The Post-Yugoslav “America”: Re-Visiting the United States After the Breakup of Yugoslavia

Abstract

After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the U.S.A. was one of the first and most common destinations for post-Yugoslav dissidents who were critical of the rise of national-ism in the former Yugoslav republics. Prominent post-Yugoslav authors Dubravka Ugresic and Slavenka Drakulic wrote their first collections of essays (How We Sur-vived Communism and Even Laughed, 1992; Americki fikcionar, 1993) reflecting on turbulent political, cultural and social changes after the breakup of Yugoslavia in which America is very often the place of the subject’s distanced position as well as a reference in numerous cultural and political comparisons of capitalism and (post)socialist Europe. The paper examines the role of “America” in their critical views on the breakup of Yugoslavia, looks at how America was shaped as a cultural metaphor and re-viewed as a real environment, and finally how Yugoslav socialist legacy is artic-ulated in their perspective on the United States.