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The links between cinema and war machines have long been established. This book explores the range, form, and valences of trauma narratives that permeate the most notable narrative films about the breakup of Yugoslavia. Dijana Jela?a is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Communication and Theater at St. John s University, USA.

Through three separate-yet-connected instances of spectatorial re-appropriation of the Western cinematic iconicity, I explore how the genre framed an understanding of a war that is not only geographically but also historically and politically far away from the Western's American home culture. The war in question is one that broke the country of Yugoslavia apart at the end of the 20th century (a century that is, incidentally, also known as the century of cinema). From prominent Yugoslav artists re-writing iconic Western imagery to refuse troubling divisions haunting their home country, to my own personal experiences with surviving the war—fused with my childhood love of the Western film genre—I explore how the Western mythology was re-appropriated to symbolize something entirely different from what it might have meant in its home context. While this re-appropriation might potentially erase or reconfigure some of the Western's domestic complexities, it creates many new ones, offering an opportunity to explore the question of how trans-cultural "fantasy echoes" offer sites of creative possibility and of insightful re-readings rather than of reductive limitations.

The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Chapter 1 Introduction: Cultural Capitalism the (Post)Yugoslav Way -- Capitalism: A Restructured Feeling -- Cultural Hybridity and the Yugoslav State of (Non-)Exception -- Notes Towards Cultural Capitalism -- References -- Part I Capital(ism) and Class Cultures -- Chapter 2 The Strange Absence of Capital(ism) -- References -- Chapter 3 Fictions of Crime in a State of Exception -- Yugoslav Exceptionalism -- Crime Fiction -- A Specimen Story -- A Socialist Masochism -- References -- Chapter 4 Rethinking Class in Socialist Yugoslavia: Labor, Body, and Moral Economy -- On Liminality -- The Bodies -- The Gaze -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 5 The Restoration of Capitalism After Yugoslavia: Cultural Capital, Class and Power -- Class as a Discursive Object: "Nation-Talk" and "Class-Talk" in Post-Yugoslav Capitalism -- Cultural Boundary-making: Culture as Capital -- Egalitarianism, Neoliberalism and the Myth of Middle-classness -- Five Cultural Types and Their Class: Localism vs Cosmopolitanism -- Aesthetic Cultures and Their Class Affiliation -- Social Character and Moral Economy of Cultural Types: Class, Gender and Ethnicity -- Conclusion: Middle Classes in Search of Mythical Fullness -- References -- Chapter 6 Class and Culture in Yugoslav Factory Newspapers -- I -- II -- III -- IV -- V -- References -- Chapter 7 Post-Yugoslav Notes on Marx's Class Theory and Middle-Class Classism -- Introduction -- Two Theories of Class in Marx -- Class and Culture -- Middle Class and Classism -- References -- Part II Trajectories of Capitalism: Culture and Everyday Life -- Chapter 8 On Yugoslav Market Socialism Through Živojin Pavlović's When I Am Dead and Pale (1967) -- Black Wave Films Preceded the Minerva's Owl of 1968

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. The "Radiant Future" of Spatial and Temporal Dis/Orientations -- The Unfinished Business of (Post)Socialism -- Reflecting a Radiant Future -- The Circuits of Intimacy -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- References -- Part 1. New Approaches to (Post)Socialism: The Theory in Transition -- Chapter 1. The Endless Innovations of the Semiperiphery and the Peculiar Power of Eastern Europe -- Dialectics of the Semiperiphery -- The Diffusion of the Yugoslav Self-Management Model -- Isomorphism and the Semiperiphery -- The Contested Theorization Trajectory of Civil Society -- Eastern Europe as Neoliberal Testing Ground -- Eastern Europe and the Reinvention of the Right -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 2. Socialist Future in Light of Socialist Past and Capitalist Present -- Introduction -- Socialist Past -- Explaining the Demise of the Soviet System -- Capitalist Present -- Socialist Future -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 3. "Failing the Metronome": Queer Reading of the Postsocialist Transitio -- Fast-Forward from Backwardness -- There is No Transition -- "I am Dizzy and Weak From the Sudden Transition" -- Notes -- References -- Part 2. (Post)Socialist Space(s) -- Chapter 4. "Brand" New States: Postsocialism, the Global Economy of Symbols, and the Challenges of National Differentiation -- Branding the Nation: A Précis of the Practice and Its Goals -- The Curious Knot: An Overview of the Relationship between State Branding and (Post)Socialism -- "This is Jüri": Making Estonians, or the Evolution of the Postsocialism's Branded Wunderkind -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 5. Putting the 'Public' in Public Goods: Space Wars in a Post-Soviet Dacha Community -- Introduction: Revisiting the "Grand Dichotomy" -- The Public and the Private in a Post-Soviet Dacha Settlement