Slaven Crnic

Junior Visiting Fellow - Cluster European Literatures and their Interrelationships

Facing West: Post-Yugoslav Queer Fiction at the Intersection of European Literature and Europeanization

This projects explores representations of Europeanization processes and sexual citizenship in post-Yugoslav queer literature. Specifically, the project sets out to interrogate, on the one hand, the connections between dominant trends in European queer literature and the selected post-Yugoslav literary corpus and, on the other hand, the literary juxtaposition of the political project of Europeanization and the contested historical and political legacy of Yugoslav socialism. By bringing into focus the intertextual and thematic continuities that post-Yugoslav queer literature establishes with Yugoslav socialist history, I take a closer look at the ways in which, instead of adhering to the exclusionary format of post-Yugoslav national belonging, queer literature finds strength and sustenance in rediscovering newly marginalized cultural objects and social values. While borrowing freely from the Yugoslav legacy of idealized forms of socialist equality, post-Yugoslav queer literature provides an interesting and multifaceted response to both the divisive anti-Yugoslav nationalist politics and the vicissitudes in the political espousal of Europeanized principles of non-discrimination and liberal human rights.

 

Slaven Crnic is a Junior Visiting Fellow during the Wintersemester 2023/24 working closely with the Cluster European Literatures and their Interactions.