Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on February 25, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a book talk by Nataša Kovačević. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.
Preoccupied with developing an independent culture and seeking an alternative to Cold War–bloc politics, socialist Yugoslavia turned to the decolonizing countries of the Global South. It forged political, economic, and cultural links with postcolonial states and anticolonial liberation movements through the Non-Aligned Movement, of which it was a founding member in 1961. “Nonaligned Imagination” reconstructs the forgotten literary and cultural history of this movement, tracing the development of new networks of intellectual engagement and cultural exchange between writers, journalists, and scholars who connected postwar Yugoslavia with 1950s India, 1960s Algeria and Guinea, 1970s Vietnam, and beyond. These networks shaped a nonaligned worldview through engaged travel writing that generated support for anticolonial revolutions; exchange and translation that connected peripheral literatures without metropolitan mediation; aesthetic innovations that went beyond Soviet socialist realism and Western modernism; and shared decolonial vocabularies that developed alongside material solidarities. With Cold War–era rhetoric intensifying again in the twenty-first century, “Nonaligned Imagination” assumes the urgent task of unearthing a history of engaged writing and cultural diplomacy that imagined alternatives to superpower conflicts and a bipolar vision of the world.
Nataša Kovačević is professor of postcolonial literature at Eastern Michigan University. Her research concerns the literature and cinema of migration to the European Union, global socialist cultures, and anticolonial internationalism during the Cold War. She is the author of “Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization” (Routledge, 2008), “Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe” (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and most recently, “Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs” (Northwestern University Press, 2025). Her essays have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Critique, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and a number of edited collections.
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