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Jovana Babović, "The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory" (Indiana UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:38]
Eva Glisic
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Eva Glisic, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Jovana Babovi about her new book, the Youngest An Oral History of Post Socialist Memory. Jovana is an associate professor of Modern European History at SUNY Geneseo. Her research focuses on urban culture and society in Eastern Europe during the 20th century. Jovana, welcome to the show.
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Jovana Babovi
Hi. Thank you, Eva. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
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Eva Glisic
Now, Jovana, I wonder before we jump into the book and this absolutely fascinating story of the youngest Yugoslavs, if you could maybe tell us first a little Bit about yourself?
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Jovana Babovi
Yeah, absolutely. So, like you say, I am a historian of modern European history and I specialize specifically in the history of Yugoslavia. My first book was called Metropolitan Belgrade and it explores the history of urban culture in belgrade in the 1920s and 1930s. And what I was studying in that book was kind of like a bottom up approach to everyday life and the way entertainment in particular shaped urban culture. And so the books show that people in Belgrade in many ways were very much feeling like Europeans, much less so than national citizen. I really love that. I love the idea of developing kind of a bottom up approach, studying Yugoslavia, which we haven't necessarily seen before then. And in this book too.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
I am really kind of leaning into those interests of like, listening to the voices of everyday people and thinking about Yugoslavia as experiences of people who actually live the history rather than necessarily state now. And for me, Yugoslavia has always been, you know, I always tell students and I tell colleagues. It's like the love of my life. I am fascinated and continue to be fascinated with deep Islam history and moreover, telling history from the perspective of folks who lived it.
- [03:34]
Eva Glisic
Yeah, absolutely. And it is such a fascinating history and project and experience. And that comes through in your new book. And we'll talk about this probably a bit later, but it is a bit of a shift of focus from familiar history of Yugoslavia that focused really on the breakup. And as you note in your book work from that point back, this is in a way a liberating kind of approach to think about Yugoslavia as a bit of a different project. Now, this book, the Youngest Yugoslavs, get us interviews with the last generation that experienced a unified Yugoslavia as children. So this is a cohort born between broadly 1971 and 1991. What drew you to the study of this specific generation?
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Jovana Babovi
Yeah, so I wanted to get at the voices of this youngest Yugoslav generation, the last generation born in Yugoslavia, because we hadn't necessarily heard their voices before. Some scholars have studied the generation of their grandparents. So folks born in the first Yugoslavia in the 1920s and 1930s, folks who came of age in Yugoslavia and then their lives, had careers, children's family, and through the existence of Yugoslavia.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
And we know a lot of those folks are generally nostalgic. Yugoslavia had been good to them and they weathered the breakup of Yugoslavia as older adults and it didn't impact them as much then. Scholars have also studied the generation of the parents of the youngest Yugoslav. So folks who would be like the baby boomer generation. Right. So 1940s, 1950s, even to the 1960s and those folks had it really hard, right? They were born in Yugoslavia, had the opportunities and the possibilities of Yugoslavia and socialist period. But then they lost everything, right? A lot of them lost their livelihoods, some of them lost their homes, they lost their identities, and they had to readjust in adulthood to these new realities. And understandably, these are fascinating experiences. But nobody had really asked the question, what happened to that youngest generation who were children, who never came of age, who did not go to college or finish degrees, didn't have careers, didn't lose homes, didn't lose, necessarily professions, but yet they were impacted deeply by Yugoslavia because they lived their childhood in it and moreover, as children, lost their homelands. And so I was drawn to the generation's history because I hadn't necessarily heard their voices before. And I wanted to give these folks a platform to tell me their experiences. But moreover, also, what Yugoslavia means to them today.
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Eva Glisic
Right?
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Jovana Babovi
To what degree, having grown up in Yugoslav multinationalism, Yugoslav socialism, impacts them as adults today, both in the region? And then, importantly, one of the things that my book does is it also talks with folks who live outside the region.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
There's a couple of books out there that focus on, excuse me, the interview, on interviews with the youngest generation who lives and continues to live in the region. But my book also gives platform to folks who've moved away or lived abroad and come back. And so there's a global mobility that's built in. And I think that's a love story, too.
