NASSS BOOK PRIZE (Formerly Mihajlo Miša Đorđević Book Prize*)
NASSS Book Prize is awarded annually to distinguished authors of books published in English on aspects of Serbian social and cultural history. Nominations should be sent by May 31 of the current year to Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Chair (slobodanka.vladivglover@monash.edu). The committee, comprised of Rajka Gorup, Tomislav Longinović, and Ida Sinkević, will announce its decision by November 1 of the same year.
*Mihajlo Misha Djordjevic was one of the founding members of NASSS. He was a professor of French literature at Penn State University and a translator of Serbian poetry into English. Until 2019, this award was given in his honor.
2024 NASSS Book Prize
Dubravka Đurić, The Politics of Hope (After the War): Selected and New Poems. Foreword by Charles Bernstein. Translated and edited, with an interview, by Biljana D. Obradović. New York: Roof Books, 2024.
Dubravka Djurić’s (1961-) The Politics of Hope (2023) presents a four-decade overview of the Serbian poet known for her ludic inquiry into the language of poetry and the constructive nature of both meaning making and the self-affirmation of subjective nonconformity. The book was originally written in Serbian and the mammoth task of rendering it into English was undertaken by Biljana Obradović, herself a Serbian-American poet, who has collaborated with Dubravka on many joint projects to spread Serbian poetry to the world and vice versa – to bring world poetry into Serbian culture.
Djurić is of a generation of Serbian poets who, from at least the late 1960’s, began to take notice of the American poetry scene, first brought to attention by poets such as Srba Mitrovic (1931-2007), whose Anthology of American Poetry (1945-1994) became a touchstone for many poets of the Balkan region, from the 1990s until the present. Djurić’s poetics is perhaps most acutely stimulated by the American language-centred poets who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Her work shares in their scepticism towards all systems of meaning making, which are subjected to the endless displacement and decentring movement of language. She writes, “I remain connected/to that tiny/little space of/nonidentification.” Her poetic “I” is marked by the certainty of its uncertainty and in that it has a certain Cartesian quality that characterises both Herman Melville’s (1819-1891) Ishmael and the narrative persona of Walt Whitman’s (1819-1892) Song of Myself (1855): “I […] am not contained between my hat and my boots.” By refusing sovereign self-possession and emphasising the playful insistence of language, Djurić’s poetry maintains an openness resistant to the determinations of power that have informed the region, whether they be those of Communism, Nationalism or Arbitrary Monopoly Capitalism. Her Whitmanesque “I” contains multitudes, dwells on a particular moment or mood that seems to swell or show up, then moves on again in restless examination and wonder. The poems maintain socio-political distance even as they strain to release themselves from the force of a historical gale that blows across them. We may not be able to see the Grass for the susurrating Leaves just yet, but her work, by disassembling and reconfiguring sign systems in and through the materiality of language, maintains a clearing, a “hope” that something better is immanent, a state of affairs in which poetry such as this can come into its own.
By Nikolai Gladanac BA Hon (Monash)
Melbourne, Australia
2023 NASSS Book Prize (awarded in November 2024)
Zenithism (1921–1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology, ed. Aleksandar Bošković and Steven Teref. Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2023. 694 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1644697221
The 2023 NASSS Book Prize has been awarded to Aleksandar Bošković and Steven Teref for their co-edited volume Zenithism (1921–1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology, which came out in 2023. The six-hundred-page book traces zenithism from its birth in 1921, through three main stages of development, to its nadir in 1927. Organized in discrete digestible segments, the book features translations of complete critical texts from the journal Zenit and other periodicals that showcased the innovative poetics of the movement’s central figures: Ljubomir Micić, Branko Ve Poljanski, Ivan Goll, Boško Tokin, Marijan Mikac, and MID (pseudonym of Mita Dimitrijević). The authors bring to the fore two signature features—zenithism’s emphases on “pan-avant-garde” aesthetics and cross-genre writing, following the movement’s three key phases: cinépoetry and radio-film, cross-genre writing, and conceptual writing. Some obscure texts which were unearthed have been incorporated into the book, including a 1925 article which provides the first fleshed-out portrayal of the enigmatic MID. An indispensable compendium of the Yugoslav avant-garde, Zenithism uncloaks a chapter of European modernism and is a great read for the general public as well as scholars of literature, art history, visual arts, and more.
By Nada Petković
University of Chicago
Past Recipients:
2022 — Svetlana Tomić for her book The Hidden History of New Women in Serbian Culture: Towards a New History of Literature.
Lexington, 2032.
2019 — Biljana Obradović and Dubravka Đurić, Eds. Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry. Dialogos, 2016.
2018 — Jovana Babović, Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
2017 — Tatjana Aleksić, The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom, University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2013
2016 — Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Scholarship as the Art of Life: Contributions On Serbian Literature, Culture, And Society,
Slavica Publishers, 2016
2013 — Radmila Gorup, After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land. Stanford University Press, 2013
2012 — Tomislav Z. Longinović, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary. Duke University Press, 2012
2009 — Gregory A. Freeman, The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of
World War. New American Library 2007
2007 — Charles Simić, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States.