Yugonostalgia. The Meta-National Memory Narratives of the Last Pioneers

Résumé En

Taking into account the specificities of (post) Yugoslav neostalgia (Velikonja, 2010) there is a strong need for theory to take a closer look at themultiplicities of both Yugoslavia and its nostalgia(s). Introducing the political aspect of nostalgia, with particular focus on the last generation of pioneers (born between 1974 and 1982), we are leaving the banalizing official post-communist discourses (Buden, 2012) on nostalgic transition losers and those academic discourses that deny nostalgic sentiments of the ability to generate a political movement or a programme (Horvat and Štiks, 2015). Within revisionist political and cultural discourses, nostalgia emerges, through Svetlana Boym’s concept of counter-memory (Boym,2001), in public spaces without state control and without the control of dominant discourses of political elites, and as such is being translatedinto reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2001, p.49). Through this reflection, the last generation of pioneers creates memory narratives that interweavethe political and the nostalgic. These narratives perform as “noeuds de mémoire” – exceeding attempts of territorialisation and identitarianreduction (Rothberg, 2010) and through their multidirectionality (Rothberg, 2009), they emerge as meta-national Yugonostalgic memory,creating a new paradigm in the political field. This essay aims to provide further reflection on possible theoretical frameworks for understandingthe phenomenon of Yugonostalgia and its place within the political imaginary of the last pioneers. Remaining embedded in research and theory,I have decided to structure this article as an invitation to a dialogue, rather than a fully rounded academic article. The present political phenomena demand new perspectives and thinking about Yugonostalgia remains a challenge.