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Eva Glisic
Yeah, absolutely. And I think all of these interviews. We have eight interviews in this collection, and as we talked about this, you sort of talked with many, many more people. But what is common is their mobility in and out of Yugoslavia. It's not necessarily they were born there and left, but actually it's kind of back and forth, which is, in a way a defining characteristic of the generation. And speaking of that, can you tell us a little bit about what defines this cohort in terms of how are they different from previous generations? What are some of the common experiences?
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Jovana Babovi
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So they were born in Yugoslavia, and on the whole, most folks I talked to had relatively positive memories of their childhood. Folks mentioned either being part of the Pioneer Organization, they recall these kind of nostalgic memories of childhood, like favorite foods. But also, more importantly, they were called having families, having a sense of community, having a sense of belonging, not just at home, but also a sense of belonging in the state. A lot of them had family across Yugoslavia, and they moved through different regions, traveled and had networks and so their experience of childhood are generally positive. Another characteristics that this cohort shares is that they're very critical of war, the solution, post socialist transition. They're very thoughtful about those experiences because they lived through them, but then also have lived half of their life since Yugoslav dissolution. And they were able to reflect on those experiences. And so they're very thoughtful about the past and the solution war, successor states, nationalism. And they're also thoughtful too about this notion of Yuga nostalgia. They are in some cases nostalgic, but they're also very thoughtful and critical and self reflective about nostalgia as a whole. Right. They don't just accept it as a yearning for the past, but they wonder what is this thing that I'm yearning for? And a lot of the folks I talk to think through that critically. So their memories are about pillars of identity or ideals of Yugoslavia that they.
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Eva Glisic
Are.
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Jovana Babovi
Not necessarily yearning for, but that they are reflective of having lost and not having necessarily been able to live through. And I think those critical memories are something that really is like defining of that generation. It's not quite wistfulness or looking through the past through rosy colored glasses, but looking through the past critically. Right. They've had space to reflect, reflect. And they've also kind of had a new world, this post Yugoslav world to compare it to. And so that world is not always like positive. It's often disappointing, right. This sort of neoliberal world that a lot of Yugoslavs live in today is not better. And so they look to these ideals of the Yugoslav past and they think those opportunities could have been better. How could we implement something similar in our lives?
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Eva Glisic
Absolutely. A number of them, as you just mentioned, lived overseas. And it's really fascinating to read some of those reflections. As you said, they're very critical and understanding of some broader trends. And I love there was a number of businesses where they note, I wish somebody told me what the west or what the other countries actually look like as living. Of course, Somewhere Else is not a pink colored Hollywood film. As one of the interviews, it is quite different, isn't it? So we just mentioned there were eight interviews in the book. But the project was obviously much broader and wider. And I'm interested in how you identified your interviewees and then how were you guided to select these final eight?
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Jovana Babovi
Yeah, thank you for that question. So I used a kind of like network building chain interview process. So when I would interview somebody, I would ask them if they knew anyone else born in that generation. And folks who agreed to talk with me, I was very eager to speak To. There was a little bit of a bias built into that.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
Selection bias was that folks who said, yes, I will talk to you about my memories about Yugoslavia inherently were reflective of their memories in Yugoslavia and had something to say about Yugoslavia. So there's a selection bias in that. But I talked to a vast number of people, both those who live in the region, those who live abroad, and when I sat down to select folks to include in the book itself, there are eight interviews total in the book. I wanted to show an illustrative representation of Yugoslav experiences. You and I both know that there are just as many Yugoslav experiences as there were Yugoslavs, so it's impossible to be representative. But I wanted to show a diversity of Yugoslav experiences. And so I aim to show, for example. Right. Diversity of gender. I didn't have any trans or non binary folks in the book, but I have four men and four women. I wanted to show diversity of place of origin. So I have people who are born in five of the six Yugoslav republics. I don't have anybody in the book who was born in Montenegro. I wanted to show a diversity of place of residence. So about half the people who are interviewed in the book are living in the region, about half are living abroad, and other types of diversity. So bilingualism, queerness, parenthood, even class. Most folks who I spoke to were educated, but they didn't necessarily come from families who were educated. Many of them came from families who had gone through upward mobility in the socialist period. So I selected the interviews really to highlight diversity as much as I could in eight people. Right. But, you know, to make it representative, it would be like 10 million.
