Parallel Session 2.

Chair: Jelena Lalatović

The panel entitled “The International Scope of Yugoslav Periodicals: Radical Intelligentsia between the Attainment of Legitimacy and Contestation (1913–1964)” deals with the emergence of various counter-publics in the Yugoslav context, showing how crucial those counter-publics, often neglected as peripheral, were to the formation of the avant-garde, revolutionary antifascism, and radical philosophy of the twentieth century. The paper “Beginnings of Feminist Press and Yugoslav Avant-garde Context” by Jelena Milinković and Žarka Svirčev explores the links between micro-sociology of feminist press and anti-imperialist revolutionary agenda as constitutive for the avant-garde political and poetic project. The next presentation, “The Woman Today and its Editors (1936–1940, 1943/4; 1946–1981): Center/Periphery Dialectics”, also investigates the connections between left leaning feminist periodicals and revolutionary practices, but this time in the interwar and post-WWII era. Zorana Simić and Stanislava Barać analyze and accentuate editorial policies and figures of The Women Today journal before and after WWII as markers of the center/periphery dialectics. Coupled with that, the presentation “From Margin to Center, and Back Again: A History of Thick Journals as a History of Marxist Heresy in the Yugoslav Context from 1952 to 1964” by Jelena Lalatović focuses on the bi-directional nature of the shifts of social marginalization and validation using the genre of the thick journals and Marxists criticism of a so-called existing socialism as an example. The panel encompasses several perspectives in periodical research: micro-sociology, editorial policies, the role of periodicals as genres and as platforms of radical thought. As a consequence, diversity of topics, methodologies, and perspectives contribute to the articulation of the significant phenomena: the fact that periodicals enabled the rise of the radical intelligentsia as counter-publics, while also serving as the space for legitimization and challenging of subversive ideas. Furthermore, the panel focuses on these phenomena in the history of the periodical press as paradigms and epitomes which transcend the local context of the Yugoslav cultures and societies, trying to depict how the center/margin dialectics in the case of Yugoslav radical intelligentsia could be more broadly relevant.

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Jelena Milinković and Žarka Svirčev

Beginnings of feminist press and the Yugoslav avant-garde context

In this paper, we will present the heuristic potentials of almanac Srpkinja: njezin život i rad, njezin kulturni razvitak i njezina narodna umjetnost do danas (Serbian Woman: Her life and work, her cultural development and her folklore art up to date, Sarajevo, 1913). The almanac is one of the first projects of the feminist counter-public in Serbian/Yugoslav culture. Srpkinja aimed to present the versatile work of women and their activities (especially women artists) in the public space. It is an international and interdisciplinary feminist periodical project, that was the result of the networking of women cultural workers from different socio-political backgrounds. However, the almanac is not just a valuable source for research on the formation and strategies of feminist counter-public at the beginning of the 20th century. It is a significant source for understanding the interaction of women’s authorship and diverse social and artistic movements as well. We will depict the position and contribution of the female authors to the avant-garde movement. Our focus is the micro-sociology of the collective action of feminists gathered around Srpkinja and the revolutionary movement (Young Bosnia), which was the bearer of the avant-garde political-ethical and poetic agenda: political (anti-imperialist) activism, collective publishing and exhibition projects, collaborative authorship, international networking. We will point out the collaborative, textual, and logistical exchanges. Also, we will single out elements of Srpkinja comparable to the poetics of avant-garde publications (genre hybridity, typographic collage, manifest discourse). Finally, our research will show that feminist counter-public played a constitutive role in the formation, discursive shaping, and activist practice of the Yugoslav avant-garde before the First World War.

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Stanislava Barać and Zorana Simić

The Woman Today and its editors (1936–1940, 1943/4; 1946–1981): Centre/periphery dialectics

This presentation aims to show how the journal The Woman Today (1936–1940, 1943/4; 1946–1981), starting from multiple marginalized positions during the 1930s in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (women’s magazine in a patriarchal community, left-feminist journal in a bourgeois-dominated feminist counter-publics, proletarian voice in a capitalist society, disguised and legal activist form of the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia), through War and Revolution, took central place in a newborn socialist state (SFRY). Observed in the global context of the 1930s, The Woman Today was in fact close to the forces that shaped the world’s history: it was a part of the global anti-fascist movement, The Popular front, as well as the Third International (1936–1940). Banned by the state censorship while the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was still officially neutral, it renewed in the middle of war struggles (1943/4) with the added subtitle the Organ of the Antifascist Women’s Front (AFW). After the short period of great political and financial support of male comrades right after the Second World War, the patriarchy in Party frames grew stronger, and in 1953 this organization was abolished. As a result, The Woman Today persisted in the public sphere again somewhere between a center and a margin. Moreover, a similar development and political path are visible in the biographies of some of its (women) editors, most of all Mitra Mitrović, who was both one of the leading figures of the CPY and AFW, as well as one of the most prominent editors and contributors of the journal before, during and (right) after the Second World War. Thus in this presentation the center/periphery dialectics of The Woman Today will be considered through examining the key shifts and aspects of its editorial policies, with a special focus on the portraits of its key editors.

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Jelena Lalatović

From margin to center, and back again: A history of thick journals as a history of Marxist heresy in the Yugoslav context from 1952 to 1964

This presentation explores the role of the thick journals as a platform for radical Marxist intellectuals who criticized the theory and practice of a so-called real or existing socialism. The temporal coverage of my research corresponds with the launching of two journals – The New Thought in 1953 (edited by the poet Skender Kulenović) and The Views (edited by Rudi Supek, an influential sociologist, later a co-editor of the journal Praxis) in 1952 – at the beginning, and the publication of the first issue of Praxis: A Philosophical Journal in 1964, at the end. The New Thought was conceptualized as a journal that primarily dealt with literary disputes and literary criticism. It was circulated for less than two volumes because it published “Anatomy of a Moral” by Milovan Đilas, a critique of Janus-faced ethics within the Communist Party, after which the journal was banned. The Views was circulated from 1952 to 1955. It was in this period and this specific thick journal that the radical intelligentsia which later became the core of the Marxist humanist project in the Praxis gathered. Thus this paper aims to briefly reconstruct the process of social marginalization of a radical critique of the communist movement from within, which took place via the thick journal as a platform and as a genre. Additionally, the presentation analyzes the bi-directional nature of this process – the case of The New Thought and The Views as suppression of radical thought which reemerged in Praxis, the internationally recognized philosophical journal – as well as the joint effort of state bureaucracy and its intellectuals to marginalize the Marxist humanist tradition again.