CAS SEE Seminars with Guests: Christian Voss on “Towards a Cultural History of Albanians in Tito‘s Yugoslavia” in conversation with the RECAS Fellow Elona Gjata

The lecture discusses the cultural contribution of the Albanian-speaking population in Tito’s Yugoslavia under the condition of its highly contradictory political treatment, oscillating between repression and overt promotion. The biographies of “cultural defectors” like the poet Esad Mekuli, famous actors Bekim Fehmiu and Faruk Begolli or sportsmen Fadil Vokrri clearly indicate that the riots in Kosovo in 1981 triggered the loss of Yugoslav loyalty among the Albanians. The limits of Yugoslav nation-building can also be shown in the representation of Albanian in Miroslav Krleža’s “Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia”, where Serbian nationalist intervention in 1981 insisted on the rewriting of the articles on Albania(ns) to reinstall the traditional hegemonist and paternalistic discourse.