Nonaligned Imagination

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 Kovacevic 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.