YUGONOSTALGIA: RESTORATIVE AND REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

Abstract

Drawing on Svetlana Boym's distinction between "restorative" and "reflective" nostalgia, the essay maps two broad, and often overlapping, ideal types of Yugonostalgia expressed in and through contemporary former Yugoslav film, popular music, and multi-media. The first expresses reeonstructive longing for an essential Yugoslav past; the second offers self-consciously ambivalent and critical frames in indulging fantasies of this past. What different forms of Yugonostalgia share in common is challenging symbolic geographies of disunity that have dominated political discourse in former Yugoslavia for the last two decades. The two types can be differenciated by their stance toward the presentpast and the future: while both of them are based on fantasies of the past, thc "restorative" Yugonostalgic looks backward towards a seemingly fixed time and space while "reflective" nostalgic restlessly grapples with the dislocation so palpable in the former Yugoslavia to imagine alternative futures.