“I am something that no longer exists …”: Yugonostalgia among Diaspora Youth

Author(s) : Dilyara Müller-Suleymanova

Source : https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733501-014

“Young people of migrant background identify not only with multiple geographical locations and homelands but also with various historical frameworks and narratives about the past. When Dragan, a young man of Bosnian descentraised in Switzerland, told me that Yugoslavia was the country he would like to live in, he expressed longing for a temporally and spatially distant past which hehad never experienced first-hand. As the child of Bosnian migrants who arrived in Switzerland as seasonal workers and then resettled permanently due to the war inBosnia (1992–1995), Dragan does not have any personal experiences of socialist Yugoslavia. He learned about the existence of Yugoslavia only later, during his adolescence. In this chapter, I seek to add to a growing body of scholarship on memory and transnational migration by exploring how second-generation youth – people like Dragan – come to identify with particular past(s). This chapter is based on the data gathered within the framework of a research project on young people of ex-Yugoslav background in Switzerland.”