Nataša Kovačević, “Nonaligned Imagination. Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs”
Recovering the literary and intellectual history of anticolonial collaborations
Preoccupied with developing a multiethnic, postcolonial 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. NAM spanned political and economic systems, uniting members in opposition to superpower politics and around policies of nuclear disarmament, active peaceful coexistence, anticolonialism, and respect for national sovereignty.
Nataša Kovačević 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. Nonaligned narratives attempted to reconfigure the understanding of the globe outside Eurocentric tropes and hegemonic political stratifications and to articulate Yugoslavs’ own internationalist sensibility. 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.
Table of contents
Introduction: On the Cultural Frontlines of the Cold War
Chapter 1: Revolutionary Travelogues as an Archives of Radical Friendship
Chapter 2: Nonaligned Literary Aesthetic and Postcolonial (Dis)Enchantment
Chapter 3: Literary Ambassadors and Cultural Third Spaces
Chapter 4: Decolonial Scholarship between the Periphery and Semiperiphery
Coda: Nonalignment as Epistemology
Notes
Bibliography
Reviews
“Nonaligned Imagination presents a major contribution to filling the gaps of alternative and lost cultural histories. Kovačević’s unified and persuasive narrative is a genuine achievement in its reclaiming and presentation of a wealth of rarely discussed and archival material.” —Gordana P. Crnković, University of Washington, Seattle
“Nataša Kovačević’s Nonaligned Imagination restores Yugoslavia to its rightful place in the history of the Global South by way of the Global East. A model of interdisciplinary scholarship, this excellent book will be integral to conversations about the cultural Cold War among historians, literary scholars, and other like-minded readers.” —Christopher J. Lee, Lafayette College
About the author
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. She is the author of Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization and Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe.
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: September 2025
Pages: 248