ASEEES 52nd Annual Convention
November 5-8 and 14-15, 2020 
Convention Theme: Anxiety and Rebellion

2020 ASEEES President Jan Kubik, Rutgers University and University College London (UCL):

In today’s world anxiety is pervasive. The uncertainties of the changing climate and the increasingly unstable international environment are at its root, but in Eastern Europe and Eurasia anxiety is also engendered by people’s disappointment with elements of post-communist politics, uncertainty about their economic status, and fear of losing their traditional ways of living.

PROGRAM

https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/aseees/aseees20/

Here is the list of sessions from the preliminary program in which the members of our Society participate and/or which are relevant to our mission. We hope this will help you finalize your schedule for planned activities. 

Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Kinship and Solidarity in a Polyethnic Society
Friday, November 6, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 15
Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description
A book discussion panel:
In "Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Kinship and Solidarity in a Polyethnic Society," Keith Doubt and Adnan Tufekčić analyze Bosnian social organization, cultural character, and boundary maintenance. Doubt and Tufekčić argue that modern Bosnians live in a polyethnic society, defined by a set of marriage and kinship practices that cross ethnic and national identity divisions. This book provides readers with a clearer understanding of Bosnian identity and the role of ethnic groups in an increasingly complex society. The book will be discussed by the authors and two leading experts in the region.

Discourses of Crisis and Anxiety in Interwar Yugoslavia: Social, Conceptual, Institutional, and Biopolitical Reflections
Friday, November 6, 10:00 to 11:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 15
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
After the initial period of high hopes for the creation of a modernist nation-state, the complex nexus of cleavages in the Kingdom of SHS/Yugoslavia started to show and induce an overwhelming atmosphere of crisis and anxiety across various social groups and state structures. Due to the economic crisis and the rise of ideological challenges to the existing socio-political order, many political claims originating from this period reflected an ethos of a radical political reorganization. The goal of our panel is to explore individual case studies of different discourses of and responses to this crisis, and their impact on the overall radicalization of politics. The papers move away from the more traditional focus on the Serbo-Croat political tension and suggest new avenues of research. In particular, the papers address
• A challenge to the prevalent understanding of democracy and liberalism provided by the claims articulated by religious and ethnic minorities;
• A reconceptualization of the idea of politics through the radicalization of feminist claims as a response to the deepening political crisis;
• The creeping dysfunctionality of the urban governance and the consequent paralysis of the urban development projects;
• The radical biologisation of the national identity in the “Sokol” mass gymnastics movement.
Overall, the papers provide an insight into the multifaceted convergences and mutual influences between social, political, and cultural actors, and thus introduce a more comprehensive portrayal of crisis in interwar Yugoslavia.

Bosnia, War, and Ethnicity: Then and Now
Saturday, November 7, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 6
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
The end of the Cold War and the ensuing break-up of the Yugoslavia Federation encouraged some of the country’s major ethnic groups to attempt to create ethnic states out the remains of the former Federation, a process that led to widespread violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Twenty-five years after the conclusion of the Bosnia War, much progress has been made in the region, but the repercussions of the conflict still resonate, in particular in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the majority of civilian victimization occurred. This panel will examine possible historical precursors to the conflict, legacies of the conflict among the civilian population, ramifications of ethnic conflict in social settings, and where Bosnia is now 24 years after the Dayton Peace Agreement.

History as Memory in Serbian Modernist and Contemporary Poetics: Milutin Bojić, Milorad Pavić, Slobodan Kostić
Sunday, November 8, 8:00 to 9:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 2
Session Submission Type: Panel
Affiliate Organization: North American Society for Serbian Studies

Brief Description
The panel will revisit the works of Milutin Bojić, Milorad Pavić and Slobodan Kostić which are representative of three different periods of Serbian literature: Modernism on the eve of WWI, the 1980s and the contemporary (post-Yugoslav) period. What they have in common is the use of historical and liturgical material, as form or as content, as constitutive parts of their poetics, which came into existence at times when Serbia as a nation came under threat: WWI, Communism, and post-Communist disintegration. While two of these names are mainstream in the Serbian canon, Kostić as a poet from Kosovo and Metohija represents the new, heterogeneous and fragmented Serbian literature of the post-Communist age. However, with their reliance on historical themes, motifs and genres, the three Serbian poets, despite being concerned with national survival, demonstrate the continuity of Serbian poetics, which is grounded in Serbian cultural memory. The analyses of their poetics demonstrates that all three poets use history to generate new texts and to create an open, dialogic discourse, taking their poetics beyond national boundaries into the transcultural domain of intertextuality and universal human values.

