Highways, byways and dead ends: towards a non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism through yugonostalgia and Slovenian cinema

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to the debates about European integration. Through a focus on cinema – more specifically, on the road movies in contemporary Slovenian cinema – I explore the ambivalence with which mobility in general and the road movie in particular have been perceived in this region of the new Europe. I argue that this ambivalence is not a sign of frustration or uncertainty; rather, it is an emancipatory dimension of a broader countercultural practice called yugonostalgia. Through an analysis of two contemporary Slovenian road movies, I trace the interweaving of Slovenian pro-European discourses and yugonostalgic counterdiscourses to show that this interweaving produces an inimitable cultural matrix in which an enabling model for a non-Eurocentric cosmopolitan project is beginning to emerge.