After Utopia

Leftist Imaginaries and Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World

Larisa Kurtović, Nelli Sargsyan, Larisa Kurtović, Nelli Sargsyan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000485554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection examines how the loss of state socialism as a world-making project and the subsequent failures of postsocialist "civil society building" have impacted new generations of progressive, antinationalist, anarchist, and social-justice oriented activists.

How do the histories of state socialism come to shape activist thinking and practice in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus? What kinds of political work can and does emerge out of this 30-year-long experience of political, social, and economic transformation? Understanding postsocialism as an intersectional experience and a geopolitically sensitive form of knowledge, this collection of essays seeks to render visible the forms of political activism in the region that are not tied to, or fully determined by, specific moments of street protest and public interruption.

Instead, the contributors examine forms of activist effort that endure in the aftermath of protest movements and in the course of lingering crises, in order to capture how our interlocutors seek to enact their desired futures under the conditions of intensifying and shape-shifting pressures of neoliberal governance. The ethnographies that span from Armenia to Ukraine, to Bosnia-Herzegovina to the newly emerging transnational Balkan route that refugees and migrants have created, illuminate how local activists engage with and/or disengage from their socialist inheritance of political imaginaries differently and imagine different futures. Our collection argues for a need for a careful, theoretically nuanced and context-specific analysis across the uneven political landscapes of the former socialist world.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

An archive to build a future: The recovery and rediscovery of the history of socialist associations in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina

Larisa Kurtović

ABSTRACT

This paper chronicles the ongoing efforts of several groups of Bosnian activists, artists and academics, to create archives of the often forgotten, and nowadays variously threatened, heritage of political and social life during Yugoslav socialism. Postsocialist archives in other parts of Eastern Europe have typically been motivated by the need to ‘settle accounts’ with communism, understood in this context to be a totalitarian project. By contrast, these ongoing archiving efforts in the postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, are created in order to recuperate and repurpose the unrealized potentials of Yugoslav socialism, and to use this history to reseed contemporary political imaginaries. I show how these post-Yugoslav activist-archives are working to recover a form of transformational historical subjectivity which seems profoundly necessary in the current political moment, marked by political disenchantment and the devastating effects of the postsocialist transition.

Sometime in the mid 2010s, a new genre of a political project began to preoccupy Bosnian activists, artists and academics, both those based in the region and in the wider diaspora. Without prior coordination, manifesto or programme – but sometimes in collaboration with various organizations and networks – these cultural and political workers began to search for, digitize, catalog and occasionally also make available to interested publics the multimedia materials related to socialist-era associations, institutions and economic enterprises. These archives, generated through individual and collective efforts, have sought to locate, preserve and reanimate the often forgotten, and nowadays variously threatened, heritage of political and social life during Yugoslav socialism. Set in different Bosnian cities, some of these activist archives have thematized industrial heritage of socialist Yugoslavia and worker organizations, while others have focused on women’s movements. Despite these differences, all of these activist archives embody similar political sensibilities, which include i) a leftist orientation of their creators; ii) a preoccupation with political economy and social justice; iii) an antagonism toward both nationalist and liberal revisionism of socialist history and iv) an interest in and a sympathy toward what is often described as the emancipatory dimension of socialism. This article explores this postsocialist archive fever (Derrida 1995) by analyzing several such ongoing cataloging and digitizing efforts, and the spin off projects they have managed to generate. In so doing, it also asks what is it about this current historical moment – still marked by the postwar malaise and the traumas of the ‘postsocialist transition’ – that has made archiving such a popular practice among so many activists, artists and researchers. What are these archives about and for?

