CAS SEE Seminars with Guests: Deana Jovanović

In this presentation, Deana Jovanović reveals how inhabitants of Bor, a Serbian copper-processing and mining town that lived through prosperous Yugoslav times and a post-socialist decline, were the audience theatrically performed promises of aspirational futures. She chronicles the efforts of the copper-processing company and the town’s authorities to theatrically perform promises of better economic, urban, environmental, infrastructural and post-industrial futures. Jovanović asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens’ futures and their present? Jovanović offers ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people’s orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. The performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized. She assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people’s horizons.