Keynote Session 1.

Aleksandar Bošković 

Lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University, New York

This presentation examines interwar avant-garde periodicals as discursive sites from which the centers are both subverted and propagated. Focusing on two prominent periodicals, the Yugoslav international review Zenit (1921–1926) and the Soviet illustrated magazine SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction, 1930–1941, 1949), it considers their active role in rehashing the center/periphery relationship toward Western European and American audiences, on the one hand, and Balkan and Soviet, on the other.

Both periodicals can be conceptualized just as much as sites of contestation as sites of domination. As the main platform of the zenithist movement, Zenit openly opposed everything Western European and with it, everything imperialist and capitalist by promoting barbarism and the Balkan civilization. Simultaneously, it sharply criticized national and class divisions, especially limitations in terms of borders, and promoted the Balkans as the liminal zone, a “third space” that “opens up the possibility of articulating different, even incommensurable cultural practices and priorities” (Bhabha). The lavishly printed Soviet photographic propaganda magazine USSR in Construction was generated to represent Soviet industrialization, along with the new Soviet man and civilization, to foreign and domestic audiences: although initially conceived with a foreign elite in mind and for the cultivation of Soviet trade and financial interests, it was “eagerly embraced by the new Stalinist elite” (Wolf). When approached as a discursive site, the periodical appears to acquire a mediating role in representational processes that both maintain “the center” and permit its subversion, where the very language, verbal and visual, discloses structural mechanisms of power reproduction.