The article discusses what became the epitome of non-conformist media in the region, the Croatian political weekly Feral Tribune, and its “resistance guerrilla” journalism in the period when it was published as an independent paper (1993–2008). The author illuminates Feral’s unapologetic style of reporting, which demanded full authorial responsibility, analytical scrutiny, and factual verification for its direct attacks against criminally motivated political acts and individuals. The author analyzes several cases of the weekly’s reporting during the war in Croatia, demonstrating that Feral’s parodic approach to politics and the “kynical ridicule” it cultivated irreverently targeted the cynicism exercised both by power and by those on its receiving end. Reflecting on the fact that the weekly survived years of various forms of intimidation but not the “terror” of the free market, the essay underscores the legacy of Feral Tribune’s anarcho-radicalism and its political engagement as a necessary counterweight not only to the media outlets’ servile conformity to ethnic authoritarianisms across the former Yugoslav space, but also to “the contemporary cynical condition that justifies its own inertia by the alleged futility of action.”

Tatjana Aleksić is Associate Professor of Comparative and Slavic Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the editor of Mythistory and the Narratives of Nation in the Balkans (2007) and the author of The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom (2013) as well as various journal articles and book chapters.

The article focuses on the underground Šišmiš Radio show that was aired on Radio B92 through the occupied Belgrade ether every Monday after midnight during the 1990s. The essay discusses one of the pivotal figures in Belgrade’s avant-garde art scene and culture, the Serbian radio disc jockey Miomir Grujić Fleka, and examines the most salient features of the parallel world created by his three-hour-long anti-show FM cabaret that ran counter to dominant nationalist madness and warrior-chic subcultures. The author analyzes the authentic Troto-language of Fleka’s Šišmiš Radio as a coded urban vernacular that employed irony, laughter, and satire, thus functioning as a vehicle for coded criticism of the current political situation and a genuine poetic weapon against any politics of weapons. Discussing Fleka’s conversation with his listeners during the call-in section of the radio show, which often took the form of a series of association rides resembling Dadaist séances, the essay analyzes the diverse narrative, vocal, musical, and medial disruptive strategies Fleka employed in order to offend, irk, and provoke apparently drowsy citizens. The author demonstrates that from the perspective of critique of ethno-nationalist ideology, Fleka’s show was a successful audible nightmare, since it disseminated a nihilistic negativity reminiscent of the thick Darkness of the surrounding chaos and war, which was constantly pushed beyond FR Yugoslavia’s borders by official state media and continually denied along with the state’s involvement in it. The article argues that Fleka’s radio performance both promoted individuality and enabled the formation of collectivities based on a shared urban sensibility.

Aleksandar Bošković is a lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (in Serbian, 2008). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals in the United States and Europe (Apparatus, Cultural Critique, Digital Icons, Književna istorija, Slavic Review) and in various edited collections.

This essay addresses the position satirical paper Naša krmača (and Bre! as its supplement and, later, an independent paper) occupied in the Serbian media landscape in the 1990s and early 2000s, both during Milošević’s regime and after its toppling. It also discusses the legacy these newspapers created and their significance for today’s Serbia and its media scene. Focusing on these satirical newspapers the essay touches upon three broader questions that are at the heart of debates about meanings, functions, and effects of political humor. The first question concerns the relationship between the serious and unserious/humorous content in media practices that employ humor, parody, satire, and related discursive means as a reaction to political circumstances perceived as oppressive or generally unacceptable. Secondly, it discusses the nature of the relationship between political humor and political change. And lastly, the time span that encompasses both the time of Milošević’s rule and the post-Milošević period after October 2000 up to today and the temporal distance from the time of their publication allows me to analyze Naša krmača and Bre! not only as satirical newspapers, but also as a reflection of a specific period and a discrete generational experience. In the concluding part of this essay I discuss the importance of Naša krmača for media based on political humor in contemporary Serbia, in political and media circumstances different from those that prevailed in the 1990s. Despite Naša krmača’s “unserious” character and short life span, its position among counter media in Serbia in the 1990s and its significance for those still involved in alternative and critical activism in Serbia suggest that the importance of this satirical newspaper goes beyond mocking the regime and “having fun in hard times” and point to visions, practices, and imaginations of moral citizenship and journalism.

