Nostalgia in Flux

Some ex-Yugoslavs switch between different kinds of nostalgia, depending on context. The fluctuations of yugonostalgia highlight Yugoslavia as an enduring social and moral category.

With Jelena Golubović (Northeastern University, Boston).

Listen: “Nostalgia in Flux” (Episode #137)

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Transcript: “Nostalgia in Flux” (Episode #137)

PETER KORCHNAK: This and every other 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 episodes ad-free and have access to extended and bonus episodes.

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[JINGLE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your guide, Peter Korchnak.

In the Nostalgia series on this show, we explore the various manifestations of the defining phenomenon of our time. Of Yugoslavia’s memory, in fact. I’ve been studying nostalgia and yugonostalgia for many years now, but there seems to be no end in sight to the project. Just the other day I read a text that illuminated a new, new-to-me, that is, facet of yugonostalgia: its fluctuations. So of course I had to investigate, with the author herself. And that’s our show today!

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JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: I do teach a little bit about nostalgia in my anthropology of Eastern Europe class, and it’s something that always energizes students. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Jelena Golubović is assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs at Northeastern University in Boston. She grew up in Vancouver, BC and comes from Belgrade, Yugoslavia where she was born in 1988. She spoke to me from Providence, Rhode Island.

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: It is this blend of like memory and also gaps in memory that animates them so much that it’s just it’s so elusive and it’s hard to define and it’s so romantic in this way also. 

But there is also this question of how your sense of the romanticism that comes through nostalgia also can  create total dissonance of what otherwise should be your political views, make you forgive certain things, make you overlook certain things.

PETER KORCHNAK: Though Golubović is not primarily a nostalgia scholar, the text that sparked today’s episode is, “Nostalgia in flux: Remembering Yugoslavia amid ethnic and economic precarities,” a chapter she wrote for the 2025 book Bosnian Fluxes: Belonging, Care, and Reckonings in a Post-Cold War Semi-Periphery.

The chapter in turn grew out as a side project of Golubović’s work for her book, Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo, out this year from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: What ended up being the focus of those interviews was not how the Bosnian Serb forces were besieging the city. It was about all these like interior crimes that were happening against them because of who they were, because of how they were perceived by others. And I ended up focusing on that, so on this element of retribution inside the siege. 

The main sort of perpetrator in these narratives wasn’t the Bosnian Serb army. That was like the background context. The background context was the besiegement. But the main sort of perpetrators that was being discussed in all these crimes that were being told to me were were neighbors, were Bosniak paramilitary, Croat paramilitary. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In 2017 and 2018, as she was doing fieldwork investigating the impact of the Siege of Sarajevo on Bosnian Serb women living in that city, as it often happens in the region the conversations veered into nostalgia territory.   

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: I was interested in what happened in the war, but I was also sort of following the afterlife of that history into the present and wanting to know how these women were experiencing the city now.

I mean, in short, a lot of them have a very contested sense of belonging in the city because they still are sort of haunted by this idea that others around them view them as aggressors, that others think of them as perpetrators, that they are only conditionally invited into the sort of like moral community in Sarajevo, so on and so forth. 

And so, when people were talking about how they navigate the city today and what it’s like for them, they would contrast that often with what it was like before the war and what it felt like to be Serb before the war. And that, I think, is what would sort of snowball into these questions of nostalgia.

PETER KORCHNAK: “There is a widespread feeling of nostalgia for the time of socialist Yugoslavia, which is remembered throughout the region as a time of inter-ethnic harmony, social welfare, economic security, and international prestige,” writes Golubović in “Nostalgia in flux.” “The idealised socialist past serves as a benchmark against which Bosnians measure their current realities and resist coming to accept present conditions as the new ‘normal’.”

