Yugosplaining and Beyond

In the summer of 2020, 30+ scholars, authors and artists from (former) Yugoslavia, shared their experiences of state dissolution, war, genocide and exile under the banner of Yugosplaining on the blog The Disorder of Things. The aim of the essay series was twofold: first, to use the authors’ lived personal experience of Yugoslavia as a way of explaining the current political moment elsewhere. Second, to reclaim the narrative of Yugoslavia rather than be made subject to outsiders’ accounts. Speaking from an open wound – the world split open by the war – the essays also opened other wounds, bringing into the open the extent to which Yugoslav history is still commonly read as primarily Yugo-Slav, alienating and silencing voices of its many others, Albanians in particular. This panel, too, dwells in these wounds to speak about the present from this unresolved past.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of award-winning work in fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and screenplays, including the novel The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. He has worked as a writer on the show Sense8 and The Matrix 4. He has also published non-fiction, including The Book of My Lives and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. He is Professor in Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Aida A. Hozić is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Associate Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida. Her research is situated at the intersection of political economy, cultural studies, and international security. She is the author of Hollyworld: Space, Power and Fantasy in the American Economy, co-editor (with Jacqui True) of Scandalous Economics: Gender and Politics of Financial Crises.

Nita Luci is a feminist scholar and activist. She is head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Prishtina and Assistant Professor at the departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy and Contemporary Art. Her scholarship has focused on the intersection of nationalist cultural politics, manhood, violence and political movements. Her recent publications include “Epistemic justice and everyday nationalism…” (Nations and Nationalism)  and "Fragments on Heroes, Artists and Interventions…” (edited volume, Routledge).