Nostalgia as a practice of the self in post-socialist Serbia

This article analyzes nostalgic narratives of railway workers in a provincial town in Serbia. It grounds its analysis in a particular theoretical understanding of neoliberalization, focusing on dispossession and its consequences in post-socialism. It provides an account of the specific historical context of socialist Yugoslavia and Serbia after the breakup of Yugoslavia within the wider capitalist system. It views this context as a field of force in which the hegemonic process takes place, and which circumscribes the possibilities for contestation and consent. Finally, it develops a conceptual distinction between the nostalgia of the aspiring middle class on the one hand, and working-class nostalgia on the other, and presents the interlocutors’ narratives as part of the latter. The author argues that nostalgia should be seen as a protean form that should always be studied in connection with the material and social location from which it is uttered. He aims to show that nostalgic narratives in present-day Serbia function as a technique of the self, understood as a practice through which specific kinds and capacities of thought are cultivated, forming a type of adaptable subjectivity against the backdrop of post-socialist neoliberalization.