Toward a New Yugoslav Politics: How Yugofuturism Reclaims the Past to Create New Paths for Liberations

In light of the recent surge in academic and artistic interest in socialist Yugoslavia, its supranational makeup, and its extensive international network of solidarity, the time is ripe to reimagine what New Yugoslav politics could look like. The “Yugofuturism” conference that took place in Waterloo, Canada earlier this year is one of the latest ambitious examples of reclaiming Yugoslavia as a critical academic, artistic, and political project. Ena Selimović and Bojana Videkanić offer insight into this endeavor.

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In April 2025, forty-two scholars and artists working within the field of New Yugoslav Studies met at the University of Waterloo in Canada for a conference on the theme of “Yugofuturisms.” An audience member who had been traveling with his wife through Toronto and had heard about the symposium by word of mouth from a friend with Macedonian heritage asked: “What’s this about? Are you trying to bring Yugoslavia back or something?” It was an honest question, not one meant to provoke a particular response. The short answer might be something like: “We’re creating a new Yugoslavia, not bringing back the old one” (note: more on this ‘we’ later). A longer answer might be as follows.

Borrowing from “Afrofuturism” – a term with a rich history that attends to “notions of Black identity, agency, and freedom through art, creative works, and activism that envision liberated futures for Black life” – the conference provided a space for creative, collaborative engagements with the legacies of emancipation at the core of the Yugoslav project. Film scholar Dijana Jelača was an early proponent of using “Yugofuturism” as an organizing term, suggesting that we consider a “critical fabulation of Yugofuturism against capitalist inevitability.” Borrowed from Saidiya Hartman, critical fabulation is, as Jelača highlighted, “a strategy and writing methodology that uses historical sources, archival materials, critical theory and fiction in order to challenge and recalibrate normative histories.” This process of imagining Yugoslavia anew – of ‘challenging’ and ‘recalibrating’ – crucially and uniquely welcomes diasporic communities in the cultural and intellectual life of the region, just as Afrofuturism deeply involves the African diaspora in the US.

Reimagining Yugoslavia anew refers not only to a renewed scholarly interest in this heterogenous nation which no longer exists – interest that has generated such works as Francesco Mazzucchelli’s “What remains of Yugoslavia?” (2012); Darko Suvin’s “Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities” (2016); Latinka Perović’s co-edited “Yugoslavia from a Historical Perspective” (2017); Ljubica Spaskovska’s “The Last Yugoslav Generation” (2017); Vladimir Kulić and Martino Stierli’s “Towards a Concrete Utopia” (2018); Gal Kirn’s “The Partisan Counter-Archive” (2021); Milica Popović’s “Post-Yugoslav memories as a resistance strategy and the political significance of Yugonostalgia” (2021), and many others – but, perhaps more importantly, to a widely shared methodology.

Reaching for new geographies

One component of this shared methodology is an unwillingness to accept the fall of Yugoslavia as the only lens through which its historical, political, and cultural significance is to be viewed. Yugoslavia was built on the ashes of the Second World War with the objective of creating an equitable state for millions of people with vastly different social statuses – based on where they fell on a racialized hierarchy heavily dependent on ethnicized difference and inscribed in language and religion. By the time of Yugoslavia’s complete dismantling forty-five years after its inception, a process involving secessionist wars and genocide, there was a sharp break in all spheres of life with the state’s socialist legacies. Rather than giving into the vulture culture – the trend of taking any given ‘other’ into account solely at the ends of an era – Yugofuturism understands that such work can border on voyeurism.

Yugofuturism, then, signals an orientation toward reenvisioning a Yugoslav field of research in which critical, social scientific, and artistic interventions matter again – in the region and beyond. The conference reflected this through its wide-ranging participation by historians Stefan Gužvica and Ljubica Spaskovska; political theorists Gal Kirn, Olena Lyubchenko, and Milica Popović; philosopher Tijana Okić; cultural theorists Ana Hofman, Sezgin Boynik, Slobodan Karamanić, Hana Ćurak, and Jelena Sofronijević; feminist theorists Silvia Federici, Lilijana Burcar, and Katja Praznik; curator Natalija Vujošević; literary theorists and critics Darko Suvin, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Djordje Popović, Genta Nishku, Dominick Lawton, and Theo Jefferies; and film theorists and critics antje postema and Nace Zavrl.