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Eva Glisic
Yeah, no, of course. And you want to give a particular kind of selection and window into this story. And they are very diverse in their experiences and geography and linguistics. And I think that comes out clearly and beautifully in the book. Of course, no reminiscence comes in a vacuum. Right. And so these interviews came about at a specific moment in time. In the introduction, you reflect a little bit on that, noting that the project really unfolded against the background of the COVID 19 pandemic, but also the onset of the war in Ukraine, which of course, for people informing Yugoslavia, had a particular resonance and a particular reaction. Do these events surface in the interviews or. It's one part of the questions, but also, how did. Did they influence you as an interviewer in thinking about these interviews and the project as a whole?
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Jovana Babovi
Yeah, that's a great question. So in terms of COVID you know, I have to say this project is a product of COVID I was working on an archival project. I was supposed to go abroad. I had a grant to go research. And then, you know, Covid shut everything down. And I was at home, and I was lonely and I was bored, and I needed something. I needed a lifeline. And in a way, this project was my lifeline. And one of the things that I think probably impacted the success of this project is that people were more likely to talk to me because they, too, probably needed a lifeline. So doing this project, to me, felt like almost a little bit of a creation of a Yugoslav diaspora in and of itself. Everyone I talked to was able to kind of share experiences with me that linked up with other experiences, and I loved making those connections as I talked to folks. But then when it comes to the war in the Ukraine, I think that as like, the first major armed conflict in Europe since the Yugoslav wars was really triggering for a lot of people. And that came up in a lot of interviews. You know, Covid came in implicitly because we were on zoom talking. Yeah, right, right, exactly. But Ukraine came up explicitly because it was very much in the news. People were following. They were really identifying with Ukrainian experiences, and they were remembering both the experience of their families and they were remembering the experiences of their own. Right. Whether that was living through conflict itself, whether that was having to flee, whether that was living in a state that was quickly becoming totalitarian. And so I think for a lot.
- [15:47]
Eva Glisic
Of folks.
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Jovana Babovi
The war in Ukraine probably brought up traumas in a way that they wouldn't necessarily have been brought up without that. And that likely shapes the book. You know, one of the things I note in the introduction, too, is that I think it was important to capture these memories at this point. And I conducted interviews in 2021, 2022, 2023. But I think those memories were apt to shift over the course of the war as well. So I was glad to talk to that generation earlier rather than later.
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Eva Glisic
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And there would be, I guess, quite a unique position for people from Yugoslavia. There wouldn't be many other Europeans who would have lived through a conflict, armed conflict, at the point when Ukrainian war broke out. And that definitely comes through in those stories and would have been quite an emotional process, I guess. I want to talk about the interviews themselves a little bit now with the collection opening, I really found this really interesting. It opens with two interviews from the very borders, opposite borders of Yugoslavia. So you have a person from Slovenia who grew up on the Slovenian Italian border, and then a Hungarian living in Vojodina. So Northern Serbia. I would say that linguistically and geographically, they are quite unique examples. And you so open with this pair of interviews. Can you tell us a bit about why start with these two narratives and then just a little bit, if the structure of the book is there an arc overall across these eight interviews? Yeah.
