year.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: A lot of the times, these visitors would come from very far away places. They would try to attend as many events as possible, right, to make the visit worthwhile.
And the same thing would happen with Yugoslavs, who would be, let’s say, be sent to Egypt or India or Guinea, or some some other country that they would be tasked with not only promoting their own writing, and let’s say, giving literary readings or participating in different kinds of literary festivals, but the expectation would be there that they would make contact with publishers and editors; that they would take you know books or from their own countries to be translated; that they would obtain books to take back and to translate them back at home; and in general, that they would establish these kind of larger, institutional, you know, collaborative projects.
PETER KORCHNAK: In the first part of this story we heard that women were very scarcely represented in the nonaligned literary market. There were prominent exceptions, however.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: One of my favorite examples, again, is the writer Grozana Olujić, who is you know, this incredibly active literary ambassador for her own country, right. She’s not only well-translated as a writer herself, right at a time when her writing actually because it deals with very explicit sexual themes and kind of this existential malaise that is critical of socialism in Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s, she is very well-translated around the world, including in India. And so when she goes to India, right on her two trips, two extended trips, she is basically treated as a literary celebrity.
But beyond that, she also gives lectures at universities, she meets with a number of famous Indian writers like Agyeya and Jainendra Kumar and Amrita Pritam and Sophia Wadia, and she brings a lot of Yugoslav texts to be translated in India. She, you know, goes to receptions at embassies, she goes to dinners…
So the authors are tasked with a lot more than what we would imagine they would be tasked with today.
PETER KORCHNAK: As always, the production of discourse is one thing, but what interests me the most is the impact of the discourse, how all this literature actually managed to shape a nonaligned worldview among the Yugoslav public.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: One of the things that also happened as a result of this cultural orientation towards the nonaligned world is, I think, that it led to a lot of soul searching and the calls to diversify literary publishing in Yugoslavia, too, beyond just kind of reaching out to, you know, countries in the nonaligned world, and, you know, setting up these bilateral exchange agreements and the journalists and writers and scholars circulating.
There was also an attempt to create kind of a broad reading culture in Yugoslavia that would be kind of more cosmopolitan, more internationalist in outlook, and would not just be kind of tied to the Eurocentric canon.
PETER KORCHNAK: The sheer volume of cultural production, both in literature and print media, skyrocketed in the 1950s. Yugoslavia’s new socialist direction, and later nonaligned status, simply had to be promoted among the citizenry.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: Increasingly, from the 1950s onward, we can see that there’s, there are a lot more publications, translations and publications of work from non-European countries in Yugoslavia, and from the debates in journals which are kind of trying to take stock of this in the 1980s, there is a sense that these kinds of texts are particularly popular with young people, with young readers. And so there’s also this kind of focus on or debates about, like whether we should internationalize also school curricula, and kind of include more non-European or non-American texts into school curricula, which I don’t think was really ever implemented.
But there is a much bigger number of literary texts that are just kind of circulating, not just as full books, but also, if you picked up any magazines or cultural journals, right, they would constantly have translations of short stories and poetry from a lot of countries that were not European, from lots of nonaligned countries.
PETER KORCHNAK: As you heard in the story of Yugoslavia’s support for liberation movements, a variety of events took place in the country in solidarity with the decolonializing nations, concerts, fundraising drives, culture days, Solidarity Weeks, and so on.
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: When it came to publishing certain kinds of literary texts, there were these, like, broad solidarity campaigns.
So for instance, during the Vietnam War, they published an edited anthology of Vietnamese, like contemporary Vietnamese poetry, right, that was kind of critical of the war right, like antiwar poetry. And all of this, it involved a lot of volunteer labor by not just writers and translators, who, by the way, were some of the most prominent Yugoslav writers, such as Danilo Kiš and Desanka Maksimović and Oscar Davičo, they were translating Vietnamese poetry from French into Serbocroatian.
But like all the other work was donated, it was volunteer labor, you know, like the materials on which these— this anthology was printed, the labor of printing it, the distribution, dissemination, right? So, that speaks to this awareness, right, that this was important, and that it wasn’t just about the, you know, white-collar labor that was participating in this, but also just blue collar labor.
There were also the events, in 1980 for instance, it was called Days of Information about African cultures, that was organized to coincide with the UNESCO General Conference in Belgrade, or was in anticipation of the UNESCO General Conference in Belgrade. And so that was kind of a large event, that would include screenings of films from various African countries, the exhibition of literatures, you know, it was supposed to kind of draw, like many people in and we can see that those kinds of events would have been popular.
Book fairs would also exhibit nonaligned literary publications.
PETER KORCHNAK: But—
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ: —to what extent, right, that made a huge difference, right? In the long run it is really kind of hard to gauge.
PETER KORCHNAK: But we’ll keep trying. For now, that’s it for our story today and that of nonaligned literature in Yugoslavia.
As should be obvious by now, more and more scholarship is coming out on the subject of nonalignment, from works by established authors to PhD dissertations, from the former Yugoslavia and from elsewhere.
Artists, too including past podcast guests Jasmina Cibic [sibic]
and Olja Triaška Stefanović
, but also many others
explore nonalignment as the political and ideological foundation for their works.
The story of Yugoslavia’s nonalignment and of the Nonaligned Movement continues.
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PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening, traveling, and reading with us.
All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself.
Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia.
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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić
. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Ćao!
Additional Sources
Kovačević, Nataša. Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South, and LIterary Solidarities beyond the Cold War Blocs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2025
Perović, Latinka. “Dobrica Čosić and Josip Broz Tito—A Political and Intellectual Relationship.” In: Gorana Ognjenović and Jasna Jozelić, eds. Titoism, Self-Determination, Nationalism, Cultural Memory: Volume Two, Tito’s Yugoslavia, Stories Untold. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, pp. 105-164
Tot, Dora. “State-Sponsored ‘Solidarity Weeks’, 1967–87: The Home Front of Yugoslav Humanitarian Internationalism.” Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 60 (2025)