Cultures of risk: On generative uncertainty and intergenerational memory in post-Yugoslav migrant narratives

Abstract

The disintegration of Yugoslavia not only marked the end of a decades-long socialist multinational project, but also reorganised former Yugoslavs’ possibilities for imagining certain futures. This article examines intergenerational narratives of rupture amongst migrant families living in Britain, showing how uncertain pasts produce distinctly diasporic post-Yugoslav cultures of risk. Unlike sociological accounts of risk that foreground the conditions of late Western modernity, this approach to risk is grounded in collective experiences of late socialism, violent state collapse, and unexpected migration, as well as intergenerational experiences of migration and settlement in Britain. The article puts forth two main arguments. On the one hand, British-born children of former Yugoslav migrants ‘inherit’ and re-narrate their families’ stories of rupture, which transform the specific events of the 1990s into narratives of potentially universal existential uncertainty. While future uncertainty cannot be avoided, it can be partly mitigated by focusing on the present. On the other hand, both parents and children invoke the more positive aspects of risk when they imagine optimistic mobile futures for the younger generation. Here young people’s diasporic hybridity, another inheritance of post-Yugoslav migrations, is favourably contrasted with the postsocialist ‘stuckedness’ that characterises much of the post-Yugoslav space. By focusing on the multi-temporal and generative qualities of narrative uncertainty, the article proposes that intergenerational stories of rupture can contribute valuable interpretive resources for dealing with open-ended futures, both within and beyond migrant communities.