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Jovana Babovi
Good, thank you. So I started with those two interviews because I didn't necessarily want to start with the story a reader would expect, right? So when we think about. About Yugoslavia, we think about the capital, right? And in my first book, I studied Belgrade. I love Belgrade. I love studying Belgrade. I love the experiences and stories of Belgrade. But I wanted to start with something that maybe was not familiar to readers, to sort of like lure people in. And I think starting with two interviews where there is a rich international or trans border relationship between Yugoslavs, and in the case of Slovenia, Italians, or in the case of boybody in northern Serbia and Hungary, I wanted to show that Yugoslavia was still part of this bigger world and Yugoslavs were very transnational in a way. Right. And so for me, also, the other aspect of this moment in Yugoslav history and the legacy of Yugoslavia on these youngest Yugoslavs is that they got to learn other languages in school, right? They got to be in communities that were multilingual. And so in the first interview, right, we meet somebody who was raised on the border of Italy, who could see Italy from his bedroom window, family in Italy, who went to Italy regularly. And so when Yugoslavia collapsed, he lost not just his homeland Yugoslavia, but he also lost easy access to Italy because the borders changed. And so there was a bigger shift, not just on the plane of homeland, but also in the plane of relation to the bigger Europe. And then in the second chapter, the one that's based in Vojvodina, you know, I also wanted to make sure that readers early on are roped into this notion that Yugoslavia sure had major constituent nations, but had so many minorities whose experiences were also Yugoslav. Right. And so starting off thinking about, well, someone who's from Slovene and, you know, or someone who's Slovenian, who grew up in Slovenia on the border of Italy, someone who's Hungarian, who grew up in the border of Hungary. Those are all also youth live experiences. And then later on in the book, I also have two interviews. They're not next to one another, but I kind of thought of them as paired folks who grew up in Macedonia, one who grew up in an Albanian household, and one who grew up in a largely Christian identifying household or Macedonian identifying household. Excuse me. So in that respect, I also wanted to kind of Pair those experiences and decenter what we think we think of as the typical Yugoslavia experience.
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Eva Glisic
Absolutely. And throughout these interviews, those borders and those languages, those differences come as natural. They are not in any way, as interviewers say, something they thought about or saw as in any way unusual or extraordinary. But then with the war, we start to have these categories. This is the first time many of them hear terms like Croatian or Serbian or these specific categories that were never part previously of their life. And suddenly there's this whole new structure imposed on their experiences. But it's really interesting to see that within their daily life they shift between different identities, languages. It was not really thought of as anything extraordinary or special, which is quite interesting to see how that shifts over the course of the.
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Jovana Babovi
Well, and for me too, like the idea of what does Yugoslavia mean to someone who's not Serbia, Croatian. Right. Or Bosnian.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
Because it meant a lot to those people too.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
Somebody who was a Hungarian from Voivodin or Hungarian from Serbia. Right. Yugoslavia meant something. It didn't necessarily mean all things positive, but it shaped their childhood and it shaped who they are today. And I love that that that was still in this sort of like umbrella of Yugoslav post war culture.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
This younger generation facilitated that. And for me, imagining a country that, you know, offers kindergarten or, you know, kindergarten or first grade in Italian, this is crazy. This is the coolest thing in the world. And whenever I share this with my students, they can hardly believe that there were these language policies in Yugoslavia, but also in the individual republics that mandated certain language instruction be offered to communities that had so many students who were from households that spoke a certain language. So you could in theory be a Yugoslav citizen, but attend primary school in Albanian.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
This is incredible. And I love that. And I really wanted to highlight those experiences because those experiences, I think, facilitated an easier transition for the youngest Yugoslavs and the post the world because they. The tools.
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Eva Glisic
That is a really good point. There were already so much of that shifting between different languages and communities that I guess the need to leave the country was helped in a way or was made easier by that flexibility that they had growing up. Based on your conversations with the interviewees, have you been able to identify any factors that might have influenced just why some families felt stronger connection or affinity for the Yugoslav identity and the Yugoslav project than others?