Activist and artist-generated archives of socialist-era political projects are an especially notable phenomenon for scholars of postsocialism. As sites of political memory, postsocialist archives have more often been associated with the process of ‘settling accounts’ with ‘communist totalitarianism.’ Critically inclined anthropologists of postsocialism have sought to read these archives ‘against the grain’ (Stoler 2009), and to locate their emergence within the teleological and ideologically inflected process of postsocialist ‘transition’ (e.g. Gokariksel 2011, Nadkarni n.p.). Katherine Verdery (2014, 2018) has, for example, written lucidly about the reopening of the Romanian secret police archives, where she, as a long-term anthropological researcher, ultimately discovered the existence of her own secret police file. This singular situation has allowed Verdery to think about the secret police and its ways of knowing not simply as evidence of ubiquitous totalitarian repression in state-socialism, but more importantly, as a site of production of knowledge which shares a certain uncomfortable similarity with that of an ethnographer. In a similar vein, Kaplonski (2011) has written about the role archival documents play in the rehabilitation of victims of political suppression in postsocialist Mongolia, and the ways in which these artifacts construct the past which they claim to represent. This literature reveals that postsocialist archives are not only a technology of (neo)liberal governmentality seeking to operationalize ideals of transparency and accountability, but also new kinds of political stages where postsocialist countries have had to renegotiate their dominant historical narratives.

The analysis that follows zooms in on a very different kind of an archive and an ethnographic object, which offers a critical counterpoint to nationalist and liberal dismissals of socialism as a political and social project. Bosnian activist-archivists do not share the same ideological assumptions about the socialist past as the engineers of Eastern and Eurasian archives of totalitarianism. For people like themselves, whose political sympathies and commitments are firmly rooted in the Left, the socialist past is not an embarrassing historical epoch that must be condemned and ultimately locked away, but rather a potential mine of insights and practical knowledge that could be reactivated in the difficult and often exasperating postwar political present.

This differential positioning vis-à-vis the socialist era is the result not only of individual political orientations, but also of Bosnia’s unique post-1989 trajectory. Bosnia arrived on the global stage in 1992 as the site of the most infamous and bloodiest episode of the decade-long dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. The war ended in 1995, after a US Brokered Dayton Peace Accords managed to stop the war by dividing the country in ethnically defined territorial units, which include two entities, the Bosnian-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic. The consociational logic of the peace sought to accommodate divergent ethnic visions of the postwar future, but it also left the country internally fragmented. Bosnia’s political life, industries, infrastructures and natural resources were soon to be captured by the nationalist political parties that lead the country into the war in the first place.

The war and its aftermath left behind a devastating legacy, uprooting values and life trajectories, as well as Bosnians’ sense of historical emplacement, particularly in relation to its relatively prosperous and calm socialist-era history. In noting that the 1992–95 Bosnian war, as the chief source of political trauma in the region, placed the socialist period in ‘parentheses,’ Andrew Gilbert has suggested that in the early postwar period, Bosnians did not particularly care for reckoning with socialism in the same ways as other Eastern Europeans since, to paraphrase one of his interlocutors, whatever the communists did, nationalists did much worse (Gilbert 2006, 14). Lately, however, the situation has been changing, thanks to the newly visible and increasingly distressing consequences of the socioeconomic ‘transition.’¹ Although my own research suggests that socialist-era sensibilities and orientation have been a continuous if understated presence in postwar political life from the mid-1990s on (Kurtović 2012), it is clear that today there is far more explicit discussion of the socialist past in the public sphere than in the years immediately following the end of war. In February 2014, a wave of violent socio-economic protests swept through Bosnia, shining spotlight on new forms of political critique that took up the old, socialist-era language of socio-economic justice (see Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017). What’s more, in the demonstrations’ aftermath, protesters formed plenums, large popular assemblies that evoked socialist era terminology, where attendees could voice their grievances and debate solutions in a radically participatory form. Although the protests were followed by a reconsolidation of nationalist power in all parts of the country, the 2014 Uprising was a watershed moment in the history of postwar political organizing, not in the least because it revived the language of class struggle.

