Please join us Friday, November 15 for our next workshop:

“The Victims of Post-Socialist Economic Transition in the Western Balkans: A Socio-Cultural Panorama” 

Tatjana Aleksic, Associate Professor of South Slavic and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

This presentation will discuss the relations of violence against broadly defined “otherness” in post-socialist transitional societies, but also as a cult of masculine aggressiveness that is cultivated through tradition and cultural production. Most post-Socialist European societies have been suffering from a pattern of violence that is gendered at the same time as it is turned against ethno-religious minorities. This discussion will focus on the oversaturation with violence of societies in the Western Balkans, and will be illustrated by examples from political life but also cultural production. Aleksic is specifically interested in the perpetuation of violence, physical, psychological, verbal, collective or individual, directed against perceived gender, sexual, social, or ethno-religious “minorities,” and the responses and reactions given to it by state and political authorities. The alarming rate of violence towards the Roma, immigrant, gay communities, and women, both in forms of domestic or organized violence, suggests that the traditional social/masculine structures, subverted by growing economic and political problems, increasingly choose to turn against fragile social elements forced to absorb accumulated aggression and frustration.

Location: NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, 285 Mercer St., 7th Floor, 4:30 to 6:00 pm.