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Jovana Babovi
Yeah, that's a great question. So the answer I expected was the answer that I had read other scholars come across, which is that folks with more privilege in Yugoslavia, and that's primarily folks of some form of Serbian identity who are more privileged missed Yugoslavia more because they lost more privilege. Right. And that's what I expected to find. But the thing that really stuck out for me was that folks who were most dissatisfied with the present seemed to lean in more on the ideals of Yugoslavia. And so that didn't necessarily correlate with their ethnicity, but it correlated more with, like, where they were in life. And so those who were more dissatisfied with the present reality seemed a little bit more, I guess you use the word, like, maybe they had a stronger affinity, but I think they looked towards Yugoslavia with greater appreciation because they saw the ideals that hadn't been yet realized but could have been realized. They saw the thing that might have been, but wasn't. So, for instance, if they were living in a world that. Where they didn't necessarily feel like their work life balance was great, they were just, you know, working in a capitalist world, and they didn't have time for family, they didn't necessarily have the ability to purchase a home. They didn't necessarily have a lot of upward mobility. I think they leaned in more to the ideals of Yugoslavia and seemed a little bit more appreciative of it. Ditto for things like, you know, living in a world with, like, radical politics, living in a world with. With, you know, gender equality. I think folks who miss those things look to Yugoslavia as a benchmark of possibility. Not necessarily something that had been a reality, but something that had been possibility.
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Eva Glisic
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, again, that generation, because it has so much international experience, is able to see those things in definitely a bit of a different light without that kind of nostalgia that is desire to return to, but more of a potential of the Yugoslav project encompassed at that point.
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Jovana Babovi
Yeah, I will just say. Sorry to interrupt.
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Eva Glisic
No, no, no.
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Jovana Babovi
I will just say that, you know, like, folks who, like, necessarily were not part of, like, kind of the Yugoslav constituent nations didn't necessarily feel that they could claim Yugoslavia as much.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
So, like the first two chapters, when I talked to someone from Slovenia and someone From Vojvadina, those 2F didn't necessarily feel like they could claim Yugoslavia as much as others. Like in the interview with Kristina, who identifies as Hungarian from Vojvodina.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
She keeps saying things like, I don't speak our language, I don't speak Nash, I speak English, I speak Vash. Right. So for her, Yugoslavia has some ideals, has some pillars, but at the same time, it's. She. She did. She also didn't necessarily feel as included.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
So there's a form of exclusion, too. That's built into this. And I think it does tend to sometimes privilege the larger ethnic groups or the more powerful ethnic groups.
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Eva Glisic
Yeah. I was struck in her interview that issue with the language of not understanding Serbia. And then that's, of course, a huge frustration, living in a community where you don't speak the dominant language. And I love when she explains when she went to school, she learned these phrases to make sure that she could tell her teacher if something was an issue. And I can. You know, I have a daughter who we speak Serbian at home, but then we live in a dominant English language environment. Right. And when she started daycare, I was very stressed about her language moving from one to another. Harsh. And it's really struck the core with me. And I can absolutely understand the frustration. Right. And fear. Right. Of not being able to. Able to express yourself in another language and how that would position you in a certain way towards the whole country and the project and so on. And the book does not really gloss over those hard parts either. I think those input comes out of these interviews is absolutely. The shortcomings or the exclusions.
- [27:42]
Jovana Babovi
Yeah. I can't tell you how much I appreciated the stories that these folks trusted me with. I mean, they. They were really critical of Yugoslavia. And. Yeah. They did not gloss over exclusionary. They did not gloss over places where they didn't feel like they fit. They didn't gloss over places where they didn't feel like people were treated equally. And I appreciate that. Right.
- [28:08]
Eva Glisic
Because.
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Jovana Babovi
The worry was that this was just going to be a project about nostalgia, but it wasn't about nostalgia. They're very reflective and thoughtful, and we can hold both of those things at the same time. We can say there were some good things about Yugoslavia, and we can say those things did not necessarily come to the fore. We can say it was about equality, and we can say not everyone was equal. And those two things can coexist, yet we can still look at the pillar as a benchmark for a potential future.
