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donate Literatur im Herbst: Yugoslavia revisited
5-7 November 2010, Odeon Theatre, Vienna
"When, in January 1990, the Slovenian and Croatian delegates walked out of the 14 Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, they sealed the end of an epoch, the epoch of the Yugoslavian single-party system and hence of Yugoslavia itself," writes Alida Bremer in her introduction to this year's Literatur im Herbst, of which Eurozine is a media partner.
"The League of Communists was, after all, crucial for the unity of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The world was collapsing around its ears: two months before, the Berlin Wall had fallen and only in the months that followed did it become clear that its concrete parts would land especially heavily on the multinational, Communist Party-led federation in southern Europe."
"The Yugoslavian dilemma posed by this historically incomplete congress was: Should the necessary reforms of the leading political force in the country take the course of centralization or decentralization? Is it possible to treat these central questions independently of the national question, where the words 'centralization' and 'decentralization' themselves demand national responses? [...] What is a 'national question' anyway? When should it be seen as progressive and when reactionary? [...] Was Yugoslavian nationalism, once so keenly cultivated, better or worse than Slovenian, Albanian, Croatian or Serbian nationalism? To put it bluntly: Was Yugoslavia good or bad? Could the country have continued to exist under different circumstances?"
Speakers include: Dzevad Karahasan, Ivana Sajko, Dragan Velikic, Edo Popovic, Ivana Simic Bodrozic, Olja Savicevic Ivancevic, Asmir Kujovic, Slavenka Drakulic, Drago Jancar, David Albahari, Beqe Cufaj and Wolfgang Petritsch.
Full programme details of "Literatur im Herbst"
Yugoslavia revisited is also the title of a new issue of Wespennest, which tries to find out if there still exists, two decades after the fall of Yugoslavia, such a thing as a "Yugosphere" in the field of art and literature. Is there a regional mindset that cross the borders of the new nation states that were once part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia?
Dragan Velikic, David Albahari, Edo Popovic, Slavenka Drakulic, Venko Andonovski, Tomaz Salamun, Beqe Cufaj, Nela Milijic, Melina Kameric, Svjetlan Lacko Vidulic and others write about what Yugoslavia actually was and what of it is still alive. And an "Encyclopedia of YU-Mythology" presented by Iris Adric, Vladimir Arsenijevic and Dorde Matic.
Wespennest 159 will be featured in the Eurozine Review on 16 November.
The table of contents of Wespennest 159
Published 2010-11-04
Original in English
© Eurozine
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