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: It started in this very textbook way where there is, I think, a sort of this very well documented textbook understanding that we have of yugonostalgia, as being this like reparative force or something that has reparative potential. So the sort of narrative through which people can position themselves as Yugoslavs and therefore not have to buy into or not have to slot themselves into the the ethnic, ethnonational categories, and frame themselves in these collectivist terms as all being sort of former Yugoslavs, all being you know economic victims of the collapse of state socialism, etc.

And so when I was doing fieldwork and we would sort of veer into this nostalgic territory in our conversations, often it would start off really textbook, and I would, you know, when when you’ve heard a story a lot, you kind of just like nod, and you know, you’re not thinking too critically about it . You’ve heard a million stories about how life was before the war and how much better it was, how everyone got along, how you didn’t know if your friends were Muslims or Croats or Serbs, etc. 

PETER KORCHNAK: “In the popular narrative of yugonostalgia,” writes Golubović, “Bosnians can step out of the divisive ethno-national categories [and] position themselves collectively as former Yugoslav citizens and mutually affected economic victims of the collapse of socialism while the question of who is to blame for this collapse, or for the war, is temporarily set aside. [Y]ugonostalgia’s reparative potential comes from the way it provides speakers with a discursive common ground that can foster social interactions across ethno-political divisions. It offers a reconciliatory language that circumvents sensitive issues related to the war while emphasising both a shared past under Yugoslav socialism and shared grievances in the present.” 

So far so typical, but Golubović noticed something peculiar in these conversations. 

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: There seemed to be the sort of twist that happened, where that was just sort of the raw material for this sort of different version of yugonostalgia that came out specifically with Bosnian Serb women in Sarajevo and also in Istočno Sarajevo, which is Eastern Sarajevo, which is on the Republika Srpska side of the partition line and is this very Serb-dominated enclave, effectively. 

And so when they would make that transition, this narrative that I had thought of as this textbook narrative, and that I didn’t think twice about, would suddenly get this edge where the we of Yugoslavs would become we the Serbs instead. And then I’d have to figure out what was happening in those narratives. 

So I can give some examples of what I’m trying to articulate here.

PETER KORCHNAK: Yes, please.

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: There’s one person that I quote in the book who says she’s talking about what life was like before the war, and she says it was the most beautiful time of my life, but it didn’t last. And then she adds, “It was easier when they were just Muslims.”

Or a different person says, “Those beautiful days are over. What can I say? They didn’t want it anymore. They wanted their own state.” 

So there was this this sense that all these categories that yugonostalgia is supposed to allow you to circumvent, these ethnic categories that became so entrenched and hardened by the war, instead of being circumvented, they were being directly invoked to place the blame on the war, to do these things that yugonostalgia was supposed to allow you to bracket aside. So these beautiful days of socialism that were supposed to be collectively shared, just became divided into this us and them, where us was the Serbs as opposed to the Yugoslavs.

PETER KORCHNAK: “Serb women used yugonostalgia to assert that the economic deprivations of the years following the war have been felt differently by different ethno-national groups,” writes Golubović. “Instead of positioning all Sarajevans as economic victims, they criticised the ethno-economic stigmatisation of Serbs.”

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: The we is we the Serbs and they is they the Muslims in those quotes, but what I mean to articulate is that those quotes happened after these longer narratives, where it was we the Yugoslavs. So it would be these long narratives about the beautiful days of socialism and how it was for us in Yugoslavia, and you know, very much like a we the people kind of narrative, which is what is the typical yugonostalgic narrative that we hear. And so those would be long narratives about you know everybody having a job and everybody going to work, and one of the common tropes is like you could sleep on a bench anywhere because it was so safe. The we in all these discussions was we the Yugoslavs. 

And then after these long talks, there would be this additional line or two that would reframe that we and suddenly say something like, “It was easier when they were just Muslims.” The we and the they would suddenly shift. And so there was something different happening in these narratives. So it wasn’t this reconciliatory narrative; it was a sort of different edge on that narrative. But it was using the same raw material, which is why it felt so dissonant to me, which is why it confused me so much when I heard it, because I was used to that typical Yugoslavia reconciliatory narrative, and I just assumed going into the field that all the yugonostalgic narratives I would hear would would fall into that frame. 