- [28:37]
Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
We can still look at that ideal and still love the ideal while realizing that it hadn't necessarily become a reality.
- [28:43]
Eva Glisic
Yeah, no, absolutely. And in the moment we live in, it does help to practice holding two opposite ideas at the same time and trying to say, yes, you can think this, but also this, and that's not a contradiction in itself. Yeah.
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Jovana Babovi
And I love that about Yugoslavia, that so much of what these folks experiences were were like multiplicities.
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Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
And we'll probably end up talking about this at some point, too. But, you know, the idea that you could be multiple identities, you know, that you didn't have to. One, you don't have to just be Serbian or Slovene. You can have multiple things at once. And that multiplicity is, I think, a.
- [29:23]
Eva Glisic
Major.
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Jovana Babovi
Legacy of Yugoslavia. The sort of belief in the conviction that you can be multiple things.
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Eva Glisic
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it's not diversity, diverse against something, but it is all the things at the same time. Now, a number of your interviewees describe themselves as post Yugoslav. And I would love for you to explain to us what's a post Yugoslavia.
- [29:46]
Jovana Babovi
That's a perfect transition question. That's such a great segue. So the way that these folks identified, so I never identify them ethnically or nationally, culturally myself. I always ask, how do you identify? And you can choose however you want. And some folks kind of just adopted an easy, I'm Serbian now, right? Some folks gave me, I'm Croatian Serbian. Some get. Some folks gave me, I'm American, Bosnian, right? And some folks entirely rejected my question and said, I am a global citizen or I'm a human being. One person said that they are an anarchist, right? Somebody said that they're an artist. And I love that. Like that rejection of national identity or embracing of it was an option, something that's on the table. There was also a large chunk of folks who said I'm Yugoslav. And then there was also a large chunk of folks who, like, as you point out in your question, said I'm post Yugoslav. And I loved the post Yugoslav category, which was self selected, something that folks were choosing and choosing for themselves. And I love it because I think it allows exactly that thing that we were just talking about. It allows folks to embrace a complexity of identity. It accounts for the fact that you could have been born in Bosnia, but your dad could have been from Montenegro and your mom could have been from Slovenia. And you might have family, right, Somewhere in a different country altogether. Or it might encompass that you moved halfway through your childhood and you don't have to choose any of those individual things. But you can say the legacy of Yugoslavia, even though it no longer exists, impacts me as who I am today. And I think post Yugoslavia is this really beautiful way of keeping Yugoslavia alive. It's not saying I'm still Yugoslav, it's acknowledging Yugoslavia no longer exists. We can still identify with it, but we can also say the legacy, not just Yugoslavia, but its legacy of multinationalism, of diversity, of multi, multilingualism, of multi religious practices. All of those things are parts that impacted me. And the way I come into the world is through that Legacy.
- [32:03]
Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
Through legacy of understanding multi ness and also socialism.
- [32:07]
Eva Glisic
Right.
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Jovana Babovi
And so I think post Yugoslav, or Yugoslav even, is a way to not erase the way that that environment shaped their childhood and ultimately their adulthoods.
- [32:19]
Eva Glisic
Right? Yeah, absolutely. And I really loved in the book, a number of your interviewees say it depends when you say where you're from. It depends who I'm talking to. Right. Even to that level that they can't actually say one thing all the time. It really depends who ask you the question where you are. And I really resonated with me because it does, it does. Depends. How do you explain that having parents from here and there and living in one country that in the case of Serbia, changed its name five times after the breakup. Right. So where do you even begin to explain that? And it is a very interesting prison. This post Yugoslav absolutely captures that complex story of this. And it really is a great focus on this generation because it's so unique. And even though not maybe had those formative experiences, in a way, Yugoslavia absolutely influenced by the story of that country. Now I want to talk about your experience conducting these interviews. You obviously know the history of the region really well, the history of the country, the language, the generation. Right. But what was kind of the biggest surprise for you or what were some of the insights that you didn't expect or didn't really think would be revealed through these stories?
