A Note on the Meaning of the ‘Post’ in Post-Yugoslav Literature

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 99, 4, 2021 A Note on the Meaning of the ‘Post’ in Post-Yugoslav Literature ZORAN MILUTINOVIĆ My aim is to try to clarify the possible meanings of ‘post-Yugoslav literature’, a designation which has become relatively frequent in contemporary literary criticism, but which still requires some attention if it is to be used as a scholarly term. It implies a geography, as it directs our attention to Yugoslavia, and a temporality, as it refers to something that comes after Yugoslav literature. The easiest would be to use ‘post-Yugoslav literature’ to refer to all literature written in the region formerly known as Yugoslavia, but it would be very difficult to find a single instance of such usage: as a rule, the term ‘post-Yugoslav’ is never applied to novels and poems written in Slovene, Macedonian or Albanian, but only to those written in the standard Štokavian. It is even sometimes explicitly underlined that all writers from this ‘post-Yugoslav’ regional space ‘all share the language’ — which certainly comes as a big surprise to those who write in Slovene or Macedonian. However, using the term ‘post-Yugoslav’ to refer to the literature written in the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian does not seem justified in any sense. If we want to refer to some shared commonalities in literature written by Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins and Serbs, and to close connections between them at all levels — so close that in some periods they leave the impression of writing a single national literature — then both ‘post’ and ‘Yugoslav’ are misplaced. These commonalities and connections are older than the state of Yugoslavia, and can in no way be thought of as something that comes after it. At the same time, excluding all non-Štokavian speakers from whatever ‘post-Yugoslav’ we may want to talk about, and appropriating this term only for Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins and Serbs certainly cannot be justified in any way. However, it reveals something very important about the possible meaning of this term, to which I will return after examining its other possible meanings. Zoran Milutinović is Professor of South Slav Literature and Modern Literary Theory at UCL SSEES. ON THE ‘POST’ IN POST-YUGOSLAV LITERATURE 735 A very widespread use of the term post-Yugoslav literature is based on its perceived ideological leanings. Post-Yugoslav literature is said to be whatever opposes the nationalist and neoliberal policies of the successor states: non-nationalist, leftist literature written in the Yugoslav successor states. The ideological criterium for admittance to post-Yugoslav literature is derived neither from the history of Yugoslav literature — which was not ideologically uniform, contained both nationalist and non-nationalist currents, and could hardly be characterized as predominantly leftist in any sense — nor from the actual political practices of the Communist Alliance of Yugoslavia, but from the Alliance’s official anti-nationalist and socialist ideology: not from what it historically was, but from how it wanted to be perceived. This understanding of post-Yugoslav literature is not based on generalizations about a specific literary corpus as a list of works meeting these criteria would be rather brief, but on our aspiration to appear as people who, in their conference papers and articles in refereed journals with quite a limited readership, ‘subvert’ something or other, or ‘disrupt’ it, ‘transgress’ or ‘re-draw the boundaries’, or make the world a better place in some other way. This aspirational activist dimension, taken from larger socio-political movements such as feminism and postcolonialism, leads some of us to identify, support and advocate non-nationalist, leftist literature either in a sincere hope that this advocacy could eventually change the political realities of the Yugoslav successor states, or simply as a way of self-positioning in the cultural field. The former is rather naive, and the latter simply vain and self-serving. This notion of post-Yugoslav literature cannot be used in any meaningful way and should be abandoned. The second, apparently more theoretically sophisticated description of post-Yugoslav literature is based on the notion of post-national literature: it argues that the historical period in which literature was nationally produced is over, that we now live...