Bosnian Muslims and the Islamic World in the 20th Century
Sunday, November 8, 8:00 to 9:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 4
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
This panel examines how Bosnian Muslims conceptualized and developed contacts with a wider Islamic World over the course of the 20th century. While these contacts have long provoked both domestic socio-political polemics and wider journalistic and scholarly interest, historians have only more recently begun to flesh out their development beyond the framework of the region’s various national historiographies. Rarer still have been attempts to grapple with the constructed nature of this “Islamic World” as a coherent geopolitical entity, as well as with how local Muslims’ understandings thereof both contributed to and drew on the transnational circulation of people, goods, and ideas between them and their co-religionists in other parts of the world. The three papers here address these lacunae through a range of methodological and temporal foci. They consider in turn: the emergence of the very concept of an “Islamic World” in the Bosnian Muslim periodical press from the late Austro-Hungarian period through to the First Yugoslavia; its significance in Bosnian Muslim Hajj writings in the mid-20th century; and the global context and reverberations of Alija Izetbegović’s 1970 Islamic Declaration. Collectively, the panel will bring together some of the most recent work on an understudied topic in regional historiography and relate it to wider academic concerns in global history and Islamic studies.

Twenty-five Years after Srebrenica and the Dayton Peace Accords: Echoes of the Past/Portents for the Future?
Sunday, November 8, 8:00 to 9:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 5
Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description
As the twenty-fifth anniversary of two momentous events for Bosnia and Herzegovina are commemorated this year, it is the right time to ask whether Dayton actually presaged long-term peace and whether the stain of the Srebrenica genocide remains indelible despite the oceans of rhetoric and initiatives behind the term "reconciliation." This roundtable will explore the implications of both the massacre and the agreement for future decades in regard to political, social, and economic factors. Does the memory of the violence 25 years ago cancel out the possibility of peace and reconciliation in all of those factors? If so, why are peace and reconciliation so difficult to achieve in the Balkans? The roundtable format will allow participants to provide a thoughtful retrospective view of the past events and a vision of the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

From Revolutionary Failure to Nationalist Retrotopia: On Anxiety and the Utopian Thought in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav Literary Studies
Sunday, November 8, 10:00 to 11:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 14
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
Through analysis of literary works of three Serbian and Yugoslav Jewish writers (Stanislav Vinaver, Danilo Kiš and David Albahari), the panel examines the possibility of utopian rebellion and revolutionary thought in the (post-)Yugoslav cultures from the beginning of the twentieth century until today. S. Vinaver opened Serbian and Yugoslav culture for the concept of future that arises from the Jewish tradition of “iconoclastic utopianism” (Russell Jacoby), as a part of avant-garde rebellion practices between the World Wars. D.. Kiš, however, faced the anxiety of a revolutionary failure which in the second half of the twentieth century finally defeated the utopian Communist project, both in the Socialist Yugoslavia and throughout Eastern Europe. D. Albahari examines collective paranoia in the unstable post-Communist social environment and its retrograde, politicallly dangerous consequences, especially obvious in the transitional Serbian society. A comparative analysis of the selected literary cases shows the profound internal division and instability of twentieth-century utopian thought, that in actual historical moment results in social anxiety, political reactionary, rise of the populist right-wing movements, and in the suspension of an emancipatory political rebellion. All three writers critically point to the vulnerability of the utopian thought and to the danger of its restriction, which – both in the post-Yugoslav context and in the global society – becomes recognized as its acute symptom of undoing.

Theorizing Yugoslavia: Class, Coloniality, Gender, Race
Sunday, November 8, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 5
Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description
This roundtable proposes to theorize the history of Yugoslavia from the 21st century perspective of researchers who have been working on new ways of imagining Yugoslavia and its legacies. The roundtable will include a number of researchers who have been attempting to grapple with this complex history from an interdisciplinary perspective including those of coloniality, class, gender, and race and from varied fields of culture, history, art and politics.