- [33:46]
Jovana Babovi
Yeah. So one thing that struck me is the degree to which folks of the generation embraced one another. I always asked people how they're related to the region and how they related to other folks from the region. And time and again I kept coming across these small clusters of the Yugoslav diaspora across the world. And like the radicalized diaspora that we think of right, as like the post second World War diasporic communities where we have like, you know, these Ustasha, the Chetniks, these like kind of radicalized national or nationalist diasporas. It wasn't that at all. It was these very post Yugoslav, post Yugoslav war diasporas that were explicitly Yugoslav in nature. And I was so heartened by that because it felt like another form of. Right. Post Yugoslav legacy. These, this was the enactment of Yooslan pillars abroad. And I loved hearing folks experiences with those that support communities. Excuse me, not everyone, of course, had them. Not everyone, you know, reached out to communities. Not everyone had access to them, not everyone cared. But every so often I would come across somebody who would then loop me in to a whole network, a whole series of different experiences. And those were their Yugoslav stories.
- [35:14]
Eva Glisic
Right.
- [35:15]
Jovana Babovi
That was their Yugoslavia Effectively after the collapse of Yugoslavia. And I think that it surprised me to the degree to which it was still very much alive. Right. I'm familiar, as you probably are, of, you know, attending an academic conference, and all of a sudden you were in this group of, like, former Yugoslavia, you know, citizens or former Yugoslavs. And, you know, there's a connectedness to that. But we have an academic conference, right. There's still like, you know, sort of an artificial glue to that. But what these folks were telling me about was, like, totally organic. Like, you know, the one that comes up in a couple of these interviews is folks who both live in Prague in the Czech Republic, and they have this, like, crazy diaspora there, and they're all friends, they have, like, events, they get together, they celebrate former USLV holidays, and they are intent on enforcing this multinationalism to a degree that I didn't expect. And I love that about talking with folks and finding those little communities. And honestly, for me, too, I did not expect to enjoy doing these interviews as much as I did. I felt like I formed my own little diasporic community. And I just really. I was heartened with how much care people took to thinking about their uoslaw pasts. I was heartened by how thoughtful and reflective people were. I was heartened by how critical, but also how, you know, how much love they poured into that past. It wasn't something they just dismissed, but it also wasn't something that they uncritically accepted. So for me, that was. It was wonderful. I loved writing this book. I loved talking to interviewers, and I interviewed you, Eva. So, you know, you and I had experience together, and I had a great time. Right. Every time I got off a call, I just. I felt so energized because it gave me another lens to understanding someone's Yugoslavia. Right? And we all have our own Yugoslavias, and those Yugoslavias make a whole. Make up a path that is whole. And putting them together was such a joy and a pleasure, and it honestly gave me hope for the future. Right? Like that people say the kids are okay. Like, the Yugoslavs are okay. This generation of Yugoslavs is so. They're such good eggs, to put it bluntly. It's a very, like, yeah, very reflective and I think very rich generation of folks who have impact to impact the. Have a potential to impact the world really positively in the future.
- [37:52]
Eva Glisic
No, no, I agree with that. And I think what strikes me, reading these interviews, and I have to say, most of the time, I had a smile on my face because all of sounds so Familiar, but also it's hard. Some of these recollections and memories, what we went through as a generation is quite extraordinary in many respects. But what's interesting is that as the last generation, you would think they would have the weakest, in a way, connection to the project. But it's actually the generation that is keeping this alive and alive in a very contemporary manner. Not as something conserved and preserved archive, but as a very open to what is happening, happening around us today. And there's a lot of happening. I want to ask one more question. You teach, you have students, young students, you're based in the U.S. do you teach this material? And if so, what is the reaction of your students to these stories?
- [38:51]
Jovana Babovi
Thank you for asking that question. So I do teach all forms of Yugoslavia and Balkan history. And I actually developed this book largely because I wanted a tool like this to use in my classroom. I wanted voices of former Yugoslav citizens who my students could relate to.
- [39:13]
Eva Glisic
Right?
