The book engages with the role of music and sound in political mobilization and participation, with the potential of musical activities for self-organization, with the challenges and potentials of the so called music collectivities and with referencing musical past as a way of political engagement. It challenges existing discourses about the politics of music in post-socialist Slovenia and the dichotomy between political and nostalgic, commercial and engaged and between escapist and emancipatory. Doing so it focuses on self-organized female choir Kombinat as an example of reactualization of musical heritage of the Second World War in Slovenia. Employing the theory of affect and theories of sonic materialism and sonic affect, the book offers a new interpretation of the political capacity of music. The book is translated into Serbian and will be published in May 2016 with the renowned Serbian publisher XX. vek.
COBISS.SI-ID: 276198144
The emergence of the public intellectual has to be seen in the framework of the specific coordinates of time and space. This makes it is possible to see it as a relatively recent, geographically limited and also fairly inconsistent, phenomenon. The author presents the status of “public intellectual” in the field of historiography. On the basis of deep changes brought into professional interpretation of the past by de-objectivisation of historical interpretation, the author investigates when and how the historians enter the role of public intellectual, exiting the field of historiography to enter the field of politics of history or the politics of the past.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36544813
This book argues that today we live in the culture of the past that delimits our world and configures our potentialities. It explores how the past invades our presents and investigates the affective uses of the past in the increasingly elusive present. Remembering and forgetting are part of everyday life, popular culture, politics, ideologies and mythologies. In the time of the ubiquitous digital media, the ways individuals and collectivities re-presence their pasts and how they think about the present and the future have undergone significant changes. The book focuses on affective micro-archives of the memories of the socialist Yugoslavia and investigates their construction as part of the media archaeological practices. The author further argues that these affective practices present a way to reassemble the historical and relegitimize individual biographies which disintegrated along with the country in 1991.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40308525
This article analyzes the Serbian fake news site Njuz.net, exploring the dynamics of its production, consumption, and appropriation in Serbian postsocialist, pre-EU-accession society. The increasing presence and importance of parodic media genres and the embrace of satire as a viable way to interpret and deal with social and political reality are explained in terms of both Serbia’s historical trajectory and its media landscape as well as the global neo-liberal condition. Njuz.net’s parody sheds critical light on various political, public, and social subjects simultaneously. Its satire communicates with multiple audiences and enables identification and detachment on several levels, a fact that makes the effects of this parody difficult to judge. The dilemmas that its writers face regarding their social activism are, I argue, a symptom of wider social anxieties and structural adversities caused by the difficulty of clearly identifying and detaching from “the enemy.” Because of how labor, consumption, and everyday practices are organized, we all inevitably contribute to the maintenance of that enemy’s well-being. Seen in this light, parody is not only a form of social criticism but also a self-reflective practice. © 2015 Association for Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38482989
The article discusses the necessity for the diversification of (hi)stories of Yugoslavia, arguing for the importance of incorporating the affects and experiences of Yugoslavia’s citizens into the historical narratives. Acknowledging the difficulties emerging form the fact that what is articulated as historical narrative is still part of the experience for millions of citizens of post-Yugoslav societies, the article reflects upon the potential for and obstacles to an affective history of socialist Yugoslavia through the lens borrowed from German sociologist Georg Simmel. It particularly refers to – and makes use of – two sets of Simmel’s ideas. The first concerns the nature of materialand the way we are making a story out of it – more precisely, the relationship between history and experience, life and representation. The second is about the perspectivefrom which we look at, approach, and synthesize this material. Simmel’s reflections on history and form offer a very useful tool to look at the Yugoslav case and also help de-essentialize and normalize Yugoslav history, making the anxieties that characterize it part of a much broader discussion about history, its nature, and its internal contradictions.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40456493