Visions of Homeland in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literature, Film, and Culture

Abstract

This dissertation explores various visions of homeland in representative works of Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav literature, film, and culture. The first chapter focuses on the experience of homeland for characters from the Southern republics of Yugoslavia growing up in Slovenia. The main focus of this chapter is on Goran Vojnović’s book and film Čefurji raus! in which the main character, Marko, navigates his identity as a čefur (a migrant from the southern republics of the former Yugoslavia to Slovenia) and the ways in which it effects his relationship with his parents and his own idea of where he feels he belongs. The chapter explores the issues of postmemory, displacement, and the newly coined “outsiders” language in relation to the attempts of creating a new homeland. The second chapter explores conceptions of homeland from afar in the hostland through the works of Saša Stanišić and Irena Vrkljan who both migrated to Germany from Yugoslavia. This chapter points out formal elements of their prose such as the fragmentation, lists, and cataloging prose that are used throughout to attempt to replicate the ways in which the authors curated the writing from their memories. The third chapter takes a somewhat contradictory stance and posits the homeland as nowhere with a discussion of Bekim Sejranović’s novel From Nowhere to Nowhere and the short story collection I’m Not Going Anywhere by Rumena Bužarovska. Characteres in both of these works feel a sense of nonbelonging as they find that they cannot fit in to the culture they were born into nor into the culture and space they migrate to. Sejranović’s novel further suggests that homeland is nowhere, and he only finds this eventual homeland in death. The fourth chapter focuses on Macedonian films by Milcho Manchevski and Teona Strugar Mitevska, in which main characters return to similarly tense political landscapes of Macedonia—Manchevski’s character in Before the Rain, Aleksandar, returns in 1994 during the Yugoslav wars and Mitevska’s character in How I Killed a Saint, Viola, returns at the moment of the 2001 Insurgency in Macedonia. The two films foreground, thematically and formally, the change in Macedonian physical and mental landscape that both characters feel they do not quite understand because of their living abroad, and their reaction to this change by trying to find alternate homelands elsewhere, including in magic and dreamscapes. The fourth chapter also explores motherhood, starting from Viola’s journey to realizing her motherhood (when she kidnaps her child back from an American diplomat) and discussing multiple other Mitevska films and their focus on gender, depicting different ways of women’s experience of the Macedonian homeland. The last chapter explores visions of homeland in the works of Luan Starova which are based on his own migrations with his family from his native Albania to Macedonia. This means Starova’s conceptions of homeland are both Macedonian, since Starova grew up in Macedonia, as well as those of the diaspora since he is technically a migrant to Macedonia. Starova realizes homeland in his father’s library, the home that his mother curates, the animals that occupied his childhood (specifically goats and eels), as well as through knowledge and community itself. Connecting most of the works in this dissertation is the theme of characters accepting and themselves creating “new” or unexpected homelands as they re-envision the basic concept of “homeland” and navigate their changing lives.