9. Friday, July 5, 1:30 pm (NY): "The Yugoslav Military and Its Afterlives: Unsettling Histories of State Socialism"
Tanja Petrović (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)
The lecture is based on the book recently published by Tanja Petrović, Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army (Duke University Press, 2024), which explores the meanings of the mandatory service in the Yugoslav People’s Army (the JNA) and its afterlives in the aftermath of the disastrous end of Yugoslavia and its socialist project. It seeks to offer insights into this collective experience which escape the “large” categories of (militarized) masculinity, violence, patriarchy, and the hegemony of the event-aftermath paradigm. It particularly focuses on the power of repetitive, ritualized, and performative forms that constituted the reality of military service, provided a framework for radically different men to live together in military bases and were capable of generating feelings of solidarity, care, love, and friendship among these men. In their afterlife, these feelings disrupt the givenness of the present and its relation towards the past and the future. This lecture will focus in particular on the capacity of military service in the JNA not only to unsettle these temporal frames, but also to challenge the way we understand, interpret, and revisit history of the Yugoslav socialist project and its ideological foundations.