Slavic Colloquium: Nataša Kovačević - Imagining Decolonization through Nonalignment: Yugoslav Literary Encounters with the Global South

Please join us for the upcoming Slavic Colloquium talk entitled, "Imagining Decolonization through Nonalignment: Yugoslav Literary Encounters with the Global South" by Nataša Kovačević (Professor of English Language and Literature, Eastern Michigan University).

Yugoslavia’s pivot away from the Eastern Bloc and toward decolonizing countries in the Global South—culminating in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961—also shaped its literary and intellectual spheres. NAM spurred translations of non-European literatures, literary exchanges with nonaligned countries, and critical scholarship that explored the relationship between literature, revolution, and decolonization. Yugoslav writers and journalists—often former partisans—reported on various movements of liberation in Africa and Asia. Their “revolutionary” travelogues aspired to undermine Eurocentric frames of reference by denouncing colonial racism, foregrounding historically marginalized narratives, reflecting on the authors’ own positioning and prejudice, and advancing decolonial historiography that staged newly independent nations through emancipated subjects. Concurrently, Yugoslav scholars, in conversation with thinkers from the Global South, made an early contribution to the development of global decolonial theoretical discourses, while also adapting their conceptual tools to Yugoslavia’s position on the geopolitical semiperiphery. This talk examines how literary and theoretical production intertwined with the politics of national liberation and suggests that nonalignment can serve as a mode of reading decoloniality across Cold War divides.