Hence, the emergence of post-socialist activist archives must be seen as a symptom of this changed political context, and a sign of a shift in the historical self-understanding. All of the activist-archivists about whom I write participated, in one way or another, in the Bosnian Uprising. Although most of their archiving efforts predate the 2014 protests and plenums, in some cases, their activities intensified after these events, particularly as the popular mobilization died down. Importantly, the majority of these archiving efforts are taking place in the Muslim-Croat Federation, even though Radnički Univerzitet, in particular, actively collaborates with leftist allies in Republika Srpska.² With this background in mind, I will argue that these ‘activist archives’ as repositories of a bygone era and presumably abandoned ideas, are created and circulated with the express purpose of revitalizing postsocialist political imaginations. In contemporary Bosnia, gripped by an enduring political paralysis (see Jansen 2015; also Kurtović 2012) and growing sense of desperation, such archives are in various ways becoming crucial to efforts to re-seed the future and rediscover a progressive politics for a new era.

This article focuses on three distinct and ongoing archival projects, including i) The Archive of Antifascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia (hereafter ‘AFSW’), created by artists and feminist activists, Adela Jušić and Andreja Dungandžić from the Sarajevo-based organization ‘Crvena’; ii) the cinematic and photographic archives of Kombiteks enterprise in Bihać, produced by multimedia artist and activist, Amir Husak and iii) the multimedia archive of the Workers’ University, a Tuzla-based collaboratory bringing together syndicalists, activists and academic researchers from Bosnia and abroad, in order to assist the workers’ movement in the northeastern parts of the country.³ These are not the only archiving projects currently under way in postwar Bosnia, or former Yugoslavia – but I focus on them because they best exemplify the efforts to recuperate the history of socialist-era associationism – collective political projects which were a part and parcel of the project of building Yugoslav communism.⁴ What’s more, I approach the last of these projects – the archive of Tuzla’s ‘Workers’ University,’ not as an impartial observer, but as an active participant in the process of its constitution.

Anthropology of activist archives

Over the last several years, archives – both official and unofficial – have emerged as an intense site of interest for many anthropologists invested in thinking through the complex ways in which the past and its traces come to shape the present and the imaginings of the future (e.g. Trouillot 1995; Dirks 2002; Stoler 2009; Zeitlyn 2012; Thomas 2013; Verdery 2014; Weld 2014; Lee 2016, also Cvetkovich 2013). Whether conceived as projects of administrative powers, or fantasized as spaces of unmediated, untainted knowledge, ‘free of context, argument, ideology-indeed history itself’ (Dirks 2002, 48), archives are nevertheless arenas of ‘the expectant and conjured … [which contain] dreams of comforting futures and foreboding of future failures’ (Stoler 2009, 1). Archives hold a powerful and privileged position in relation to history, despite the fact that ‘whatever the archive contains is already a reconstruction’ (Manoff 2004, 14). They are capable of revealing things not simply as they were, but as they were supposed to be remembered. Hence, archives are not only a sum of their documents, but of their silences (Trouillot 1995).

In the anthropological literature on archives, much of attention has been given to social lives of documents – the ways in which their archiving and circulation enables governmental projects (Stoler 2009), as well as serves as a means of redress for past wrongs among populations as varied as political prisoners and dissidents, war veterans, and formerly colonized subjects (e.g. Kaplonski 2011; Trundle 2011; Trundle and Kaplonski 2011; also Bennett, Dibley, and Harrison 2014). As Murphy (2011) points out in her work on the role of the archive in the lives of Australia’s ‘Stolen Generation,’ archives can also be sites of trauma and pain, a place where ‘loss is both localized and realized.’ Under other circumstances, archives can be a site of excitement and seduction, particularly when they promise to reveal coveted information and state secrets (Kaplonski 2011, 435; also Stoler 2009). From my own experience, and the experiences of activist-archivists about whom I write, encountering and rummaging through the archive can also be a source of delight and discovery. Undoubtedly, materials we encounter in the archive have the capacity to affect us – this aspect of the archive resonates with the new materialist analytical sensibilities (e.g. Hull 2012; Verdery 2014) which have ...