Yugoslavia’s pivot away from the Eastern Bloc and toward decolonizing countries in the Global South, which resulted in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961, shaped, also, its literary and intellectual spheres. NAM catalyzed increasing translations of non-European literatures, lively literary exchanges with nonaligned countries, and critical scholarship that explored the relationship between literature, revolution, and decolonization. Yugoslav writers and journalists—often former partisans—reported on various movements of liberation in Africa and Asia, producing a range of “revolutionary travelogues.” Such travelogues aspired to undermine established Eurocentric frames of reference by denouncing colonial racism, foregrounding historically marginalized narratives, reflecting on the authors’ own positioning and prejudice, and advancing decolonial historiography that staged newly independent nations through emancipated, revolutionary subjects. Concurrently, Yugoslav scholars, in conversation with thinkers from the Global South, made an early contribution to the development of global decolonial theoretical discourses, while also adapting their conceptual tools to Yugoslavia’s position on the geopolitical semiperiphery. This talk will analyze this era’s intertwining of literary and theoretical production with the politics of national liberation and propose that nonalignment, beyond its import for Yugoslav culture, can figure as a mode of reading decoloniality across Cold War divides.

Nataša Kovačević is professor of postcolonial literature at Eastern Michigan University. Her research concerns the literature and cinema of migration to the European Union; global socialism; and anticolonial internationalisms during the Cold War. This talk draws on her most recent book, Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs (Northwestern University Press, 2025), which reconstructs the literary and cultural history of the Non-Aligned Movement. She is also the author of Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (Routledge, 2008) and Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in leading journals, including Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Cultural Critique, Postcolonial Studies, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

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