The end of WWII is the period of construction of the new Yugoslav woman who actively participates in the war, educates herself and enters the world of work, whilst the emancipation of women from the shackles of patriarchal culture was one of the “undisputable tasks of the Antifašistička Fronta žena (AFŽ).1 In that period, which saw an historical breakaway from… Read more →
ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ME LUVLY TEACHER, I BELIEVE IN YOU.1 1. Introduction Early debates on the invisibility of women in Yugoslav history were initiated as late as the mid-1980s2 and the greatest contribution to the promotion and strengthening of feminist historical research of autonomous women’s organisations and associations was made by the late Lydia Sklevicky, the feminist theorist… Read more →
Introduction The experience of entering an archive is always an affective experience, an encounter. As Antoinette Burton notes, “history is not merely a project of fact-retrieval (…) but also a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention – processes set in motion by, among other things, one’s personal encounter with the archive, the history of the… Read more →
But you, when at last it comes to passThat man can help his fellow man,Do not judge usToo harshly.—Brecht 1. Introduction, or Beginning After the End of History – Thinking the Women’s Antifascist Front Again and Anew Thinking the Women’s Antifascist Front (henceforth AFŽ) today, 74 years after its formation and 63 years after its “dissolution”, requires a lot more than… Read more →
AVNOJ Anti-Fascist Council of People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia AFŽ Women’s Antifascist Front afežeovke members and activists of the Women’s Antifascist Front CC CPY Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia chetniks Serb-nationalist rebels, in particular members of Draža Mihailović’s ‘Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland’ DFJ Democratic Federal Yugoslavia feredža burka, a veil covering the face and body worn by Muslim… Read more →
The volume we present to the public is one of the results of many years of work by the comrades of the Crvena Arts and Culture Association on the digitization of documents to create an Archive of the Antifascist Struggle of the Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia. The idea of the archive was born in 2010, when we… Read more →
Introduction Any attempt to understand and valorize the rise and decline of the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front in Yugoslavia (AFŽ) today is faced with the question of how to read and comprehend the organization’s archive. The problem is broader, however, and has to do not only with the AFŽ archive, but also with the archive as an institution that enables contemporaneity… Read more →
“To render women visible is the first step towards questioning the customary relations between the general and the particular in the hierarchy of relevance in the writing of history.”1 Not only is there precious little material on the political activities of women, what little we have has been neglected and is on the verge of disappearing completely. One of… Read more →
In the debates of the contemporary left, interventions often start with a variation on a particular theme: “Socialists think that…” Sometimes it is, “Marxists believe that…” Sometimes, “Socialists understand that…” Whatever the wording, the point is the same.
Viewpoint Magazine