A second component of this shared methodology comes down to this matter of ‘beyond,’ which signals its dedication to comparative work. In addition to African American studies, New Yugoslav studies and its counterpart, Yugofuturism, engage with scholarship in Asian American studies and comparative literature. Texts such as Kandice Chuh’s “Imagine Otherwise” and Anca Parvulescu’s “Eastern Europe as Method” unsettle the very terms of engagement towards a more emancipatory future. In plain words, Yugofuturism extends beyond area studies. Reaching for new geographies relationally is also a reaching beyond externally manufactured divisions within a once-shared space, as in the case of ‘those who stayed’ and ‘those who left’ (i.e., diaspora). The renewed interest in describing and reinscribing the past comparatively has even allowed for newfound interest in socialist projects within the US, infamously known for orchestrating multiple crusades – McCarthyism being only one – against so-called socialist elements. In this sense, Yugofuturism reaches beyond late capitalism.

A third element of the methodology used to organize the “Yugofuturism” conference emphasized the creative and cultural work of individuals residing in and outside the region. The Yugoslav project modeled what a common space could look like – one of collaboration across various forms of expression, including language, visual art, performance art, sound, movement, and film. As with any rebuilding project, culture – with its utopian potential – is an essential blueprint. It was therefore key to include literature, film, and visual art in the conference and to present the work of artists, curators, critics, writers, and filmmakers who have kept Yugoslav art and culture alive despite all odds. The works featured in the conference program included film screenings by Tamara Vukov (based in Montreal) and Bojan Stojčić (Sarajevo), who also engaged in a live performance; a discussion of performance art with Mateja Meded (Berlin), Jasmina Cibic (London), Christian Guerematchi (Amsterdam), Nataša Mackuljak (Vienna), and Jasmina Tumbas (Buffalo); and visual art and documentary practice led by Žana Kozomora (Toronto) with artists Isak Berbić (New York) and Nataša Prljević (Mexico City).

Futurism that resurrects and renegotiates the past

Not only is there a renewed interest in comparative methodology and in inclusive ways of organizing people in space, as can happen in socialist projects, there is also a renewed interest in forms of futurism that resurrect and renegotiate the past (see, for example, Crvena dijaspora; “Remembering Yugoslavia”). Indeed, a focus on methodology is essentially a focus on the future (ideally, a better one). A vast array of publications and programs attest to the various forms that futurism might take. These include: The US National Museum of African American History and Culture held its special exhibit on Afrofuturism in 2023–24, which ended with the publication of “Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures.” The 40th anniversary edition of Wasafari, published in the fall of 2024 under the theme “Futurisms,” showcased “a branching network of writing on and around the power of persistence as resistance, as we continue to imagine into being futures that defy an increasingly oppressive present.”

Within the Yugoslav sphere came the special issue of Maska on Yugofuturism, published in 2020 to celebrate the journal’s 200th volume, with editorial direction by Alja Lobnik and Pia Brezavšček. In an article by Hana Sirovica called “Futuring as remedial proposal,” Lobnik emphasized that “Yugofuturism seeks to engage with the past but not in a nostalgic way; it identifies points within it that were never fully developed but held political potential – such as the public, social security, feminism, ecology, workers’ rights, etc.”

Given the surge in academic and artistic interest in socialist Yugoslavia, its supranational makeup, and vast international network of solidarity, there’s an open invite to reimagining what a New Yugoslav politics could look like ‘on the ground.’ The “Yugofuturism” conference is only one example of reclaiming Yugoslavia as a critical academic, artistic, and political – i.e., collectively generative – project. Broadening the audiences of these conversations remains essential. Reckoning with inequities – like those faced by Roma, Bosnians (and Muslims in particular), and Kosovar Albanians – doubly so.

Note from the editors: Bojana Videkanić co-organized the “Yugofuturisms” conference with Dragana Obradović and Zdenko Mandušić. For the conference program, visit the Toronto working group page in New Yugoslav Studies.