Overview

The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s in which many of these men found themselves on the opposite sides of the frontlines. In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrovic draws on memories and material effects of dozens of JNA conscripts to show how their experience of military service points to futures, forms of collectivity, and relations between the state and the individual alternative to those that prevailed in the post-Yugoslav reality. Petrovic argues that the power of repetitive, ritualized, and performative practices that constituted the military service in the JNA provided a framework for drastically different men to live together and befriend each other. While Petrovic and her interlocutors do not idealize the JNA, they acknowledge its capacity to create interpersonal relationships and affective bonds that brought the key political ideas of collectivity, solidarity, egalitarianism, education, and comradeship into being.

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9781478020943

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Reviews

“In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrović offers a powerful and compelling narrative that provides a very much needed alternative reading of the end of socialist Yugoslavia. I particularly like the way the author mines the Yugoslav past for the possibilities of a utopian future. This book will shift the debate in a variety of fields.” -- Kristen R. Ghodsee, author of * Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us about the Good Life * “Tanja Petrović’s Utopia of the Uniform is a tender, provocative account of how men lived, thought, and felt in the Yugoslav armed forces. It is also about what happened to their friendships and solidarities when their country came apart at the seams. Petrović writes about masculinity from a place outside it. In so doing, she captures something that those who live it can’t see.” -- Samuel Fury Childs Daly, author of * A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War *

“In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrović offers a powerful and compelling narrative that provides a very much needed alternative reading of the end of socialist Yugoslavia. I particularly like the way the author mines the Yugoslav past for the possibilities of a utopian future. This book will shift the debate in a variety of fields.” -- Kristen Ghodsee, author of * Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life * “Tanja Petrović’s Utopia of the Uniform is a tender, provocative account of how men lived, thought, and felt in the Yugoslav armed forces. It is also about what happened to their friendships and solidarities when their country came apart at the seams. Petrović writes about masculinity from a place outside of it. In so doing, she captures something that those who live it can’t see.” -- Samuel Fury Childs Daly, author of * A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War *

Author Information

Tanja Petrović is Head of the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is the author of numerous books, including A Long Way Home: Representations of the Western Balkans in Political and Media Discourses.

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