Yugonostalgia and Yugoslav cultural memory: Lexicon of Yu Mythology

Abstract

Aleksandar Boškovic argues that the Yugonostalgia in the Lexicon of Yu Mythology should be taken, not as a regressive idealization of the Yugoslav socialist past, but as a critical intervention in both the contemporary postsocialist politics of memory and the politics of emancipation. Boškovic identifies the Lexicon as an exhibition catalogue of the virtual museum of all "things Yugoslav," a self-reflective postmodern hybrid emerging from the semantic overlapping of different genres and threaded with various memories, personal and collective, nostalgic and ironic, of everyday life in Yugoslav socialism. Boǎkovic contends that by evoking visual and textual reflections on the meaning of the past for the present, the Lexicon appears to have a materiality akin to that of a ruin: it exhibits a blend of affectionate and ironic nostalgia for the Yugoslav past, while simultaneously performing and reaffirming the socialist modernity's prospective perspective as its emancipating impact on the social imagination.