A Note on the Meaning of the 'Post' in Post-Yugoslav Literature (original) (raw)

My aim is to try to clarify the possible meanings of 'post-Yugoslav literature', a designation which has become relatively frequent in contemporary literary criticism, but which still requires some attention if it is to be used as a scholarly term. It implies a geography, as it directs our attention to Yugoslavia, and a temporality, as it refers to something that comes after Yugoslav literature. The easiest would be to use 'post-Yugoslav literature' to refer to all literature written in the region formerly known as Yugoslavia, but it would be very difficult to find a single instance of such usage: as a rule, the term 'post-Yugoslav' is never applied to novels and poems written in Slovene, Macedonian or Albanian, but only to those written in the standard Štokavian. It is even sometimes explicitly underlined that all writers from this 'post-Yugoslav' regional space 'all share the language'-which certainly comes as a big surprise to those who write in Slovene or Macedonian. However, using the term 'post-Yugoslav' to refer to the literature written in the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian does not seem justified in any sense. If we want to refer to some shared commonalities in literature written by Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins and Serbs, and to close connections between them at all levels-so close that in some periods they leave the impression of writing a single national literature-then both 'post' and 'Yugoslav' are misplaced. These commonalities and connections are older than the state of Yugoslavia, and can in no way be thought of as something that comes after it. At the same time, excluding all non-Štokavian speakers from whatever 'post-Yugoslav' we may want to talk about, and appropriating this term only for Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins and Serbs certainly cannot be justified in any way. However, it reveals something very important about the possible meaning of this term, to which I will return after examining its other possible meanings.