But then instead these ones what they were doing was instead of framing all Yugoslavs as economic victims of the collapse of socialism, they were singling out the experiences of Bosnian Serbs in the economic landscape of post-socialism, which was also the post-war economic landscape. 

Looking, for instance, at how the Serbs were economically stigmatized during the war, being fired from their jobs, having their pensions refused to them, all these kinds of things, and then how that followed into the post-war period, where again they couldn’t get hired, there were these sort of blacklists against them, things like this. 

It’s hard to disentangle what might be targeted ethnic discrimination from a much more general economic disenfranchisement. So this question of, am I unable to get a job because I am a Serb and I’m being blacklisted, or am I unable to get a job because no one in this economy can get a job? 

What I’m putting forward here isn’t this like Bosnian-Serb variant of yugonostalgia that I think that we can say there’s a pattern for throughout, but it’s just sort of this this crack in the framework, this invitation to reconsider how yugonostalgia can be used and what else it can be used for other than reconciliatory potential. 

PETER KORCHNAK: “As the same speakers fluently switch between different iterations depending on what the social context calls for, the fluctuations of yugonostalgia reveal the labour through which everyday sociality is achieved across differences,” writes Golubović.

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: And what I thought was interesting too is that a lot of my interlocutors here they were fluent in both versions, so they were able to sort of switch between the two depending on what the situation called for and depending on who they were talking to.

The example of that that I used in the chapter was this one woman who initially had begun this—I keep saying textbook version that’s probably not used anywhere in the literature—but this kind of more widely recognized, more well documented form of of yugonostalgia. And then she was the person who had made that statement about it was easier when they were just Muslims. And so when she said that, and that sort of this flag went off for me. So I was following up and asking her about that, and I was asking her about what her relationships were like with Bosniaks and Croats, which is a quite specific question for her because she was someone who lived in Istočno Sarajevo, and who therefore operated in a pretty much Serb-dominant context in her day to day life, and she was a shopkeeper there, and so when I asked her what her relationships were like with Bosniaks and Croats, which is honestly kind of a terrible question, but it’s the one I asked in the moment, and she was really able to read the subtext of my question, which is, asking her to tell me whether she’s an ethno-nationalist or not, which is really just a crude way to go about that. But she did read the subtext of my question, and she told me that when Bosniaks and Croats come into her shop, she socializes with them and she talks to them just like she would talk to anybody else. And I asked her what they talk about together, and she said we talk about Yugoslavia. So I think with her saying that and with her having until that one statement engaged in with me in this very typical form of yugonostalgia is shows that she really does have a fluency in both. 

PETER KORCHNAK: “The dynamism of these two narratives demonstrates how Bosnians skilfully negotiate between the inclusive social categories of Yugoslav socialism and the divisive social categories of wartime,” Golubović writes.

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: All of these versions are just coexisting simultaneously, and there’s multiple iterations happening constantly and doing different kinds of work, I think is fascinating.

PETER KORCHNAK: So it’s like code switching, but for nostalgia. And you know, maybe she was just a good businesswoman. You don’t want to offend your customers because you need their business. 

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: Yeah, exactly.

PETER KORCHNAK: Golubović noticed that the women she interviewed only switched to this quote unquote “ethno-nationalised version of yugonostalgia” in the private interviews with her or in social interactions with other Serbs, whereas in interactions with Croats or Bosniaks or others, they stayed in the common yugonostalgia realm. 

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: And so she knows what sort of line in the discourse she can cross with me but maybe not cross with somebody else depending on how she reads them ethnonationally. So, because she read me as being legible as a Serb, and therefore could include me in this we the Serbs, us the Serbs, to me she can say a statement like, “It’s easier when they were just Muslims,” but she would obviously omit that when talking to a Bosniak or Muslim person in her in her shop. 