- [39:13]
Jovana Babovi
So I wanted somebody who had gone through the solution of Yugoslavia as a young adult. And I wanted my students to be able to relate to them on that level. But also I wanted unmediated voices. I didn't want analysis. I wanted students to be able to have voices of real living Yugoslavs who lived through the collapse of Yugoslavia and were carrying that legacy of Yugoslavia with them through their lives. So the students could then kind of think through what did Yugoslavia mean for these kids when they were children, what does it mean for them now when they're adults? And so I developed this project literally to use in my own classes. And this last semester I taught my History of Yugoslavia course, which is a intro level history course. It's open to majors and non majors. I have a mixture of first year to fourth year students in that course. And we read this book for the very first time when it came out in November, and it was great. Students engaged with it. They loved the stories, they found them very readable, they found them very personable. And we had a really wonderful discussion. I gave a book talk on campus. Students had read the book, they had some really thoughtful questions and reflections and they were really putting it together. I think sometimes when we hear voices of individuals and then they're referring historical, historical moments or historical events, it makes it more real for students, right? And so this book did really great in my first semester of teaching. Did super well. And I look forward to teaching again. I certainly hope others find some utility in teaching it in their own courses. But for me, I think it was humanizing. But more importantly, it was Also allowing students to step inside the shoes of a Yugoslav, and I think in that way get a better understanding of what that experience actually would have been like. So often my frustration and anyone who teaches Yugoslavia or the Balkans, the frustration is this region boils down to war. It boils down to a cauldron that's about to explode. But this region is so much more, and these voices are so rich, and they give us so much to think about, to dissect, to ask questions, to research that they decenter war in a way, right? Of course, war looms everywhere because this is the defining moment of everyone's childhood, childhood. In this book, however, there is so much more than that. And my big hope is that, you know, someone's going to read one of these interviews, come across something they're curious about that maybe I didn't footnote or maybe I didn't explain, and maybe they're going to go and research that. Maybe that's going to, like, spark an idea and they can take it and talk to some more former US Loves.
- [41:55]
Eva Glisic
Yeah, absolutely.
- [41:56]
Jovana Babovi
Get the answers.
- [41:57]
Eva Glisic
Yeah, absolutely. And on that really wonderful, hopeful and positive, positive note, I want to thank you for joining me today to talk about this beautiful project. What is next for you? What are you currently working on after the young Yugoslavs?
- [42:13]
Jovana Babovi
Thank you for asking. So I've been beginning, I'm very beginning, of a project about the history of HIV and AIDS in Yugoslavia. And this is really interesting to me. I haven't really worked on public health before, but since working on the youngest Yugoslavs, I've become really interested in that sort of like 1970s, 1980s moment in history. And so I have been starting to research and doing some, like, preliminary archival stuff, a lot of historiographical work on the history of the state's response, society's response, everyday people's responses to HIV and aids. And this is a really interesting topic because in Eastern Europe, right, in most East European states, as far as the state was concerned, HIV AIDS didn't exist. It was just another one of the. The Western vices. But Yugoslavia was different. East Germany was also different in the sense that AIDS was something that was acknowledged and something that was very much acknowledged by the state, but also by queer communities. And there were more queer communities, Yugoslavia, that worked as liaisons between Western states like us, France, UK and then Yugoslavia. So they were like translated related pamphlets, posters and stuff like that. So that's kind of my beginning questions. And I'm going to be working a little bit abroad, continuing to work as much as I can virtually. But hopefully this project is going to be shaping up soon and I look forward to sharing it more broadly in the near future.
- [43:50]
Eva Glisic
Terrific. And it's such an important topic given our current or recent history of public health crisis and what that meant and the responses to it. It sounds like a really, really fascinating project, something that is not covered enough in our field. So I'm pretty sure I'll be talking to you before too long and looking forward to that. Thank you and good luck with your project.
- [44:13]
Jovana Babovi
Thank you so much, Igor for having me on. It was such a pleasure.