Foregrounding nationalism, backgrounding late socialism: the politics of magical realism and postmodernism in (former) Yugoslavia

Abstract This article explores the politics of magical realism and postmodernism in (former) Yugoslavia. Although they were introduced during late socialism, the theoretical debates of that period largely focused on their aesthetic aspects. As I aim to demonstrate in this study, a more substantial scholarly interest in the politics of postmodernism and magical realism only emerged in the late 1990s, when the destructive impact of “particular nationalisms” (Wachtel in Making a nation, breaking a nation: Literature and cultural politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) became evident in Yugoslavia. My central argument is that by the time magical realism and postmodernism were analyzed through a political lens in the late 1990s, the focus had shifted from their late socialist context to the extreme nationalisms that contributed to the country’s collapse. I contend that this one-sided contextualization was driven by the reception of bestsellers and blockbusters. Furthermore, I argue that while magical realism continued to be treated primarily as an aesthetic category for a longer period, postmodernist works came to be seen as both products of and contributors to an anti-Yugoslav, nationalist political agenda.