So this fluency in both, I think, is really revealing of how much labor goes into nostalgia and nostalgic discourse and the different variants of it, and also revealing of the fact that how we are positioned gives us access to one iteration but not the other. Right, a different— differently positioned researcher would not maybe have had access to this Serb variant that I had access to by virtue of being legible as a Serb. 

There is a lot of research already talking to basically every other group, and in those studies researchers usually have a hard time getting Serb interlocutors to respond. And my sense was that a project that just focused on Serbs and like created that space intentionally would be able to draw in some voices that had been left off the record and that hadn’t been involved in research. 

So I think there must be variance within each group and subgroup and cross-group and counter-group. There must be variants of the popular nostalgia that are inflected in their own way, and that you don’t get access to them unless you are positioned appropriately, or for whatever other reason you’re able to ask the perfect questions and get those answers out. 

PETER KORCHNAK: This brought up for me the issue of salience. I mean here we are talking about Yugoslavia, about yugonostalgia, all the time, it’s our focus, but in real life, people don’t necessarily think about that stuff in such a way. So how important are these issues for people?

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: Yugoslavia is, I mean, it’s no longer a you know active political category, but it’s still a highly relevant moral category, and I think people use it for its its moral potency and for its ability to help you just sort of immediately classify who you’re talking to when you don’t know who you’re talking to. So I’ve seen this in real time with people just sort of in their day to day to day lives. 

For example, like a plumber comes into someone’s house mid-session, and they want to quickly gauge the plumber’s politics, so that they know what they should or shouldn’t say around this plumber. Especially if there’s, you know, a conversation happening with a friend or interviewer or whatever, a researcher in the next room, and so the way to quickly gauge this plumber’s politics is to just say a line or two about Yugoslavia and see how they respond, and if they respond with the kind of sense of a sense of nostalgia that you can read in them, then you know that perhaps this person has particular political leanings. And if they respond in the opposite way, or like really closed off or critical, then you know that they have political leanings in a different direction. So I feel like it’s a quick way to let you gauge others and then know what you should and shouldn’t say around them to make your life easier. So that’s one sort of daily or like quotidian use of yugonostalgia that I’ve seen quite a few times. 

Another, which I think is specific to Serbs in Sarajevo, maybe Serbs in the Federation more broadly, I’m not sure, is a sort of moral positioning of yugonostalgia for Serbs as belonging to the moral community. 

The way I open my book, for example, is I’m describing this taxi ride that I took, where I got in the car and the taxi driver started driving, and, as you know, taxi drivers in the region are amazing interlocutors, and a lot of them love to talk and tell you about their worlds, and they usually have fantastic perspectives. And this taxi driver started sort of without me doing much prompting at all, I should say, but started talking about ethnonational sort of belonging and how everyone was cut from the same cloth, how everyone was kind of considered one and not seeing all this difference, and so he’s literally saying things like pointing to his arm and saying, “Meat, meat, blood, blood,” like we are all the same. 

And when I had come into the car, and he asked me questions about my life, and asked me where I was from, and what I did for a living, and why I had an accent when I spoke the language, and whether I was married, and when I was going to have children, and all these things that a taxi driver asks you, I ended up telling him that I was born in Belgrade, and what he immediately did was say, “Oh, so a Yugoslav!” 

And I thought that was fascinating because the category Yugoslav there offered him a sort of way to signal friendliness that him saying, “Oh, so a Serb!” just simply couldn’t. If I tell him I’m born in Belgrade and he says, “Oh, so you’re a Serb!” or “Or so you’re Serbian!” That sounds so different and so much less friendly, unfortunately, than saying, “Oh, a Yugoslav!” right? 

