[Online] GGS Teaching Assistantship Programme: Zero-Sum Game in Every Direction: Post-Yugoslavia as Non Site of Multidirectional Memory

This workshop is part of the GGS Teaching Assistantship Programme 2021.

Content

Through the workshop I wish to explore several concepts in memory studies and their application to the specific contexts of a non-place of memory, that is the former Yugoslavia. I will treat Yugoslavia as a memory object which is at the same time platforming collective grievances and a cause of contention, despite the fact it does not exist as a geo-political reality for almost three decades. Therefore, I take Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory (2009) as a starting point of the workshop and work through memory conflicts on the case of Yugoslavia as a non-site of memory. Echoing Judt’s (1992) claim that the past is always another country I wish to explore what happens when the country is no more - extant only as a knowledge project and a memory object. I propose a workshop that traces competitive victimization springing from unresolved memory conflicts on one side and methodological nationalism on the other as played out in the case of Post-Yugoslavia, a country whose non-existence renders it a perfect object of memory studies, both in terms of its utopian potential (Kirn 2019) as well as shared history of violence (Assmann 2012). The workshop will look at two case studies, discussions arising from cinematic depictions of genocide(s) in Quo Vadis, Aida (2020) and Dara from Jasenovac (2020) and intellectual exchange on the supranational project of Yugoslavia that occurred around the project of “Yugosplaining the World”- series of blog posts that sparked a discussion in post-Yugoslav academic circles both on nature of the project and its consequences. In both cases, the participants will discuss how Yugoslavia is discursively reified as a memory platform, and how memory discussions render this past very much present.

Key words: Yugoslavia, genocide, multidirectional memory, Srebrenica, Jasenovac, pop-culture, socialism, decolonization

Further information is available in the syllabus.