Tanja Petrović is research advisor at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU and professor at the ZRC SAZU Graduate school in Ljubljana. Her research interests lie at the intersection of linguistic, social, and cultural phenomena in socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states. She is the author and editor of Mirroring Europe: Ideas of Europe in Europeanization in Balkan Societies (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2014); Serbia and Its South: Southern Dialects between Language, Culture and Politics (in Serbian; Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2015); and “Political Parody and the Politics of Ambivalence” (Annual Review of Anthropology 47, 2018, 201–216).

This essay examines the theoretical and visual identity of ARKzin—the magazine of the Croatian Antiwar Campaign (ARK)—as an alternative, antiwar, and anti-nationalist media platform in 1990s Croatia. Drawing on Michael Warner’s notion of “counterpublic” as a conceptual framework for examining ARK’s publishing activity, the article analyzes ARKzin’s innovative approach to journalism and design that introduced radical plurality (including political, gender, and sexual difference) into a society that was constructed as ideologically unified and ethnically homogenous. Surveying ARKzin’s several iterations as a “fanzine,” a “metazine,” and a “political pop mega.zine,” the author pays special attention to the magazine’s manifestoes, which turned its marginal status of a “bastard medium” into a politicized position of symbolic power and active resistance. The essay illuminates how the critical appropriation of mass media, pop culture, and its “lowbrow” and “pulp” genres served ARKzin’s radical, democratic politics as much as the magazine’s political topics (LGBTQ rights and forceful evictions of Croatian Serbs) did. The essay elaborates on the role of design as a critical social practice, which became integral to the magazine’s conception of radical print democracy, especially with Dejan Kršić’s approach to ARKzin’s layout. The article concludes that ARKzin was not only an oppositional medium, but a generator of a new media culture that increased the visibility of marginalized political and social identities in postcommunist Croatia.

Vladislav Beronja is Assistant Professor in Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He co-edited (with Stijn Vervaet) Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture (2016). Currently, he is completing a book manuscript on the archival impulse in post-Yugoslav literature, titled Unacknowledged Losses: Cultural Memory and Counter-Archive in Post-Yugoslav Literature. His other interests include graphic novels, queer theory, visual culture, and Balkan popular music.

Futurism is often considered a highly masculinized, even misogynistic artistic movement despite the fact that many members of the group were women. In their manifestoes, the Futurists violently rejected the possibility of “the feminine” subsisting in the highly industrialized world of the future; however, they took issue not with women per se, but in the outmoded representations of the feminine in society and literature. A wife, a mother, a femme fatale, or the eternal feminine Sophia no longer satisfied those who looked into a future where the mind dominated and possibly eradicated the body. Because femininity has long been associated with the body and the material, while the mind, the realm of ideas and cerebral creativity, was linked instead to the masculine gender, the obliteration of the feminine from all spheres of life and art seemed to guarantee a simultaneous repudiation of the weak and mortal human body in favor of the mind, capable of achieving the impossible. Ironically, however, instead of moving toward overt masculinity, the Futurist literary and artistic practices suggest very strong ties to the feminine and even to the maternal. Focusing on David Burliuk’s poem “Plodonosiashchie” and Vladimir Maiakovskii’s play Vladimir Mayakovsky. A Tragedy, my paper explores the paradox of Futurism that on the one hand rejects the female body, and on the other hand engages in literary practices that, according to Julia Kristeva, return the subject to the realm of semiotic chora—a pre-lingual space associated with femininity and the maternal.

Olga Seliazniova is a recent PhD graduate from the Slavic Languages and Literatures program at the University of Southern California. Her primary research interests lie in issues of violence, social marginalization, and cultural dominance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her article “Enchanting Wanderers, Inspiring Vagrants: Vagrancy in Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Works” has recently been accepted for publication at the Forum for Modern Language Studies.