And so I was talking with some friends in the region about this, like, what will we do in years down the road when Yugoslavia isn’t— like you know when the lived experiences of it have died out and when it isn’t available as this kind of moral category that can be invoked, and when a taxi driver can no longer turn around and say, “Oh, a Yugoslav!” because I was technically still born in Yugoslavia, and we were wondering what other kind of category could fill that space, and we came up with like maybe you could say, “Oh, oh, a neighbor”, like that might do it, but you still need some some word that signals association and signals friendliness and signals unity in a way that saying “Oh so a Serb!” just doesn’t do in that context. 

PETER KORCHNAK: I guess there’s in some circles hope that “European” would be that that concept. 

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: You know what’s horrifying? Is that European didn’t come up in my conversation with these friends, which is terrible. 

PETER KORCHNAK: I bet.

Anyways,  it’s interesting that you know Yugoslavia in all these stories is framed or or positioned as a place of of commonality and of course you know ethnicity as a place of difference and so that to me is always is always interesting. How do you— when do you use which? Just like the taxi driver used with you, or you’re one of us again, or was he just a good businessman?

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: Yeah. And how quickly it happens in real time too, where I think as a researcher you really want to like dig in and think about how this unfolds, but in a real time interaction, it might just be like half a sentence, and then a kind of quick acknowledgement, and then you move on, and it served its purpose.

PETER KORCHNAK: “Because of the collective amnesia that tends to surround contentious issues, yugonostalgia provides an agreeable narrative template for people who may not be personally acquainted, who may not know one another’s war-time loyalties or political orientations,” writes Golubović. “The socialist past becomes a resource for re-negotiating social relations, as chatting innocuously about how things were better ‘before’ provides a way of avoiding more divisive topics related to the war and its aftermath… [I]n reminiscing about the socialist past, people do not position themselves as ethno-national subjects, since the very division of Bosnians into discrete and bounded ethno-national groups was a primary goal of the war-time ethno-nationalist elite. Instead, people position themselves collectively as ex-Yugoslavs, thus invoking an identity that is politically obsolete but still morally and socially relevant.”

Now, if Bosnian Serbs feel this way, experience or express different kinds of nostalgia and switch between them depending on context, can the same be said of their Bosniak and Croat neighbors?

JELENA GOLUBOVIĆ: My human sense of the matter is that I feel like in in so many of these interactions, your—I sound like such an anthropologist—but your positionality matters so much. So I think coming in as a Serb-legible researcher asking these types of questions prompts particular kinds of responses. So I mean, I can sort of guess what I might have heard just based on talking to people as a human, if not a researcher, during my time doing fieldwork. I would assume that as a Serb researcher, I would have just been given access to the much more textbook version of yugonostalgia when told by other groups.

A few of the women that I talked to said, “If you had been talking to everybody, we wouldn’t have talked to you.” 

Every decision shapes the narratives you get, every decision sort of like inflects the data in some way. So this one shaped my data and shaped the stories I gathered towards being more stories about ethnic grievances and you know where you could air ethnicity more in this way, than it would have been if it was a project where I talked to everyone. So you have to be conscious of what direction the decision is going to take you in. But I did think it was important to get access to these stories that hadn’t been told yet, even if the price for telling them was that you wouldn’t hear from everybody.

But to that point, there has been some research that’s looking at Bosniak variants or Bosnian Muslim variants of remembrance of Yugoslavia, where speakers from that group would sometimes position themselves as the only real Yugoslavs, unlike all the others. There’s also Bougarel who’s discussing how, again looking at Bosnian— Bosniaks or Bosnian Muslims and the way they remember Yugoslavia, that there’s sometimes also this like grievance of not being recognized as an equal nation within Yugoslavia, so that’s kind of built into the way they remember it as well. 

I think what makes the popular nostalgia popular is that all these bristly little bits and sharp edges are smoothed out, and so you get the most palatable and the most widely acceptable narrative that doesn’t bring up these points of contention.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening. 

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. 

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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić.  

Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys. 

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!