Recounting and Remaking: Memories and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s
Sunday, November 8, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 11
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
The wars in former Yugoslavia are still omnipresent in the region today: Whether in symbolic inscriptions such as graffiti, ruins or monuments, whether in personal narratives of victimhood and suffering, or, in the political and social challenges of renewed experiences with displacement and migration in the region after 2015. These papers bring together cases in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia that span the material, affective, and political imprints of violence in the 90s. Our panel consists of oral histories as well as ethnographic and linguistic methodologies to explore how memory can be both an object of analysis to understand past events as well as a political process of narration.

Narrating Resistances to Anxiety and Oppression: From Yugoslav to Post-Yugoslav Perspectives
Saturday, November 14, 8:00 to 9:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 18
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
The panel aims to investigate a number of women's and feminist narratives which address resistances to various forms of anxieties and oppression in the region of former Yugoslavia before and after the country's dismemberment in 1991 . There were relevant discussions in feminist circles on important role of feminism and women's groups in opposing nationalism and war cultures in the region, but the issues addressed in this panel open a new set of questions focusing on literature from both topical and narrative perspective. Taking as its starting point a feminist claim that a particular linkage between nationalism, patriarchy and violence against Others has been an obstacle to processes of democratization, the panel claims that the narratives in question once again confirm that women (be they declared feminists or not) were among few social subjects who argued for emancipation, cosmopolitism, solidarity, gender equality and secularism both before and after 1991.

Balkan Collections in Libraries Outside of Southeast Europe
Saturday, November 14, 10:00 to 11:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 14
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
Collecting publications from Southeast Europe became a high priority for large research libraries after World War II, and especially with the advent of the Cold War. Despite the strong interest in the Balkans, not many libraries had pre-war collections or succeeded afterwards in amassing deep collections. This panel will present the challenges and results of historical and ongoing efforts by three libraries with important Balkan collections to provide Balkan materials to researchers working outside of the region. Although two panelists will focus primarily on Serbian collections, the history and development of library collections from other Balkan countries is in many respects a shared history and thus those collections will enter into the discussion as well.

YU-phoria, YU-phemism, YU-logy: How Literature Worries over Yugoslav Idea(l)s before, during, and after Yugoslavia
Saturday, November 14, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 13
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
Following on a successful 2019 panel exploring similar issues, this panel proposes to examine how literary and cultural spheres have been at the forefront of imagining, creating, debating, and memorializing the Yugoslav project in ways that go far beyond nostalgia. Literature and the press provided a vital forum for thinking through Yugoslav aesthetics during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. And as long as the later Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in existence, literature, film, and other art forms participated actively in shaping, contesting, and changing Yugoslav ideals. This can be seen everywhere from the acclaimed Partisan films of the 1960s and 70s – to the seemingly apolitical prose of Danilo Kiš. The violent collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s prompted a huge literary, filmic, and critical output. Even as the term “post-Yugoslav” itself remains problematically parochial and undertheorized, fictional narratives of cultural and geographical displacement in the wake of Yugoslavia’s bloody end constitute a sizeable canon. These works, in which threads of the Yugoslav project are taken up and examined, mostly assumed a heteronormative horizon of history and experience. This panel, thus, investigates a rich textual corpus (ranging from the first decades of the 20th century to the present) in order to trace out the textual forms and registers “Yugoslavia” has taken – and the transnational intellectual and aesthetic communities that have been forged and reforged in and around Yugoslav ideals.

Post-revolutionary Anxieties: Partisan Veterans in Socialist Yugoslavia and in Post-socialism
Sunday, November 15, 10:00 to 11:30am, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 8
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
This panel provides an in-depth look at the role of Partisan veterans and their organizations in post-war Yugoslavia, but also at their transformation in the post-Yugoslav period. The focus is on socialist Croatia, socialist and post-socialist Slovenia, and two organizations: the Federation of Associations of Combatants of National Liberation War and the Association of the Veterans of the Spanish Republican Army. In addition to their active political roles in socialism and in building a new socialist society, these Partisan veterans were also important mnemonic actors who ensured that the narratives of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War would be transmitted to the youth through commemorations, educational engagement, and other public activities. The papers are presenting new archival research and are based on projects at the Universities of Pula and Rijeka, which tackle the issue of these veterans from a micro-historical approach, in various municipalities and local communities.