Author Description

Summary:"In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrović explores the meanings of the mandatory service in the Yugoslav People's Army and its afterlives in the aftermath of the disastrous end of Yugoslavia and its socialist project. Service in the Yugoslavian National Army (the JNA) was compulsory for young men while the country existed, creating ties across lines of ethnicity and religion that lingered even after horrific violence that saw many of these men who had served together fighting for different nationalist factions. Petrović as conducted interviews with dozens of JNA veterans and draws on their memories and material effects to show how these affective archives point to alternative futures, other forms of collectivity and relations between the state and the individual, providing a counter to the reality of the aftermath of the Yugoslav catastrophe. Bringing together time and form, the affective afterlives of military service explored in this book demonstrate how the monotony of military practices and the meaningfulness of the experience of service came together to unsettle temporal frames and produce a collective utopian imagination. The link between the Yugoslav military service and the utopian imagination speaks against the dominant understanding that citizens rejected socialism because its forms became too empty and too distanced from what made sense in life. Instead, Utopia of the Uniform suggests that socialism ended because the social and institutional infrastructures altered in such ways that they could no longer accommodate the forms productive of collective meanings, affects, and future-oriented imaginaries intrinsic to the socialist project"-- Provided by publisher