On the Dark Side of the Twilight

Spectral fabulations: Belgrade drag performances refashioning socialist memories

“…T.’s (2021) exploration of drag performers in Athens emphasises how these performances foreground the connections between the ‘dehumanisation of ‘deviant’ bodies’, both queer and Balkan – the Balkans region long being associated with monstrous figures such as vampires (p. 166; see also Longinović, 2011). This has particular resonance for Belgrade’s drag performers, when considered alongside Arsić’s (2001) description of how Serbs perceive themselves as ‘those who are neither alive nor dead’ (p. 561).…”

“…I argue that by calling attention to and witnessing the concealed violences in Belgrade's LGBTQ+ history, the second of Novoslovenka's performances (to 'Fighter') explored in the previous section could be considered as an act of mourning for the violence that the community has suffered. In her discussion of postsocialist Serbia's hauntings, Arsić (2001) unpacks how spectrality and mourning are interwoven, explaining that mourning leads to 'inventing the spectral apparition of what reality is missing' (p. 560). She also asserts the utopian potential of mourning, as an attempt to 'appropriate hope', to move beyond the event or object being mourned (Arsić, 2001).…”

“…To understand Belgrade’s spectral landscape, this section traces the legacies of socialism and the shifts during the city’s postsocialist transition, particularly from the perspective of the city’s LGBTQ+ 1 community. Postsocialist Belgrade has been described as a place where ‘phantoms multiply’, and ‘archaic phantasms haunt the experience of space’ (Blagojević, 2013: 761–780), while Branka Arsić (2001) writes about the haunted landscape of postsocialist Serbia, as ‘a nation of spectres’, where the past refuses to disappear (p. 561). In this haunted space, the city’s past constantly erupts into the present, the urban landscape refuses to forget.…”

Coito ergo sum: Serbian sadism and global capitalism in A Serbian Film

“…Is this not the meaning of Bjelic and Cole's (2002) point about Serbian identity being a testicular concept, rooted in the balls, the organs of reproduction, symbolic of the essence of ethnic identity, and the brutal truth of biology, Darwinian natural selection, and the struggle to survive? According to Serbian philosopher Arsic (2002), it is precisely this testicular attitude towards the world that defines Serbian psychosis, and thus must be key to understanding the origins and meaning of the sexual violence of A Serbian Film. Analysing normal human subjectivity, Arsic argues that psycho-sexual castration entails the experience of loss, and the endless return of the lost object in the form of spectres that promise to take away my lack.…”

“…They are the death that will never go away or disappear into the past. Reading Arsic's (2002) work, we have already seen how the Serbs have a similar preoccupation with holding onto death, and thus to a certain extent I think A Serbian Film is about the perverse leftovers of socialism and nationalism, which will probably always haunt Tadic's new European Serbia. However, this is not everything, because I think we can also make the case that what such violence signifies is also the situation of the new Serbia within the contemporary political economy of the West.…”