The preservation and dissemination of national memory has become а main concern of post-Euromaidan Ukraine, as it has faced (geo)political, economic, social, and cultural challenges inflicted by the ongoing military conflict in Eastern Ukraine. In response to the war, Ukraine’s state agencies and institutions began to regulate stratagems for the remembering and selective forgetting of the Soviet past. At the same time, contemporary Ukrainian writers have contributed differently to these issues, offering innovative approaches to memory as forgetting. This paper aims to conceptualize forgetting as a dominant mode in recent war narratives by Serhiy Zhadan and Volodymyr Rafieienko. Their novels, The Orphanage (2017) by Zhadan and Longitude of the Days (2017) and Mondegreen (2019) by Rafieienko, provide complex and interesting material upon which to consider the dynamics of memory and forgetting as something indispensable for Ukrainian society’s renewed identity. Both Zhadan and Rafieienko develop the tradition of Eastern Ukrainian literature. They are prominent writers and public intellectuals whose works have received national and international acclaim for their idiosyncratic style, imagination, and active civic position regarding the conflict in the Donbas. Through analysis of mnemonic poetics and narrative strategies in the novels, this article demonstrates how the authors’ protagonists, both of whom are displaced persons, engage with various modes of cultural and individual memory in order to make sense of their dislocation and become active subjects. Using the concept of “memory on the move,” as well as a phenomenological approach to memory, I show how individual memory and forgetting are mediated in texts and how aberrations, gaps, and loss of memory particularize the human experience of the war.

Yulia Ilchuk is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Stanford University. Her major research interests fall under the broad heading of cultural exchange, interaction, and borrowing between Russia and Ukraine. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol’s Hybrid Performance (University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid by situating them in the in-between space of Russian and Ukrainian cultures. Ilchuk’s most recent book project, tentatively titled “Future in the Past: Memory, Culture, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine,” offers a comparative analysis of the memory culture in Russia and Ukraine and examines the parallel development of the two related cultures through their rivalry over the control and dissemination of memory of the Soviet past and recent present.

While not as visible as the Muslims, Christians, or Jews, the Bosnian “Gypsies” do play important secondary roles in noteworthy chapters of Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, most prominently as the executioners of Radisav, the Christian man who attempts to sabotage the Ottomans’ construction of the bridge on the Drina. This essay focuses on these roles, as well as on the discursive foundation and origins of the image of the “Gypsies” in the novel. My intention is to foreground Andrić’s consistent reliance on facile, racialized discursive tactics and thus argue that his ethnic tolerance, especially celebrated in Western criticism, essentially disappears if “Gypsies” are concerned. Drawing attention to the discursive violence a specific ethnic group suffers in a novel that centers on ethno-religious relationships is revealing, not only thematically, but politically as well.

Stoyan Tchaprazov is an Associate Teaching Professor at Iowa State University’s Department of English. Most recently he has published articles on Bernard Shaw’s Bulgarians in Arms and the Man and Bram Stoker’s Gypsies in Dracula. He has also co-translated into Bulgarian (with Rayko Chaprazov) Arms and the Man.

Given their presence and importance on a global level, English loanwords have been extensively studied in various linguistic communities. Apart from the traditional studies focusing on their classification and integration processes, multidisciplinary research on speakers’ perceptions of Anglicisms has received considerable attention in recent years. This is not the case in Montenegrin, however, where Anglicisms have largely been neglected. This paper seeks to explore Montenegrin speakers’ perceptions of English loanwords as opposed to their native equivalents. The questionnaire-based study was conducted among 377 university students with the aim of observing their associations of both Anglicisms and their Montenegrin synonyms. Close observations obtained in this way will enable certain generalizations and conclusions about the differentiation between Anglicisms and their counterparts in Montenegrin.

Jovana Đurčević is a Teaching Associate in the English Department of the Faculty of Philology (University of Montenegro), where she is pursuing her Ph.D. in linguistics. Fields of her current research include contact linguistics, cognitive linguistics, semantics, and pragmatics. Having a passion for literary translation, Jovana also appears as a published translator in several anthologies and monographs. She actively participates in international cooperation projects and teacher training programs across Europe.