Slavonic and East European Review

Abstract:

Oliver Frljić's staging of Lexicon of YU Mythology was an attempt to critically rethink Yugoslavia while avoiding nostalgia, which was seen as an idealistic approach to the past. In his performance, Frljić employs different strategies, including the use of the Albanian language, to critically portray Yugoslav culture as a space of shared meaning, but also cacophony, hierarchy and exclusion. I address the performance as a successful intervention in dominant perspectives on popular culture, but also as a failure to productively engage with the Yugoslav past. I argue that it fails not because of its criticism (although it has some problematic points), but because of its rejection of emotional and affective elements of the past experience. This leads us to the question whether it is possible to engage with the past exclusively through criticism, while rejecting less-rational and less-definable aspects, such as emotions, affects, ambivalent longings and undefined positions.